2026年3月7日 / 美国东部时间晚上11:39 / CBS新闻
西蒙与舒斯特出版社
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“CBS周日早晨”记者大卫·波格的新书《苹果：头50年》（3月10日由西蒙与舒斯特出版社出版）探讨了在其半个世纪的发展历程中，由史蒂夫·沃兹尼亚克和史蒂夫·乔布斯创立的公司是如何重塑文化——并以惊人的方式重塑自身的。
阅读下文节录，千万不要错过大卫·波格3月8日在“CBS周日早晨”对苹果公司头50年发展历程的报道！
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《苹果：头50年》大卫·波格著
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史蒂夫·乔布斯已离开他创立的公司11年。1997年7月6日他回归时，苹果公司四年内换了三位首席执行官，处境岌岌可危。
士气降至冰点。才华横溢的员工成群结队地离职。部门林立，各自为政。曾有一次，苹果两大部门的律师甚至出现在专利商标局互相起诉对方。
当时公司没有CEO，没有战略，乔布斯强烈地感觉到，也没有灵魂。
乔布斯一次解决了所有问题。他全身心投入这个无名也无薪的角色，不知疲倦，夜以继日。“最初的六个月情况非常惨淡，”他说，“我几乎是在靠虚幻度日。”
他解雇了大多数董事会成员。大幅简化公司结构。并将当时苹果70种不同的Mac机型削减至仅四款：两款笔记本电脑和两款台式机。
西蒙与舒斯特出版社
“当时局势非常动荡，因为你在淘汰人们正在研发的产品，”现任服务高级副总裁的埃迪·库伊回忆道，“就像：‘我们要从面向所有人的众多产品，缩减到只有两种？你们疯了吗？’”
但乔布斯态度坚决。他指出，一条高度聚焦的产品线意味着“我们可以将精英团队全部投入到每一款产品上。”
不同凡想
乔布斯发现苹果正在同时运行12个不同的广告宣传活动。这些活动毫无协调，事实上，它们传递的信息常常相互冲突。
他想将所有宣传活动替换为单一活动，以致敬创造力、独立性和叛逆精神——这既是旧苹果也是新苹果的精神。
回到洛杉矶，Chiat/Day创意总监罗布·西尔特南让他的四个团队准备一些活动创意。他们将想法钉在墙上：照片、铅笔素描、标语。“但其中一个创意格外突出，而且非常震撼，”他说。
那是一个海报和广告牌宣传活动的创意，以黑白照片展示革命人物和事件：爱因斯坦、托马斯·爱迪生、甘地。每张照片上方都有条纹状的苹果标志——这是图像中唯一的色彩——以及“Think Different（不同凡想）”的字样。
“这个创意的纯粹性令人难忘，”乔布斯说，“当他向我展示这个想法时，我在办公室哭了。”
西尔特南一直被罗宾·威廉姆斯主演的电影《死亡诗社》中的独白所感动——例如，“尽管有人可能会告诉你，文字和想法可以改变世界。”
因此，当他思考如何将平面广告转化为电视广告时，西尔特南在日记中写道：“致疯狂的人。向不合时宜者致敬。叛逆者。捣蛋鬼。”还有他最喜欢的部分，他设想在结尾使用：“那些足够疯狂到相信自己能改变世界的人…才是真正做到的人。 ”
但当乔布斯看到广告原型时，勃然大怒：“我以为你会写出类似《死亡诗社》那样的台词！这纯粹是垃圾！”他对着西尔特南大喊，“这是广告公司的烂活儿！”
西尔特南又气又失望，告诉老板另找人完成这个广告；他和乔布斯的合作到此为止。
然而，就在广告计划播出前17天，乔布斯打来电话说他改变了主意。他希望继续使用“疯狂的人”这一剧本。
广告公司现在有了想法，并获得了乔布斯的认可。接下来是最困难的部分：获得使用这些名人肖像的版权。大多数人从未允许自己的形象出现在广告中。
乔布斯动用了自己的人脉。他致电约翰·肯尼迪和吉姆·汉森的家人，并飞往纽约与他的遗孀小野洋子讨论约翰·列侬的影视片段。几乎所有他心中的偶像，或其继承人，都同意参与。（每位参与者都获得了报酬和苹果产品，用于捐赠给他们最喜欢的事业。）
广告公司聘请了洛杉矶的众多人才试镜旁白：理查德·德莱福斯、彼得·加拉格尔、萨莉·凯勒曼，甚至菲利斯·迪勒。
直到最后一刻，乔布斯还在理查德·德莱福斯的版本和自己旁白的版本之间犹豫不决。最终他选择了德莱福斯的版本。“如果用我的版本，就会变成关于我个人的故事，”乔布斯说，“但这不能是关于我的，这是关于公司的。”
1997年9月28日，“Think Different”广告在ABC电视台的《迪士尼奇妙世界》节目中首次亮相，该节目恰好同时播出皮克斯制作的《玩具总动员》网络首播。
在60秒的广告中，伴随着轻柔的钢琴与弦乐背景，展示了17位“疯狂的人”的片段：阿尔伯特·爱因斯坦、鲍勃·迪伦、马丁·路德·金、理查德·布兰森、巴克敏斯特·富勒、托马斯·爱迪生、巴勃罗·毕加索等等。
西蒙与舒斯特出版社
广告中没有任何电脑的宣传，甚至没有展示电脑（当时苹果也没有新电脑可展示）。此外，大多数人无法认出这些被展示的人物。例如，谁会认出巴克敏斯特·富勒、弗兰克·劳埃德·赖特或玛莎·格雷厄姆的面孔？
但Chiat/Day认为这种“不为人知”正是它的特点，而非缺点。这促使人们讨论这个广告，反复观看，甚至去研究这些人物——“那是谁？”
这个广告所传递的信息是，苹果确实拥有灵魂——并且它一直都在。黑暗岁月中的所有摸索都不算数。所有坚持留在Mac团队的创意人士都知道自己在做什么。所有坚守信念的员工都应该感到自豪。
这个广告为苹果和Chiat/Day带来了又一个历史性成功。它斩获了一个又一个广告奖项，并获得了艾美奖。被无数次模仿和恶搞。最重要的是，正如乔布斯所希望的，这个广告让苹果的每一个人都重新燃起了自豪感和希望。
苹果最终为这个广告活动花费了1亿美元，该活动以各种形式持续了五年。
1998年1月在旧金山Macworld博览会上，入职仅一年的乔布斯留着新蓄的胡子和灰白相间的全须，几乎让人认不出来。这一次，他在主题演讲结尾的“还有一件事”环节没有推出任何产品。
相反，乔布斯揭开了苹果盈利的面纱——大多数人认为他们再也看不到这一天了。
节选自《苹果：头50年》，大卫·波格著。2026年版权所有。经西蒙与舒斯特出版社许可摘录，西蒙与舒斯特出版社是西蒙与舒斯特公司的子公司。
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《苹果：头50年》大卫·波格著
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Book excerpt: “Apple: The First 50 Years” by David Pogue
March 7, 2026 / 11:39 PM EST / CBS News
Simon & Schuster
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“CBS Sunday Morning” correspondent David Pogue’s new book, “Apple: The First 50 Years” (to be published March 10 by Simon & Schuster), examines how, in its first half-century, the company founded by Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs remade the culture – and then, incredibly, remade itself.
Read the excerpt below, and don’t miss David Pogue’s report on the first 50 years of Apple on “CBS Sunday Morning” March 8!
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“Apple: The First 50 Years” by David Pogue
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Steve Jobs had been away from the company he founded for 11 years. When he returned on July 6, 1997, Apple had been through three CEOs in four years, and it was in desperate shape.
Morale was at zero. Talented people were leaving in droves. There were too many divisions, too many fiefdoms. At one point, lawyers from two different Apple divisions showed up in the Patent and Trademark Office to sue each other.
The company had no CEO, no strategy, and, Jobs felt strongly, no soul.
Jobs tackled all of it at once. He threw himself fully, relentlessly, exhaustingly, into his nameless and unpaid role. “It was pretty bleak those first six months,” he said. “I was running on vapor.”
He fired most of the board. He drastically simplified the company’s structure. And he slashed the company’s 70 different Mac models down to only four: two laptops and two desktops.
Simon & Schuster
“There was huge turmoil, because you were killing products that people were working on,” says Eddy Cue, now senior VP of services. “It’s like: ‘We’re gonna go from all these different products for everybody to, like, two? Are you guys crazy?’”
But Jobs was emphatic. A very focused product line, he pointed out, meant that “we could put the A-team on every single one of them.”
Think Different
Jobs discovered that Apple was running 12 different ad campaigns. They weren’t coordinated; in fact, their messages often conflicted.
He wanted to replace them all with a single campaign that would pay tribute to creativity, independence, rebelliousness—the spirit of the old Apple and the new one.
Back in L.A., Chiat/Day creative director Rob Siltanen asked four of his teams to prepare some campaign ideas. They tacked up their ideas on wallboards: photos, pencil sketches, taglines. “But there was one campaign that jumped out at me, and it jumped out in a big way,” he says.
It was an idea for a poster-and-billboard campaign, featuring black-and-white photos of revolutionary people and events: Einstein, Thomas Edison, Gandhi. Above each photo was the striped Apple logo—the only color in the image—and the words “Think Different.”
“There was a purity about that I will never forget,” Jobs said. “I cried in my office as he was showing me the idea.”
Siltanen had always been moved by the monologues in the Robin Williams movie Dead Poets Society—for example, “Despite what anyone might tell you, words and ideas can change the world.”
So when he contemplated how to turn the print ads into a TV ad, Siltanen wrote in his journal: “To the crazy ones. Here’s to the misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers.” And, his favorite part, which he envisioned for the closing: “The people who are crazy enough to believe they can change the world … are the ones who actually do.”
But when Jobs saw the prototype ad, he went ballistic. “I thought you were going to write something like ‘Dead Poets Society’! This is crap!” he shouted at Siltanen. “It’s advertising-agency s***!”
Siltanen, furious and disappointed, told his boss to find someone else to finish the ad; he was done with Jobs.
Then, only 17 days before the ad was supposed to air, Jobs called to say he’d changed his mind. He wanted to proceed with the “crazy ones” script.
The agency now had the idea and Jobs’s blessing. Now came the hard part: securing the rights to use the famous people’s images. Most had never allowed their images to appear in ads.
Jobs plied his own connections. He called the families of John F. Kennedy and Jim Henson himself, and flew to New York to discuss the John Lennon clip with his widow, Yoko Ono. Almost all of his heroes, or their estates, agreed to participate. (Every participant received money and Apple products to donate to their favorite causes.)
The agency hired a parade of L.A. talent to try their hands at the narration: Richard Dreyfuss, Peter Gallagher, Sally Kellerman, and even Phyllis Diller.
Until the last moment, Jobs was torn between the Richard Dreyfuss version and the one he narrated himself. In the end, he went with Dreyfuss’s. “If we go with mine, it’ll become about me,” Jobs said. “And this can’t be about me. It’s about the company.”
On September 28, 1997, the “Think Different” ad debuted on ABC’s The Wonderful World of Disney, which happened to be airing the network premiere of Toy Story—from Pixar, of course.
In 60 seconds, backed by a gentle piano-and-strings theme, the ad presented clips of 17 “crazy ones”: Albert Einstein, Bob Dylan, Martin Luther King Jr., Richard Branson, Buckminster Fuller, Thomas Edison, Pablo Picasso, and so on.
Simon & Schuster
The ad said nothing about computers. It didn’t even show computers (not that Apple had any new computers to show). Furthermore, most people couldn’t identify many of the featured figures. Who would recognize, for example, the faces of Buckminster Fuller, Frank Lloyd Wright, or Martha Graham?
But Chiat/Day considered their obscurity a feature, not a bug. It prompted people to talk about the ad, to replay it, to research it—”Who was that guy?”
What the ad did say is that Apple did have a soul—and it had been there all along. All the fumbling during the Dark Years didn’t count. All the creative people who’d stuck with the Mac knew what they were doing. All the employees who kept the faith should be proud.
The ad was another historic success for Apple and Chiat/Day. It won one advertising award after another, and an Emmy. It was endlessly parodied and imitated. Best of all, as Jobs had hoped, the ad gave everyone at Apple a new sense of pride and hope.
Apple wound up spending $100 million on the campaign, which ran in various forms for five years.
At the San Francisco Macworld Expo in January 1998, only one year into the job, Jobs was nearly unrecognizable in his new mustache and full beard, streaked with gray. This time, his “one more thing” moment at the end of the keynote did not involve a product.
Instead, Jobs took the wraps off an Apple creation most had thought they’d never see again: a profit.
From “Apple: The First 50 Years” by David Pogue. Copyright © 2026 by David Pogue. Excerpted with permission by Simon & Schuster, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
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Get the book here:
“Apple: The First 50 Years” by David Pogue
Buy locally from[Bookshop.org]
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