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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 "
"In one of the ads the PC repeat itself several times because it had to reboot."
... PC is sick because of a virus, while Mac is healthy."
"In an other one
Is the submitter actually a robot manufactured by Apple to demonstrate what happens when you make a language engine out of MS Office's grammar checker?
I'm not an expert on commercials
Well the PC guy (John Hodgman) is an expert. He's the daily show's resident expert and the author of "The Areas of my Expertise". Which was reviewd on slashdot and by the Onion.
There are 10 types of people in this world, those who can count in binary and those who can't.
I'll let others flame you about the start menu and shortcut keys (If you want MacOS to behave exactly like Windows, why not just use Windows?) but:
a) Right-clicking should work the same as ctrl-clicking.
b) MacOS doesn't have "windows-style "uninstall" functionality" because uninstalling is trivial.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
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.
Want a "start" menu? Drag your applications folder to the dock (next to the trash). Right-click to operate.
Why not fork?
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
Yup, any day now. What with this commercial egging them on, and CERT's "sky is falling" report that says they expect Mac viruses and spyware to sharply rise. It will happen, just you all see. Maybe not right now, but soon. Well, eventually. You will know when it does. I know we have been saying this for a while but seriously, just give it time. It has nothing to do with system security, or response to vulnerabilities, or anything like that, it is simply a function of how popular something is. OS X will soon become a cesspool of viruses and spyware, it HAS to happen if they get more popular, popularity is the ONLY reason windows has this problem.
Finkployd
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").