Apple: Our philosophy is to provide software for our machines free (1976)
aaronbrethorst
What's up with all of the weird typos, such as:
"APPLE Computer Compagny"
"Palo Atlt"
chocochunks
Probably OCR'd with no editing.
fsckboy
it appears to be a website in the french tongue
dagmx
Whomever scanned it , enabled some kind of OCR correction which left the typos.
amelius
The full sentence:
> And since our philosophy is to provide software for our machines free or at minimal cost, you won't be continually paying for access to this growing software library.
titzer
They forgot to mention that the growing software library is also shrinking as they deprecate support for older OS versions and hardware. On the one hand they go to heroic lengths (fat binaries, Rosetta 2) to enable a migration to a new hardware platform but get bored in ~5 years and drop support.
"Growing software library" it ain't.
thisislife2
I don't how it was when Apple was a start-up, but I have never considered macOS or Apple Office suites as "free" or cheap - the way I rationalised purchasing an Apple device was by telling myself that Apple hardwares are overpriced because it includes the price of the accompanying software. Of course, now, as Apple slowly shifts to a hybrid subscription model, you will of course be continually paying for Apple software ...
ece
Locking you into the software when you buy the hardware is still considered giving it away.
gignico
At $666.66 this must have been a diabolic deal!
jagged-chisel
More devilish
bigyabai
Not really. The Apple I was discontinued within a year of release, if you saved that money until 1978 then you could get an Apple II that would be supported for almost 20 years give-or-take.
CharlesW
~$3,800 in 2026 dollars.
pixelpoet
Including 8K of "RAM memory", brought to you by the DRD Department!
A lot of corporate "philosophies" are actually just business models. There have been times between then and now they charged for the OS. They do charge for other software. But largely it's been a good business model for them.
wlesieutre
In the 2000s I remember the OS releases being $130, which (depending on exactly what year you start from) is equivalent to $200-250ish today.
Not a yearly cadence because back then they only released a new OS version when it was done and had features worth releasing, but even every two years that wasn't a cheap update.
subtlesoftware
"Compared to switches and LED's, a video terminal can dis- play vast amounts of information simultaneously."
The beginning of the end.
enzosaba
Really. You start with 40x24 chars and after a little span of time end up doom scrolling
dlcarrier
I worked at a place that tested software releases on a VM of every supported operating system, including OS X. We didn't have any Apple hardware, because no one wanted to deal with that, but someone had brought in the chassis of an old Apple computer and the host computer was inside it. We didn't run it by any lawyers or anything, but as far as we could tell, running OS X inside a computer that had all of its guts replaced was entirely within the license requirements.
bryogenic
The Mac of Theseus
pbhjpbhj
These sort of letter-of-the-law arguments don't tend to do well in court in my very limited experience (UK). But I love the essence of it!
teaearlgraycold
I would love to hear more about the exact license wording that allows this.
rendaw
IANAL but I think you'd be fine as long as you placed your NUC on a Mac Mini or maybe a closed Macbook if your hardware has a larger footprint.
> use and run one (1) copy of the Apple Software on a single Apple-branded computer at any one time.
Note that you do have to be careful not to stack multiple Macbooks when you do this.
rpastuszak
Haha, excellent timing:
I opened HN just now because:
1. I got tired of waiting 2h for my app to get notarized because
2. I can't sell it on the AppStore in the EU... because
3. the AppStore Connect page gets stuck at their DSA compliance form (it's been 10 days).
And, to add insult to injury, the whole thing could be a PWA, without any compromises in the UX whatsoever.
I misread the title, but I still posted this comment as an example of confirmation bias in the orange book for posteriority. Time to step away from the computer!
(sunk cost fallacy)
echelon
> the whole thing could be a PWA
Apple neutered the web as best they could to force you to use their rails.
I'm still angry they killed flash. There has never been a better platform for non-technical folks, kids especially, to make animation, games, and mini apps, and deploy them as single binary blobs.
pcl
[delayed]
candiddevmike
I can't sign into Apple without going incognito in Chrome. I put in my email, and it throws and error before asking me for my password. It's not an extension, it's not a cookie, idk what it is.
And then when I do get past he password, it sends a OTP to a Mac Mini I never use and have to tap around to get it to generate a SMS code. No option for external TOTP, and no way to remove the Mac Mini I don't use from OTP without signing out of it.
epistasis
I use PWAs on iOS and they're pretty great. That was the original plan for apps on iOS, before Apple was pressured into creating an app store.
I appreciate that the software and updates are made "free" to me, and it may be their right to disallow "downgrades" and have time-limited windows for redemption. However, as a developer for their platform, it is quite frustrating that these restrictions are at odds with industry practice to guarantee support for older OS versions than current. I cannot purchase a new iPhone, put iOS 18 on it, install my app, and test updating the iPhone to 26. This can have very real negative consequences for the very same shared customers of mine and Apple's.
cwicklein
Expandable to 65K. I don’t recall seeing SI units used in this context until by hard disk manufacturers years later.
randomme
I think that comes from 64k + 1k ("the video display section contains its own 1K bytes").
Makes me wonder who printed their motherboards early on
yashasolutions
> "you won't be continually paying for access to this growing software library."
Well... the apple used to be sweet and has turn pretty sour with the years...
PlatoIsADisease
Interesting to think that:
>If Microsoft never bailed Apple out, this wouldn't be on the front page today
>If Apple didn't have the greatest marketing team of all time and nail the ipod commercial, this wouldn't be on the front page today
>If Apple charged competitive prices for the iphone, rather than make it a veblen good, this wouldn't be on the front page today.
If I could only consider how much luck is involved in life, it might make setbacks feel better.
raw_anon_1111
Which is another myth that needs to die. Apple had a couple of billion in the bank from a loan that they secured and they lost much more than the measly $250 million that Microsoft invested. Not to mention that Apple
MaxPock
Heard to believe that all this (product and ad) was by kids barely out of teenage.
cellover
Not related at all: oh my, chez.com still exists? That's my very first website I did in 2000: http://w2000.chez.com/
Foobar8568
That was my first surprised as well...
qingcharles
Green PCB Prototype #0 Apple I just sold yesterday for $2.75m
This anecdote from history feels timely given the recent shift of Apple’s iWork suite (Pages, Numbers, Keynote) from being bundled with Macs to being a freemium subscription.
What do any of these comments have to do with this advertisement for the Apple1?
tenahu
Yes, I was wondering if I missed some context.
locao
The post had a different title hours ago. Something along the lines of "it's Apple's philosophy to offer our software for free forever". I didn't followed the link before, so I don't know if it was the same content, but I'm sure the comments are related to the previous title.
mrcwinn
I know people are rightly amazed by Woz’s engineering prowess, but it’s fascinating to see Steve’s fingerprints all of Apple I. Look at the product commitments and they’ll ring a bell:
- It’s all in one
- Hassle free to set up
- Something that usually doesn’t work (cassette board) now just works
They rightly identified the hobbyist market (I want to tinker) was actually the smaller market within a larger one. Seems obvious in hindsight. It wasn’t obvious then.
I first saw an Apple I at a Maths Camp in late 1976. It was from the first batch to arrive in Australia. We were all enthralled. We were slightly less enthralled waiting for the floating point libraries to load from cassette tape.
Earlier that year I'd been on a school excursion to Lismore "to see the computer". Richmond River High had got themselves a computer. It was a WANG the size of a washing machine, with a separate mark-sense card reader and a separate RF adapter which connected to a big black and white TV. It was new by the way.
The rate of advance from the WANG to the Apple I was incredible. I'm still intoxicated by it.
Dwedit
The Apple I computers got bought back by Apple for the release of the Apple II. That's why they're so rare, Apple wanted them gone. They were not a user-friendly computer. It booted to the Monitor prompt, and did not include BASIC in the ROM.
wolvoleo
Weird that they say "4 Ko RAM". That's how the French refer to bytes (octets) but everything else is in American units and dollars.
This is not an original copy of the advertisement. This is typeset horribly from the original text of the ad, probably.
Giveaways are brutal/ill placed line breaks, zero quotes being curly ones (single and double), -- instead of a en/em dash, missing hypenation or existing one that does not align with typesetting "dis- play", etc., etc.
Why not use an image of the original instead? [1]
Jobs would have never signed off on a typographic eyesore like this. :]
This was less a philosophy and more a competitive jab at Gates' "Open Letter to Hobbyists." Apple bundled BASIC for free because Woz wrote it himself, they had no software costs to recoup. Easy to be generous when your cofounder is the product.
veltas
> Apple bundled BASIC for free because Woz wrote it himself, they had no software costs to recoup.
But in respect of Gates' letter, Woz didn't write that BASIC for free, he wrote it to enable his hardware platform and the time spent writing it is a cost/investment in the platform. Gates was just trying to make a business writing software without the hardware.
Also Apple are the ones that made Gates' sentiments a reality with the precedent set in Apple v Franklin (1983) defending the copyright of their BIOS software.
aaronbrethorst
What's up with all of the weird typos, such as:
"APPLE Computer Compagny"
"Palo Atlt"
chocochunks
Probably OCR'd with no editing.
fsckboy
it appears to be a website in the french tongue
dagmx
Whomever scanned it , enabled some kind of OCR correction which left the typos.
amelius
The full sentence:
> And since our philosophy is to provide software for our machines free or at minimal cost, you won't be continually paying for access to this growing software library.
titzer
They forgot to mention that the growing software library is also shrinking as they deprecate support for older OS versions and hardware. On the one hand they go to heroic lengths (fat binaries, Rosetta 2) to enable a migration to a new hardware platform but get bored in ~5 years and drop support.
"Growing software library" it ain't.
thisislife2
I don't how it was when Apple was a start-up, but I have never considered macOS or Apple Office suites as "free" or cheap - the way I rationalised purchasing an Apple device was by telling myself that Apple hardwares are overpriced because it includes the price of the accompanying software. Of course, now, as Apple slowly shifts to a hybrid subscription model, you will of course be continually paying for Apple software ...
ece
Locking you into the software when you buy the hardware is still considered giving it away.
gignico
At $666.66 this must have been a diabolic deal!
jagged-chisel
More devilish
bigyabai
Not really. The Apple I was discontinued within a year of release, if you saved that money until 1978 then you could get an Apple II that would be supported for almost 20 years give-or-take.
CharlesW
~$3,800 in 2026 dollars.
pixelpoet
Including 8K of "RAM memory", brought to you by the DRD Department!
A lot of corporate "philosophies" are actually just business models. There have been times between then and now they charged for the OS. They do charge for other software. But largely it's been a good business model for them.
wlesieutre
In the 2000s I remember the OS releases being $130, which (depending on exactly what year you start from) is equivalent to $200-250ish today.
Not a yearly cadence because back then they only released a new OS version when it was done and had features worth releasing, but even every two years that wasn't a cheap update.
subtlesoftware
"Compared to switches and LED's, a video terminal can dis- play vast amounts of information simultaneously."
The beginning of the end.
enzosaba
Really. You start with 40x24 chars and after a little span of time end up doom scrolling
dlcarrier
I worked at a place that tested software releases on a VM of every supported operating system, including OS X. We didn't have any Apple hardware, because no one wanted to deal with that, but someone had brought in the chassis of an old Apple computer and the host computer was inside it. We didn't run it by any lawyers or anything, but as far as we could tell, running OS X inside a computer that had all of its guts replaced was entirely within the license requirements.
bryogenic
The Mac of Theseus
pbhjpbhj
These sort of letter-of-the-law arguments don't tend to do well in court in my very limited experience (UK). But I love the essence of it!
teaearlgraycold
I would love to hear more about the exact license wording that allows this.
rendaw
IANAL but I think you'd be fine as long as you placed your NUC on a Mac Mini or maybe a closed Macbook if your hardware has a larger footprint.
> use and run one (1) copy of the Apple Software on a single Apple-branded computer at any one time.
Note that you do have to be careful not to stack multiple Macbooks when you do this.
rpastuszak
Haha, excellent timing:
I opened HN just now because:
1. I got tired of waiting 2h for my app to get notarized because
2. I can't sell it on the AppStore in the EU... because
3. the AppStore Connect page gets stuck at their DSA compliance form (it's been 10 days).
And, to add insult to injury, the whole thing could be a PWA, without any compromises in the UX whatsoever.
I misread the title, but I still posted this comment as an example of confirmation bias in the orange book for posteriority. Time to step away from the computer!
(sunk cost fallacy)
echelon
> the whole thing could be a PWA
Apple neutered the web as best they could to force you to use their rails.
I'm still angry they killed flash. There has never been a better platform for non-technical folks, kids especially, to make animation, games, and mini apps, and deploy them as single binary blobs.
pcl
[delayed]
candiddevmike
I can't sign into Apple without going incognito in Chrome. I put in my email, and it throws and error before asking me for my password. It's not an extension, it's not a cookie, idk what it is.
And then when I do get past he password, it sends a OTP to a Mac Mini I never use and have to tap around to get it to generate a SMS code. No option for external TOTP, and no way to remove the Mac Mini I don't use from OTP without signing out of it.
epistasis
I use PWAs on iOS and they're pretty great. That was the original plan for apps on iOS, before Apple was pressured into creating an app store.
I appreciate that the software and updates are made "free" to me, and it may be their right to disallow "downgrades" and have time-limited windows for redemption. However, as a developer for their platform, it is quite frustrating that these restrictions are at odds with industry practice to guarantee support for older OS versions than current. I cannot purchase a new iPhone, put iOS 18 on it, install my app, and test updating the iPhone to 26. This can have very real negative consequences for the very same shared customers of mine and Apple's.
cwicklein
Expandable to 65K. I don’t recall seeing SI units used in this context until by hard disk manufacturers years later.
randomme
I think that comes from 64k + 1k ("the video display section contains its own 1K bytes").
Makes me wonder who printed their motherboards early on
yashasolutions
> "you won't be continually paying for access to this growing software library."
Well... the apple used to be sweet and has turn pretty sour with the years...
PlatoIsADisease
Interesting to think that:
>If Microsoft never bailed Apple out, this wouldn't be on the front page today
>If Apple didn't have the greatest marketing team of all time and nail the ipod commercial, this wouldn't be on the front page today
>If Apple charged competitive prices for the iphone, rather than make it a veblen good, this wouldn't be on the front page today.
If I could only consider how much luck is involved in life, it might make setbacks feel better.
raw_anon_1111
Which is another myth that needs to die. Apple had a couple of billion in the bank from a loan that they secured and they lost much more than the measly $250 million that Microsoft invested. Not to mention that Apple
MaxPock
Heard to believe that all this (product and ad) was by kids barely out of teenage.
cellover
Not related at all: oh my, chez.com still exists? That's my very first website I did in 2000: http://w2000.chez.com/
Foobar8568
That was my first surprised as well...
qingcharles
Green PCB Prototype #0 Apple I just sold yesterday for $2.75m
This anecdote from history feels timely given the recent shift of Apple’s iWork suite (Pages, Numbers, Keynote) from being bundled with Macs to being a freemium subscription.
What do any of these comments have to do with this advertisement for the Apple1?
tenahu
Yes, I was wondering if I missed some context.
locao
The post had a different title hours ago. Something along the lines of "it's Apple's philosophy to offer our software for free forever". I didn't followed the link before, so I don't know if it was the same content, but I'm sure the comments are related to the previous title.
mrcwinn
I know people are rightly amazed by Woz’s engineering prowess, but it’s fascinating to see Steve’s fingerprints all of Apple I. Look at the product commitments and they’ll ring a bell:
- It’s all in one
- Hassle free to set up
- Something that usually doesn’t work (cassette board) now just works
They rightly identified the hobbyist market (I want to tinker) was actually the smaller market within a larger one. Seems obvious in hindsight. It wasn’t obvious then.
I first saw an Apple I at a Maths Camp in late 1976. It was from the first batch to arrive in Australia. We were all enthralled. We were slightly less enthralled waiting for the floating point libraries to load from cassette tape.
Earlier that year I'd been on a school excursion to Lismore "to see the computer". Richmond River High had got themselves a computer. It was a WANG the size of a washing machine, with a separate mark-sense card reader and a separate RF adapter which connected to a big black and white TV. It was new by the way.
The rate of advance from the WANG to the Apple I was incredible. I'm still intoxicated by it.
Dwedit
The Apple I computers got bought back by Apple for the release of the Apple II. That's why they're so rare, Apple wanted them gone. They were not a user-friendly computer. It booted to the Monitor prompt, and did not include BASIC in the ROM.
wolvoleo
Weird that they say "4 Ko RAM". That's how the French refer to bytes (octets) but everything else is in American units and dollars.
This is not an original copy of the advertisement. This is typeset horribly from the original text of the ad, probably.
Giveaways are brutal/ill placed line breaks, zero quotes being curly ones (single and double), -- instead of a en/em dash, missing hypenation or existing one that does not align with typesetting "dis- play", etc., etc.
Why not use an image of the original instead? [1]
Jobs would have never signed off on a typographic eyesore like this. :]
This was less a philosophy and more a competitive jab at Gates' "Open Letter to Hobbyists." Apple bundled BASIC for free because Woz wrote it himself, they had no software costs to recoup. Easy to be generous when your cofounder is the product.
veltas
> Apple bundled BASIC for free because Woz wrote it himself, they had no software costs to recoup.
But in respect of Gates' letter, Woz didn't write that BASIC for free, he wrote it to enable his hardware platform and the time spent writing it is a cost/investment in the platform. Gates was just trying to make a business writing software without the hardware.
Also Apple are the ones that made Gates' sentiments a reality with the precedent set in Apple v Franklin (1983) defending the copyright of their BIOS software.
What's up with all of the weird typos, such as:
"APPLE Computer Compagny"
"Palo Atlt"
Probably OCR'd with no editing.
it appears to be a website in the french tongue
Whomever scanned it , enabled some kind of OCR correction which left the typos.
The full sentence:
> And since our philosophy is to provide software for our machines free or at minimal cost, you won't be continually paying for access to this growing software library.
They forgot to mention that the growing software library is also shrinking as they deprecate support for older OS versions and hardware. On the one hand they go to heroic lengths (fat binaries, Rosetta 2) to enable a migration to a new hardware platform but get bored in ~5 years and drop support.
"Growing software library" it ain't.
I don't how it was when Apple was a start-up, but I have never considered macOS or Apple Office suites as "free" or cheap - the way I rationalised purchasing an Apple device was by telling myself that Apple hardwares are overpriced because it includes the price of the accompanying software. Of course, now, as Apple slowly shifts to a hybrid subscription model, you will of course be continually paying for Apple software ...
Locking you into the software when you buy the hardware is still considered giving it away.
At $666.66 this must have been a diabolic deal!
More devilish
Not really. The Apple I was discontinued within a year of release, if you saved that money until 1978 then you could get an Apple II that would be supported for almost 20 years give-or-take.
~$3,800 in 2026 dollars.
Including 8K of "RAM memory", brought to you by the DRD Department!
This was because Woz liked repeating digits.
https://youtu.be/pJif4i9NRdI @2:05
It would be a cancellable offense today
A lot of corporate "philosophies" are actually just business models. There have been times between then and now they charged for the OS. They do charge for other software. But largely it's been a good business model for them.
In the 2000s I remember the OS releases being $130, which (depending on exactly what year you start from) is equivalent to $200-250ish today.
Not a yearly cadence because back then they only released a new OS version when it was done and had features worth releasing, but even every two years that wasn't a cheap update.
"Compared to switches and LED's, a video terminal can dis- play vast amounts of information simultaneously."
The beginning of the end.
Really. You start with 40x24 chars and after a little span of time end up doom scrolling
I worked at a place that tested software releases on a VM of every supported operating system, including OS X. We didn't have any Apple hardware, because no one wanted to deal with that, but someone had brought in the chassis of an old Apple computer and the host computer was inside it. We didn't run it by any lawyers or anything, but as far as we could tell, running OS X inside a computer that had all of its guts replaced was entirely within the license requirements.
The Mac of Theseus
These sort of letter-of-the-law arguments don't tend to do well in court in my very limited experience (UK). But I love the essence of it!
I would love to hear more about the exact license wording that allows this.
IANAL but I think you'd be fine as long as you placed your NUC on a Mac Mini or maybe a closed Macbook if your hardware has a larger footprint.
> use and run one (1) copy of the Apple Software on a single Apple-branded computer at any one time.
Note that you do have to be careful not to stack multiple Macbooks when you do this.
Haha, excellent timing:
I opened HN just now because:
1. I got tired of waiting 2h for my app to get notarized because
2. I can't sell it on the AppStore in the EU... because
3. the AppStore Connect page gets stuck at their DSA compliance form (it's been 10 days).
And, to add insult to injury, the whole thing could be a PWA, without any compromises in the UX whatsoever.
I misread the title, but I still posted this comment as an example of confirmation bias in the orange book for posteriority. Time to step away from the computer!
(sunk cost fallacy)
> the whole thing could be a PWA
Apple neutered the web as best they could to force you to use their rails.
I'm still angry they killed flash. There has never been a better platform for non-technical folks, kids especially, to make animation, games, and mini apps, and deploy them as single binary blobs.
[delayed]
I can't sign into Apple without going incognito in Chrome. I put in my email, and it throws and error before asking me for my password. It's not an extension, it's not a cookie, idk what it is.
And then when I do get past he password, it sends a OTP to a Mac Mini I never use and have to tap around to get it to generate a SMS code. No option for external TOTP, and no way to remove the Mac Mini I don't use from OTP without signing out of it.
I use PWAs on iOS and they're pretty great. That was the original plan for apps on iOS, before Apple was pressured into creating an app store.
> the orange book
?
There was discourse in the 1970s about whether software should all be free or if paid software would be better. Apple and Micro-Soft had different perspectives: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists
I appreciate that the software and updates are made "free" to me, and it may be their right to disallow "downgrades" and have time-limited windows for redemption. However, as a developer for their platform, it is quite frustrating that these restrictions are at odds with industry practice to guarantee support for older OS versions than current. I cannot purchase a new iPhone, put iOS 18 on it, install my app, and test updating the iPhone to 26. This can have very real negative consequences for the very same shared customers of mine and Apple's.
Expandable to 65K. I don’t recall seeing SI units used in this context until by hard disk manufacturers years later.
I think that comes from 64k + 1k ("the video display section contains its own 1K bytes").
The text was mangeled by some OCR-software. This ad can be found as image on Wikimedia: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Apple_1_Advertisemen...
Makes me wonder who printed their motherboards early on
> "you won't be continually paying for access to this growing software library."
Well... the apple used to be sweet and has turn pretty sour with the years...
Interesting to think that:
>If Microsoft never bailed Apple out, this wouldn't be on the front page today
>If Apple didn't have the greatest marketing team of all time and nail the ipod commercial, this wouldn't be on the front page today
>If Apple charged competitive prices for the iphone, rather than make it a veblen good, this wouldn't be on the front page today.
If I could only consider how much luck is involved in life, it might make setbacks feel better.
Which is another myth that needs to die. Apple had a couple of billion in the bank from a loan that they secured and they lost much more than the measly $250 million that Microsoft invested. Not to mention that Apple
Heard to believe that all this (product and ad) was by kids barely out of teenage.
Not related at all: oh my, chez.com still exists? That's my very first website I did in 2000: http://w2000.chez.com/
That was my first surprised as well...
Green PCB Prototype #0 Apple I just sold yesterday for $2.75m
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46843037
This anecdote from history feels timely given the recent shift of Apple’s iWork suite (Pages, Numbers, Keynote) from being bundled with Macs to being a freemium subscription.
https://www.macrumors.com/2026/01/28/apple-updates-keynote-n...
What do any of these comments have to do with this advertisement for the Apple1?
Yes, I was wondering if I missed some context.
The post had a different title hours ago. Something along the lines of "it's Apple's philosophy to offer our software for free forever". I didn't followed the link before, so I don't know if it was the same content, but I'm sure the comments are related to the previous title.
I know people are rightly amazed by Woz’s engineering prowess, but it’s fascinating to see Steve’s fingerprints all of Apple I. Look at the product commitments and they’ll ring a bell:
- It’s all in one - Hassle free to set up - Something that usually doesn’t work (cassette board) now just works
They rightly identified the hobbyist market (I want to tinker) was actually the smaller market within a larger one. Seems obvious in hindsight. It wasn’t obvious then.
https://archive.is/dJvc
I first saw an Apple I at a Maths Camp in late 1976. It was from the first batch to arrive in Australia. We were all enthralled. We were slightly less enthralled waiting for the floating point libraries to load from cassette tape.
Earlier that year I'd been on a school excursion to Lismore "to see the computer". Richmond River High had got themselves a computer. It was a WANG the size of a washing machine, with a separate mark-sense card reader and a separate RF adapter which connected to a big black and white TV. It was new by the way.
The rate of advance from the WANG to the Apple I was incredible. I'm still intoxicated by it.
The Apple I computers got bought back by Apple for the release of the Apple II. That's why they're so rare, Apple wanted them gone. They were not a user-friendly computer. It booted to the Monitor prompt, and did not include BASIC in the ROM.
Weird that they say "4 Ko RAM". That's how the French refer to bytes (octets) but everything else is in American units and dollars.
An artifact of bad OCR; not actually there.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/48/Apple_1_...
This is not an original copy of the advertisement. This is typeset horribly from the original text of the ad, probably.
Giveaways are brutal/ill placed line breaks, zero quotes being curly ones (single and double), -- instead of a en/em dash, missing hypenation or existing one that does not align with typesetting "dis- play", etc., etc.
Why not use an image of the original instead? [1]
Jobs would have never signed off on a typographic eyesore like this. :]
[1] https://www.alamy.com/stock-image-an-advertisement-for-the-a...
This was less a philosophy and more a competitive jab at Gates' "Open Letter to Hobbyists." Apple bundled BASIC for free because Woz wrote it himself, they had no software costs to recoup. Easy to be generous when your cofounder is the product.
> Apple bundled BASIC for free because Woz wrote it himself, they had no software costs to recoup.
But in respect of Gates' letter, Woz didn't write that BASIC for free, he wrote it to enable his hardware platform and the time spent writing it is a cost/investment in the platform. Gates was just trying to make a business writing software without the hardware.
Also Apple are the ones that made Gates' sentiments a reality with the precedent set in Apple v Franklin (1983) defending the copyright of their BIOS software.
What's up with all of the weird typos, such as:
"APPLE Computer Compagny"
"Palo Atlt"
Probably OCR'd with no editing.
it appears to be a website in the french tongue
Whomever scanned it , enabled some kind of OCR correction which left the typos.
The full sentence:
> And since our philosophy is to provide software for our machines free or at minimal cost, you won't be continually paying for access to this growing software library.
They forgot to mention that the growing software library is also shrinking as they deprecate support for older OS versions and hardware. On the one hand they go to heroic lengths (fat binaries, Rosetta 2) to enable a migration to a new hardware platform but get bored in ~5 years and drop support.
"Growing software library" it ain't.
I don't how it was when Apple was a start-up, but I have never considered macOS or Apple Office suites as "free" or cheap - the way I rationalised purchasing an Apple device was by telling myself that Apple hardwares are overpriced because it includes the price of the accompanying software. Of course, now, as Apple slowly shifts to a hybrid subscription model, you will of course be continually paying for Apple software ...
Locking you into the software when you buy the hardware is still considered giving it away.
At $666.66 this must have been a diabolic deal!
More devilish
Not really. The Apple I was discontinued within a year of release, if you saved that money until 1978 then you could get an Apple II that would be supported for almost 20 years give-or-take.
~$3,800 in 2026 dollars.
Including 8K of "RAM memory", brought to you by the DRD Department!
This was because Woz liked repeating digits.
https://youtu.be/pJif4i9NRdI @2:05
It would be a cancellable offense today
A lot of corporate "philosophies" are actually just business models. There have been times between then and now they charged for the OS. They do charge for other software. But largely it's been a good business model for them.
In the 2000s I remember the OS releases being $130, which (depending on exactly what year you start from) is equivalent to $200-250ish today.
Not a yearly cadence because back then they only released a new OS version when it was done and had features worth releasing, but even every two years that wasn't a cheap update.
"Compared to switches and LED's, a video terminal can dis- play vast amounts of information simultaneously."
The beginning of the end.
Really. You start with 40x24 chars and after a little span of time end up doom scrolling
I worked at a place that tested software releases on a VM of every supported operating system, including OS X. We didn't have any Apple hardware, because no one wanted to deal with that, but someone had brought in the chassis of an old Apple computer and the host computer was inside it. We didn't run it by any lawyers or anything, but as far as we could tell, running OS X inside a computer that had all of its guts replaced was entirely within the license requirements.
The Mac of Theseus
These sort of letter-of-the-law arguments don't tend to do well in court in my very limited experience (UK). But I love the essence of it!
I would love to hear more about the exact license wording that allows this.
IANAL but I think you'd be fine as long as you placed your NUC on a Mac Mini or maybe a closed Macbook if your hardware has a larger footprint.
> use and run one (1) copy of the Apple Software on a single Apple-branded computer at any one time.
Note that you do have to be careful not to stack multiple Macbooks when you do this.
Haha, excellent timing:
I opened HN just now because:
1. I got tired of waiting 2h for my app to get notarized because
2. I can't sell it on the AppStore in the EU... because
3. the AppStore Connect page gets stuck at their DSA compliance form (it's been 10 days).
And, to add insult to injury, the whole thing could be a PWA, without any compromises in the UX whatsoever.
I misread the title, but I still posted this comment as an example of confirmation bias in the orange book for posteriority. Time to step away from the computer!
(sunk cost fallacy)
> the whole thing could be a PWA
Apple neutered the web as best they could to force you to use their rails.
I'm still angry they killed flash. There has never been a better platform for non-technical folks, kids especially, to make animation, games, and mini apps, and deploy them as single binary blobs.
[delayed]
I can't sign into Apple without going incognito in Chrome. I put in my email, and it throws and error before asking me for my password. It's not an extension, it's not a cookie, idk what it is.
And then when I do get past he password, it sends a OTP to a Mac Mini I never use and have to tap around to get it to generate a SMS code. No option for external TOTP, and no way to remove the Mac Mini I don't use from OTP without signing out of it.
I use PWAs on iOS and they're pretty great. That was the original plan for apps on iOS, before Apple was pressured into creating an app store.
> the orange book
?
There was discourse in the 1970s about whether software should all be free or if paid software would be better. Apple and Micro-Soft had different perspectives: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists
I appreciate that the software and updates are made "free" to me, and it may be their right to disallow "downgrades" and have time-limited windows for redemption. However, as a developer for their platform, it is quite frustrating that these restrictions are at odds with industry practice to guarantee support for older OS versions than current. I cannot purchase a new iPhone, put iOS 18 on it, install my app, and test updating the iPhone to 26. This can have very real negative consequences for the very same shared customers of mine and Apple's.
Expandable to 65K. I don’t recall seeing SI units used in this context until by hard disk manufacturers years later.
I think that comes from 64k + 1k ("the video display section contains its own 1K bytes").
The text was mangeled by some OCR-software. This ad can be found as image on Wikimedia: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Apple_1_Advertisemen...
Makes me wonder who printed their motherboards early on
> "you won't be continually paying for access to this growing software library."
Well... the apple used to be sweet and has turn pretty sour with the years...
Interesting to think that:
>If Microsoft never bailed Apple out, this wouldn't be on the front page today
>If Apple didn't have the greatest marketing team of all time and nail the ipod commercial, this wouldn't be on the front page today
>If Apple charged competitive prices for the iphone, rather than make it a veblen good, this wouldn't be on the front page today.
If I could only consider how much luck is involved in life, it might make setbacks feel better.
Which is another myth that needs to die. Apple had a couple of billion in the bank from a loan that they secured and they lost much more than the measly $250 million that Microsoft invested. Not to mention that Apple
Heard to believe that all this (product and ad) was by kids barely out of teenage.
Not related at all: oh my, chez.com still exists? That's my very first website I did in 2000: http://w2000.chez.com/
That was my first surprised as well...
Green PCB Prototype #0 Apple I just sold yesterday for $2.75m
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46843037
This anecdote from history feels timely given the recent shift of Apple’s iWork suite (Pages, Numbers, Keynote) from being bundled with Macs to being a freemium subscription.
https://www.macrumors.com/2026/01/28/apple-updates-keynote-n...
What do any of these comments have to do with this advertisement for the Apple1?
Yes, I was wondering if I missed some context.
The post had a different title hours ago. Something along the lines of "it's Apple's philosophy to offer our software for free forever". I didn't followed the link before, so I don't know if it was the same content, but I'm sure the comments are related to the previous title.
I know people are rightly amazed by Woz’s engineering prowess, but it’s fascinating to see Steve’s fingerprints all of Apple I. Look at the product commitments and they’ll ring a bell:
- It’s all in one - Hassle free to set up - Something that usually doesn’t work (cassette board) now just works
They rightly identified the hobbyist market (I want to tinker) was actually the smaller market within a larger one. Seems obvious in hindsight. It wasn’t obvious then.
https://archive.is/dJvc
I first saw an Apple I at a Maths Camp in late 1976. It was from the first batch to arrive in Australia. We were all enthralled. We were slightly less enthralled waiting for the floating point libraries to load from cassette tape.
Earlier that year I'd been on a school excursion to Lismore "to see the computer". Richmond River High had got themselves a computer. It was a WANG the size of a washing machine, with a separate mark-sense card reader and a separate RF adapter which connected to a big black and white TV. It was new by the way.
The rate of advance from the WANG to the Apple I was incredible. I'm still intoxicated by it.
The Apple I computers got bought back by Apple for the release of the Apple II. That's why they're so rare, Apple wanted them gone. They were not a user-friendly computer. It booted to the Monitor prompt, and did not include BASIC in the ROM.
Weird that they say "4 Ko RAM". That's how the French refer to bytes (octets) but everything else is in American units and dollars.
An artifact of bad OCR; not actually there.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/48/Apple_1_...
This is not an original copy of the advertisement. This is typeset horribly from the original text of the ad, probably.
Giveaways are brutal/ill placed line breaks, zero quotes being curly ones (single and double), -- instead of a en/em dash, missing hypenation or existing one that does not align with typesetting "dis- play", etc., etc.
Why not use an image of the original instead? [1]
Jobs would have never signed off on a typographic eyesore like this. :]
[1] https://www.alamy.com/stock-image-an-advertisement-for-the-a...
This was less a philosophy and more a competitive jab at Gates' "Open Letter to Hobbyists." Apple bundled BASIC for free because Woz wrote it himself, they had no software costs to recoup. Easy to be generous when your cofounder is the product.
> Apple bundled BASIC for free because Woz wrote it himself, they had no software costs to recoup.
But in respect of Gates' letter, Woz didn't write that BASIC for free, he wrote it to enable his hardware platform and the time spent writing it is a cost/investment in the platform. Gates was just trying to make a business writing software without the hardware.
Also Apple are the ones that made Gates' sentiments a reality with the precedent set in Apple v Franklin (1983) defending the copyright of their BIOS software.