Apple's 1984 ad, originally aired to 96 million viewers during the Super Bowl, used the idea of a dystopian society demonstrated in George Orwell's 1984.

Ted Friedman (2005) explains the idea behind this ad:
It turned the confusing complexity of the Information Age…into a battle of good versus evil. There’s the bad technology – centralized, authoritarian – which crushes the human spirit and controls people’s minds. Read, IBM. But we can be liberated from that bad technology by the good technology – independent, individualized – of the Mac. (ch. 5)

The ad used a "pronounced countercultural tone," to denote a "shift from engineering to artistry" (Johnson, 1997), and has been regarded as one of the top commercials of all time, and marks the consistent idea of Mac users being individuals and part of a counterculture.