Slashdot Mirror
New Apple Campaign Target PC Flaws
sodul writes"Apple just started a new campaign to emphasize the advantages of Mac versus a regular tasteless PC. The ads represent a young cool looking man (Mac) and a white collar in his 40's (not cool, PC).
In one of the ads the PC repeat itself several times because it had to reboot. In an other one (and maybe the most aggressive of all) PC is sick because of a virus, while Mac is healthy.
You can watch the new spots on Apple's site "
Diod you watch any television during the last US election?
Most politicial campaigns?
modern Mac's are a bog standard Personal Computer (that comes with a nice box & even nicer software)
The "dumb" ones are those that hold on to the notion that the worth of a computer is solely in its hardware. That "even nicer software" is what seperates the two - the consumer on average doesn't really care much about how well the hardware can perform, he/she just cares what he/she can do with the computer (other than overclock it, give it shiny lights, or add four of those latest extreme ultra super graphics cards for $500 each).
They know that in vernacular English (rather than pedantic geekspeak), "PC" means "a computer running Windows". (Most non-dumb geeks are at least aware of this fact.)
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
It's semantics. "PC" in this context means IBM PC compatible. You know, I know it, and everyone reading this knows it. Pretending to be naive about it accomplishes nothing.
English is easier said than done.
I'm going to go out on a limb here, and make a wild guess that Linux users aren't the target audience of this marketing campaign.
English is easier said than done.
This doesn't really look like a "hate campaign" to me. The ads give an affectionate look at what people commonly believe are Windows failings while strongly promoting what Macs can do. As played in the commercials, you don't hate the PC, he even has his strengths ("The things this guy can do with a spreadsheet"), but he isn't cool and competent like the Mac is. As to whether they work, advertisers do comparison ads all the time, so someone thinks that they work.
Warning: The intelligence of this post may be larger than it appears.
Give me a reason to buy Apple, not a reason to leave Windows.
From the commercials:
iLife
plug-and-play peripherals
fewer viruses
ease of use
good reviews in the WSJ
Those seem like reasons. They are not really targeting the geek audience with those reasons, which might be why you don't care. But, to someone like my mother, they seem like very good reasons.
Rhapsody in Numbers
The wrongheadedness of that MS campaign is spectacular, isn't it? You can tell what they were thinking; basically the idea was to goad us into paying for upgrades to systems and app suites for which people aren't ponying up their upgrade fees. MS needs businesses, especially, to stay on that treadmill.
Talk about insulting their audience, though. That campaign is almost up there with the RIAA folks and their "our consumers are thieves" mindset. MS even does the RIAA one better -- because the point is that we're dinosaurs who are using Microsoft's old products. They trash us, and they trash their own software!
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
Seriously, put a Mac and a, um, Dell in front of 1000 people and ask them to point to the PC. The only one who'd say, "Well, technically,..." is wearing a pocket protector, has a serious case of nasal drip, and has distinct opinions on whether Kirk or Picard is the better captain.
Geek speak != common speech. Get used to it.
Another one bites the dust
Just seems to be a challenge to the virus writers. I expect it won't be long now.
That's what people said about various things Apple and users did last year, and the year before that. Still waiting....
The thing is, virus writers are mostly not in it for the bravado now. It's a business, trying to scrape as many details or get as many zombie systems as possible. An Apple "gauntlet" means nothing.
The funny thing is, just like most software is on Windows because people are too set in thier ways to learn OS X programming, so to are virus writers pretty comfortable with what they can do on Windows and don't want to really do much extra work. So macs are proteced by an inertia that should keep them pretty safe long after some arbitrarily large threshold of marketshare is reached.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Yes, I do think that's in Apple's advantage. But they should say "windows" rather then "PC", so they don't look like retards.
Apple is marketing to the general public - the people who use "PC" to mean a "computer using Windows" and "Mac" to mean "a Macintosh" or "Apple computer."
They're using informal language because the people they're targeting know exactly what they mean when they say "PC" - their audience knows that the "Windows" is implied.
They don't look like retards - no more than someone who says "Kleenex" when they really just mean "tissue" or "Band-Aid" when they really just mean "a little sticky bandage." "PC" means "a computer using Windows" to the vast majority of the people who use that term. Get used to it.
Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.
There's been many Mac "viruses" over the last 5 years, they just don't spread very fast or very far, probably due to a dispersed userbase.
Unless you can find a situation where a virus could easly jump from one Mac to hundreds of others, it will likely remain that way. As someone's joke goes "You could potentially take out an art school or a small advertising agency".
Note I have "virues" in quotes because like most Windows "virues" they are acutally stupid trojans along the lines of "HAY! RUN THIS!".
Whenever I hear the word 'Innovation', I reach for my pistol.
If Apple wants Windows users to switch, they have to stop sticking to their guns on the "Apple way" of doing things -- Command-C instead of Ctrl-C is a perfect example
How about, instead, Windows stops using a keystroke that has meant "kill this process RIGHT NOW" for over 20 years? You know, Control-C ?
And, yes, it still does make me cringe when I have to use Ctrl-C for "copy," and Ctrl-D for "duplicate," and a few other keystrokes that Unix and VMS defined back in the paleolithic age.
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
I have to agree. It's a pretty fine line, but these ads seem to fall into the "observational humor" category without being too over the top.
I think Apple's last advertisment where they talk about "dull little PCs performing dull little tasks" (by dull little people?) was a lot worse, pretty much only appealing to the Smug Mac User crowd.
Whenever I hear the word 'Innovation', I reach for my pistol.
Well, to be fair, the Mac is a PC.
Thus, it would be logical that all of the PC guy's behaviour in the ad applies to a Mac, too. This actually seems to be the case, though in less significant amounts than in a pure PC.
Need for an occasional reboot? Check.
Malware? Check (Well, attempts do count. And CNET articles.)
iTunes, clock, calculator? Yup.
Networking glitches? Sure.
Rave reviews? Hmm... I'm sure Vista will get some.
I'd say the Mac is a PC. Because he's younger and chooses to wear contact lenses, you can't tell, but in 15 years or so...
J
The use of command keys instead of control keys is superior for a very simple reason: you can do it with your thumbs without moving your fingers from the standard touch-typing positions. If I want to use a control key shortcut, I either have to twist my wrist in order to use a thumb, or move one hand off of its position in order to use a pinky. This slows down the use of keyboard shortcuts (I can save, print, or cut/copy/paste in the middle of typing without losing a beat). Furthermore, on laptops with reduced-size keyboards like the iBook and the small Powerbooks, there's only one control key. That means you really have to remember a different set of fingers to use when using the control key as when you type normally. That's very bad.
.... control characters! You ever wonder why, when people on Slashdot want to make a joke about having to delete some text they mistyped, they use "^H"? That's the printed representation of control-h, the keybinding for the ascii delete character. You couldn't do this at all if control were used for keyboard shortcuts, breaking virtually every interactive Unix program ever written. I suppose you could come up with a different set of keyboard shortcuts for applications that need to use control characters, but that would mean that different apps have wildly inconsistent keyboard shortcuts. So you might as well have every program use what the applications that need control characters use, so that every application can be consistent. For this purpose, I nominate the command key. Once you get used to it, you'll wonder how you managed to get anything done using control keys for that stuff.
Lastly, and certainly not least, control is used by every version of the Mac OS I've ever used, as well as Unix, to send
As for the Chevy/Mercedes comparison, it's a wholly false analogy. Nobody drives a Mercedes with reversed pedals or a joystick. A better one would probably be automatic vs. manual transmission, but even that fails to take into account the subtleties of the issue.
Logically, I'd also think that showing people how good your product is (rather than how bad the other product is) has a much more positive effect.
What if your strength is that you don't do something horrible? What if your strength is that you do something better than a competitor, and you'd like to show how much better you are? What if failures are rare for both products, but you want to show yourself as better? Isn't it fair in that case to contrast your success against your competitor's failure?
If you're selling fluorescent lights, and you want to contrast the short life and high power consumption of incandescent lighting against your product, is that bad?
If your cell phone service doesn't drop calls and lets you communicate clearly, isn't it better to show your competitors failing at this rather than trying to show an entire month of not failing?
If your product cleans stains effectively, isn't it fair to compare it against "the leading brand" to show how much better it is?
I see no difference between the above commercials and what Apple is doing. However, I think it's a little like calling the Titanic "Unsinkable" before its maiden voyage to brag about how virus-free Macs are. That kind of hubris is definitely going to bite Apple when the platform reaches that critical mass of interest + talent especially now that much more common x86 assembler experience can be leveraged by malware writers against the Mac now.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Well, in addition to the numbers game, FedEx actually does reliably ship overnight, while the USPS Express mail occasionally takes longer.
Likewise, Macs do have fewer virus problems, better default-config security, superior media authoring software (for free and pre-installed, no less!) and tend to be considerably more reliable and more robust.
Now, Windows has gradually gotten better, as has the USPS, but neither has closed the gap, nor have their earned back their reputations just yet.
So really, it's FedEx and Apple: 1, USPS and Windows: -1.
And just like that, a "hate" campaign makes a lot of sense.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
You're an idiot. Clearly these ads show the Mac and PC as two guys who have differences, yet get along. There's a playful tone to the ads. It's not a "hate campaign." Did you just make that up?
What did you really want Apple to say? "Macs are great, but if you don't want one, it's totally cool with us if you buy a Windows PC too, because Internet Explorer runs great on them!"
Apple can talk until they're red in the face about how great their own product is, but there are clearly still a lot of misconceptions about them. The only way to really drive home the fact that they do some things better and lack the problems that abound on PCs is to put the two side-by-side. You're right that people don't react well to negative ad campaigns (there's no such thing as a hate campaign), and that's precisely why Apple has struck an extremely delicate balance in these ads.
The Mac guy doesn't come out and call the PC guy a piece of shit idiot who can't install Firefox and Ad-Aware to save his life. It's a friendly dialogue with upbeat music, far from the deep voices and forboding music of negative political ads.
Slashdot: 24 hours behind every other site or your money back!
Is someone going to bring up this flawed theory EVERY time there's an Apple article on /.? Are you telling me there hasn't been a single virus writer who wanted to be the one behind the first real-world OS X virus? Or to write one just to shut up all those smug Mac users?
Obvious exits are NORTH, SOUTH, and DENNIS.
Insightful?!
There's been many Mac "viruses" over the last 5 years, they just don't spread very fast or very far, probably due to a dispersed userbase.
There have? Name one.
Unless you can find a situation where a virus could easly jump from one Mac to hundreds of others, it will likely remain that way.
Imagine if someone hooked a Mac up to a network accessible by hundreds of others Macs!
Note I have "virues" in quotes because like most Windows "virues" they are acutally stupid trojans along the lines of "HAY! RUN THIS!".
So you have "virues" (sic) in quotes because you mean Trojans. There haven't even been many Mac trojans in the last five years (maybe three).