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Mac Spotting
- Thread starter eyoungren
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Sega (and general gaming) legend Hirokazu Yasuhara giving a presentation in 2017 with the assistance of what looks like an 11" MacBook Air.
Again in 2018 using what appears to be the same machine.
Again in 2018 using what appears to be the same machine.
Macintosh Plus spotted today rewatching Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. Must have seen that movie a dozen times, but never noticed the brand of the computer before.
Spotted a Mac running Sonic Solutions DAW in "Analyze This" movie (Robert De Niro / Billy Crystal).
The Mac is not visible, it probably resided in control room, but, knowing how long people kept their systems running even on 68k machines, it could have been anything from Q650 to PowerMac 9600. The face of the engineer in the picture looks familiar, but I can't remember his name.
The Mac is not visible, it probably resided in control room, but, knowing how long people kept their systems running even on 68k machines, it could have been anything from Q650 to PowerMac 9600. The face of the engineer in the picture looks familiar, but I can't remember his name.
Members of Gulf High School converse with Noam Chomsky via a MacBook Pro:
Lowkey talks to Chomsky with the help of an iMac:
Chomsky during an interview with Democracy Now! A MacBook Air is perched upon a book in the background.
Lowkey talks to Chomsky with the help of an iMac:
Chomsky during an interview with Democracy Now! A MacBook Air is perched upon a book in the background.
Members of Gulf High School converse with Noam Chomsky via a MacBook Pro:
Lowkey talks to Chomsky with the help of an iMac:
Chomsky during an interview with Democracy Now! A MacBook Air is perched upon a book in the background.
“It was such a thorough video interview that we were able to see Professor Chomsky’s beard grow and him removing two layers of clothing as winter turned to summer!”
From the set of Denis Villeneuve’s 2016 Sci-Fi flick Arrival. An iMac and MacBook Pro are visible in the office of Louise Banks, played by Amy Adams.
I don't know if this was mentioned before, but there's Roy Scheider playing with Apple IIC + LCD display in 1984 movie "2010: The Year We Make Contact", a sequel to Kubrick's 2001 Odyssey.
I'm rather surprised they used Apple products from the day for the sake of Sci-Fi movies... shouldn't they have realised how dated that would make them?
I think the sci-fi world is far more conscious of that now... you'd never see a real iPad or a MacBook in Avatar, for example.
I think the sci-fi world is far more conscious of that now... you'd never see a real iPad or a MacBook in Avatar, for example.
Filmmakers work with what’s available at the time the film is produced. Novelists work from imagination, but also are somewhat beholden to paradigms and technological limits in what they know during their moment. It is why many sci-fi novels and screen productions from the 1950s, 1960s, and even 1970s didn’t exactly foresee handheld computers so much as consoles for “easy” access to mainframes.
Sometimes it’s a given how props or devices meaning to portray paradigmatic events or circumstances are not, in the hindsight of actually reaching that target date, going to “age well”. Good examples of this include the video call (and “long-distance” charges) in 2001: A Space Odyssey, as well as the video pay booth charges in Blade Runner (1982). Heck, even AT&T were hellbent as late as 1995 on the notion of pay video and home video telephones).
Another good example of this are any example of levitating personal vehicles, maglev vehicles, and so on (again, Blade Runner, Back to the Future II, and also Minority Report).
With computers, it’s a paradigm being portrayed by the filmmaker which determines the plausibility of that being something people during a specific moment during the future may be using. The closer to the present that future is, obviously, the more precise the portrayal is likely to be.
No, Roy Scheider wasn’t using a unibody white MacBook in 2010: The Year We Make Contact, but the portrayal of using a completely portable, battery-powered personal computer — and an Apple product, at that! — as an ordinary thing, in the course of doing work away from the office in the year of 2010, is surprisingly spot-on. And, amazingly, Apple — the corporation — didn’t get absorbed or go into receivership during those intervening years (c.f., Atari, Pan-Am, TWA, and Schlitz in Blade Runner).
And yet, these devices, however flawed and however the degree the director(s) ask the audience to suspend their disbelief, don’t tend to detract from those stories because they aren’t meant to be the story on screen so much as an element in the world-building of that story. We suspend disbelief in films as Brainstorm (1983) as we bear witness to technology able to record and play back consciousness, or in films as LOOKER (1981) (well, except for the rank misogyny of the day being what it was), when a light-emitting device can disrupt consciousness into a brief, hypnotic state (and a degree of computer-generated, full-motion CGI which more than forded the uncanny valley that 2023’s tech, for all its self-congratulatory feats, has yet to reach, much less cross).
Amusingly enough, what we don’t hear people kvetching over frequently is when contemporary sci-fi films or television series portrays the near-future with a ubiquity of virtual screen spaces in which, in effect, the person is “tapping” and “dragging” objects in literal air — as if this idea is borne by some existing or forthcoming technology, that that forthcoming tech will be widely accepted and adopted, and that tech is some foregone conclusion of happening exactly like that. This crop of early 21st century visual entertainment to lean hard on this device (thx, CGI overuse!) will age about as well as a rocket crash-landing on the moon and giving the annoyed moon a bruised eye, or repeated appearances of a silver robot with the same glass head and spinning rings and rings moving perpendicular to one another (for some reason).
There are also signs of technology being willed into existence as an effect of being seen or described first in a sci-fi film, show, or novel — long before any such analogous tech actually came into existence (i.e., a handheld communicator, a tricorder, an eye scanner in public spaces in use to surveil and/or target advertising to an individual, etc.).
These, by and large, end up being ideas which get willed into being with arguably dystopian implications and dreamt up by folks in tech who are, otherwise, bereft of original ideas, original imagination, and who use sci-fi futurist/technologist portrayals (often by those storytellers as a portent of tech, not a thing a society to aspire to reach) as their direct inspiration to begin work on inventing a thing they can hope to monetize. But in imagination they may lack, money to throw at it they do not.
[This is, incidentally, why the series Black Mirror is so compelling and so often harrowing.]
Conversely, in the dystopian season of Fringe, set in 2036 (but filmed in 2012), one does see an “old” (it even looks worn) iPad in use in an occupying regime’s bureau reception area. Even as the episode in question aired in 2012, to see a “modern” iPad in use that many years into the future might seem far-fetched for such an “antique”, but if the world as we knew it was halted in 2015 by a legion of invaders which wiped out a fraction of humanity (as was the case in that story line), then the use of new-old tech in a dystopian future seems no less odd or absurd than one where, in 2010, as filmed in 1984, a portable Apple computer running off battery power and using an LCD display would be.
If anything, one should be mocking the use of interplanetary craft equipped with artificial gravity — something which still hasn’t been pulled off in 2023!
And even if Apple had gone under in, say, 1989, some other company in our own 2010 would have delivered on a portable, battery-powered computer, making the 1984 portrayal of 2010 not so far-fetched, even if the computer’s brand was off. In fact, many companies did just that.
If anything, seeing an Apple IIc with the LCD at the beach in that world’s 2010 is spot-on with our own 2010, when white MacBooks were still ubiquitous and, without a doubt, being used on beaches around the world (some even on wifi!). Heck, I even had my MBP with me at the beach last month, because I Am A Big Old Nerd. Projections of a near-future — one human generation forward — where a then-novel technology was considered commonplace a quarter-century in the future, isn’t far-fetched.
So as futurist portrayals in films or books go, this example is a rare one which nearly gets it spot-on, quite by accident and luck, really.
So yah, I think your nitpick is misplaced and kind of facile.
Your example of Avatar is altogether silly, as that story was set in 2152, as memory serves — some 150 years into the future. At this point, it’d be better to gripe about “warp speed, Mr. Scott”, or playing some Steppenwolf song (?!!) in 2063 as a human reaches faster-than-light travel for the first time, or “blow yourself into hyperspace, kid,” than to critique how, “oh look James Cameron stuck an iPad into Avatar, ijbol…”
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Your very unnecessary and long-winded rebuttal was completely unnecessary. You completely missed my point – of course they predicted many things about the future, and did them well. But on the choice of props, they made a grievous error.
They probably should've at least removed the Apple logo, if they were going so cheap and uncreative as to include a computer from their own era and pass it off as being from the 2010s. If they had thought about it a little longer, they would've realised that no one would use an 80s Macintosh in the future, just as very few people still drove 1930s Fords or wore 3-piece suits by 1980 (their own time). Heck, even computers had come a massive way just between 1970-80.
Seriously, no modern sci-fi movie would include a branded product from our own time. It's so stupidly obvious to us in 2023 that no one would be using an iPhone 14 in 206x. It might not be obvious to us what they'll be using in 206x, but it would clearly not be an iPhone 14.
Not criticising their inability to perceive innovations of the future, but on this matter alone they seemed woefully inadequate.
Blade Runner does it much better. They didn't recycle tech from their own era, and did a good deal of imagining. I can forgive the use of CRTs, since flat-panels really weren't in anyone's scope in 1982.
OK, @mectojic . Whatever you say.
Post script: my “long-winded” reply was meant to be thoughtful as it considered other sci-fi uses of contemporary products in a near-future setting — i.e., 20–25 years, not two or more (i.e., the 2060s). I’m sorry I couldn’t have given you the brevity of a more useful, six-word response. I think you were nitpicking.
Great write up @B S Magnet and @mectojic .. an interesting discussion.
I'd say we see less of the “[Insert Brand] products of the future” placements in future-set films over the past couple of decades due to the shift toward more subversive marketing strategies. It's a trend of the times to sell a product without directly "selling it", as in, shoving it in the audience' face...
It will be like; "Here's a futuristic concept to warm you up..." Minority Report and others as mentioned paved the way for Apple to finally launch their "First spatial computer" hardware/operating system and other brands to break this market, without ever using a major brand/product placement. I'd surmise these "arrangements" are a very long and patient process of major investors, board members, and marketing strategists within big tech, seeding film studios with concepts to covertly demonstrate through the big screen and then analyze audience reaction, and how a culture can evolve around such a concept. You could call it their "Long-term" investments, as with many, many other aspects of modern consumerism.
As we know, Big tech brands with near-unlimited financial resources will continue to work on top-secret prototype products... So, a concept is portrayed in a fictional setting for a product which may eventually come to market sometimes many years or decades later -- we are not far from the flying cars of the Jetsons, completely self-driving Johnny Cabs of Total Recall, or an A.I "operating system" romantic counterpart of Her. And when a product comes to market which is "Just like in the movies!", it is an almost guaranteed hit because of all the seeding, planted long ago via the great propaganda machine of Hollywood.
Not that I'm against it all, but it's good to know where we are being played/targeted/prodded so we can make more discerning choices around the tech we migrate into our lives.
Or perhaps I'm too cynical, and it's just that Sci-Fi audiences are more sensitive, and more consciously aware of brands "overdoing it" these days. The gunslingers of yore were simply more forgiving when it came to blatant product placement. Blade Runner comes to mind...
I'd say we see less of the “[Insert Brand] products of the future” placements in future-set films over the past couple of decades due to the shift toward more subversive marketing strategies. It's a trend of the times to sell a product without directly "selling it", as in, shoving it in the audience' face...
It will be like; "Here's a futuristic concept to warm you up..." Minority Report and others as mentioned paved the way for Apple to finally launch their "First spatial computer" hardware/operating system and other brands to break this market, without ever using a major brand/product placement. I'd surmise these "arrangements" are a very long and patient process of major investors, board members, and marketing strategists within big tech, seeding film studios with concepts to covertly demonstrate through the big screen and then analyze audience reaction, and how a culture can evolve around such a concept. You could call it their "Long-term" investments, as with many, many other aspects of modern consumerism.
As we know, Big tech brands with near-unlimited financial resources will continue to work on top-secret prototype products... So, a concept is portrayed in a fictional setting for a product which may eventually come to market sometimes many years or decades later -- we are not far from the flying cars of the Jetsons, completely self-driving Johnny Cabs of Total Recall, or an A.I "operating system" romantic counterpart of Her. And when a product comes to market which is "Just like in the movies!", it is an almost guaranteed hit because of all the seeding, planted long ago via the great propaganda machine of Hollywood.
Not that I'm against it all, but it's good to know where we are being played/targeted/prodded so we can make more discerning choices around the tech we migrate into our lives.
Or perhaps I'm too cynical, and it's just that Sci-Fi audiences are more sensitive, and more consciously aware of brands "overdoing it" these days. The gunslingers of yore were simply more forgiving when it came to blatant product placement. Blade Runner comes to mind...
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Not quite. Here's one that featured on a episodic basic in a Sci-Fi TV series that aired in 1966.
Not quite. Here's one that featured on a episodic basic in a Sci-Fi TV series that aired in 1966.
Never mind how the distance of time between filming Blade Runner and 2010 was exactly two years…