Let’s all take a collective moment to light a sandalwood candle and bow our heads toward Cupertino. It’s the 40th anniversary of the Macintosh, or as historians like to call it, the moment marketing officially triumphed over engineering. The Verge is back with another teary-eyed retrospective on how the Mac “changed computers forever,” proving that if you air a high-budget Super Bowl commercial directed by Ridley Scott, people will forgive you for selling them a beige toaster with the processing power of a digital watch.

The central thesis here is that the Macintosh was a revolutionary leap forward. In reality, the Macintosh was less of a “leap” and more of a “very expensive shoplifting trip to Xerox PARC.” Steve Jobs didn’t invent the Graphical User Interface (GUI) or the mouse; he just saw them, realized the engineers at Xerox were too busy being “productive” to monetize them, and slapped a “Think Different” sticker on the concept. The claim that the Mac changed everything assumes that computing wouldn’t have evolved past C prompts without Apple. Newsflash: the GUI was coming regardless; Apple just ensured it would be packaged in a plastic box you couldn’t open without a proprietary screwdriver and a prayer.

Then we have “The Commercial.” You know the one—the 1984 ad featuring a track star throwing a sledgehammer at Big Brother. It’s heralded as a masterpiece of hype. But let’s look at the logic: Apple marketed a computer with a closed architecture, no expansion slots, and a “my way or the highway” philosophy as a tool for “breaking the status quo.” The irony is so thick you could use it to shim a wobbly table. They sold the dream of rebellion while building a walled garden that would eventually make IBM’s corporate uniformity look like a hippie commune.

The summary admits the Macintosh “wasn’t a great computer” at first. That is a massive understatement, bordering on historical malpractice. The original Mac shipped with 128K of RAM. To put that in perspective, you couldn’t even finish a sentence in a Word document before the machine started gasping for air. It didn’t have a hard drive. It had a single floppy disk drive, meaning you spent half your life playing “disk swap” like a bored DJ just to save a file. It was an underpowered, overpriced toy for wealthy enthusiasts who wanted to draw a picture of a cat with a mouse that had one button—because apparently, Apple figured their users lacked the finger coordination for two.

The article also touches on Steve Jobs’ “unceremonious exile.” Let’s be real: he wasn’t exiled because the board was mean; he was exiled because the Macintosh was a commercial disaster in its first iteration. It was slow, it was expensive, and it lacked software. The “legacy” being celebrated is essentially the birth of the “Apple Tax”—the idea that you should pay a 40% premium for a product that does less, just because the box is pretty and the founder wore a turtleneck.

The Macintosh didn’t change computing by being a superior machine; it changed computing by proving that if you wrap mediocre hardware in enough “visionary” mystique, people will wait in line to be inconvenienced by it. It taught Silicon Valley that branding is more important than bits, and for that, we can all truly say: thanks, Apple. We’ve been “thinking different” ever since, as long as “different” means exactly what the App Store guidelines allow.