You can’t enter a coffee shop nowadays without at least seeing one iPhone on a single person. First released in June 2007, Apple’s iconic phone has become one of the leading smartphone lines around the world.
Goes without saying, right? But what if the iPhone was released earlier than 2007? What if, say, it came out in 1984?
Thanks to nostalgia aficionado Future Punk, we can see EXACTLY how the iPhone would be advertised if it was released in the 1980s. Times were different back then; Apple was still using their rainbow-colored logo, the Internet was still a budding network of computers, and blocky computers were still in vogue. All of these trends can be seen in Future Punk’s fake 3D advertisements for the Macintosh portable computer.
The iPhone of the 1980s looks almost nothing like the phone you see today. For those born in the 21st century, there’s a simple reason — the phone mimics the Apple Macintosh computer design of the 1980s and 90s (yes, they had computers ‘back then’) which were chunkier, blockier, and pretty much look like giant calculators.
This handheld Macintosh computer has no touchscreen, and instead uses the old school number keypad to input data. It also has a much smaller screen and a ginormous front speaker located near the top of the device. These phones in the first commercial
The second commercial takes on the
To keep with the whole 80s vibe, Future Punk keeps the commercials super low-res. The phones themselves aren’t real but are 3D models which he made specifically for the adverts. Even the static you hear throughout the commercial sounds very 80s, with the low-quality voice narration followed by the Rolling Stones’ “She’s A Rainbow” to
Future Punk made the 3D Macintosh Blender files available for download on his Gumroad page, so if you’re feeling in the mood to mess around with some nostalgia, you can take the files and make a commercial of your own. For more of Future Punk’s 80s and 90s-inspired creations, check out his YouTube channel and Patreon.
