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New "Get a Mac" TV ads
Klaidas writes "Apple has introduced 3 new "Get a Mac" TV ads: "Accident", "Angle/Devil" and "Trust Mac" " Normally, posting ads would be make me cry, but these are genuinely funny and well done.
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It makes the PC look productive and serious, instead of the slacker Mac OS X.
Yeah, and I'm sure that Apple's trying to market these commercials towards those that need office applications at home as opposed to the Mom-and-Pop types who just want a computer to surf the internet, and check/send e-mail from/to their kids.
I wish my lawn was emo, so it would cut itself.
For instance, Windows runs fine out of the box, there's virtually no advanced configuration after you've installed it.
You're not being literal enough. They're talking about hardware, not software. With your typical Dell PC, after you get it out of the box, you've got to set up the tower and the monitor, then connect them, then also plug in your mouse, keyboard, and speakers. The monitor, tower, and speakers will also all require their own power. On the other hand, all of the hardware in an iMac is contained in a single unit. You plug the power into the unit, then plug in your keyboard and mouse. The keyboard and mouse will also plug into any USB port -- if you have a PC with a PS/2 keyboard and mouse, you have to be careful not to plug them in wrong, and then you also have to figure out which one of those little jacks your speakers should plug in to.
Yes, I'm sure that's not a big deal to you, but you have to realize that all of that is pretty daunting to anybody who's never owned a computer before (or never set up their own, at least).
Karma: Terrifying (mostly affected by atrocities you've committed)
Apple's advertisements serve a number of roles: reassuring their customers of the superiority of their platform choice (thus encouraging continued purchases), obtaining as much recognition for their brand as possible, and appealing to the vanity of potential new customers. I think they're fairly pretentious, but their success will be measured by how much brand-awareness and revenue they generate. They will turn some people off and appeal to others, but there's little doubt that they will succeed in increasing brand awareness. It's not unlike the Switch campaign.
why Apple, won't you let me run your OS on other Intel hardware?
My own answer to this would be that it's because they're a gnat's pube away from becoming a software company, and they're holding on to their bespoke hardware business for dear life.
Nope, let me clear it up for you:
Apple is not a software vendor, Apple is also not a hardware vendor. Apple is an experience vendor.
To get you the "Macintosh Experience" for which you're paying the big bucks they need tight control and integration between the hardware and the software. The reason why MacOS X is able to give a better useability experience is because Apple knows exactly what hardware it'll be running on unlike Microsoft does with Windows.
With a PC there are thousands upon thousands of motherboards, CPUs, hard drives, video cards, sound cards, network cards, etc, etc, etc. The combinations are endless and people expect Windows to not only work, but work well, on every single combination.
I would be surprised if the number of macintosh computers that are currently supported in Tiger reached beyond double digits but even if it did it is still a lot smaller than infinity. Because Apple knows exactly what hardware the OS will be running on they can take full advantage of it whereas on the PC side of things you still have for example: 64bit CPUs running 32bit OS's and the latest version of Windows not even supporting SATA, a 3+ year old technology, out of the box.
Think consoles: PS2, XBox, GameCube, etc. They are severly underpowered if you compare them to a PC, yet they can push out graphics rivaling them, why? Because the developers know exactly what hardware they are coding for and can take full advantage of it.
That is why Apple prevents OS X from running on just any beige box. It wasn't designed to, so if they allowed it people would try it, it would crash, not work right and people would say that MacOS X sucked.
A Mac is more than its software. You can install OS X on your homebrew PC 'til the fat man croaks, but where's your command key, your startup chime, your flashing disk on startup, your magnetic power connector, your backlit keyboard, your FireWire target disk mode? Oops, they didn't survive the installation. Trivial, maybe, but these are the sorts of details that fucking make the Mac what it is.
A Mac is more than hardware, either, as you pointed out. Its soul may be somewhere in the code, but that code is spread between both hardware and software. It's an integrated platform, and to force it into components like it were a beige-box PC sort of misses the point, I think.
Finally, if you find the Mac guy "bloody annoying," you need to relax. It's just a commercial, and obviously not targeted at the likes of you.
And now, a PSA from David Lynch.
The stuff the OEM vendor bundles on the desktop is really not a problem with Windows, it's a problem with OEMs who don't actually have the best interests of their consumers in mind. I'm not a big fan of Windows, but I'm also not a big fan of OSX. Between the two, Windows is able to be more productive, consistent (home & end keys - nuf sed), meaningful (how often do I really need to scroll to the top of my terminal window's history vs going to the front of my current line, why would Home & End be bound this way by default?) and waste less of my CPU on stupid and meaningless crap like Dashboard, software rendered drop shadows & transparencies, etc. Believe it or not, I value responsiveness, consistency, and day-to-day usability over polish. But then I'm not an average computer user, I'm a techie.
This is why I use XGL on Ubuntu on my iMac: responsive, pretty, hardware accelerated eye candy, and my CPU is totally quiet when I'm not specifically telling it to process something. I got used to seeing it idle at 10-15% CPU under OSX, and under Linux, it idles at 0-2%.
Slay a dragon... over lunch!
Yeah cause, you know, the Mac user is their target audience and all ...
Not that almost any PCs come with PS2 keyboard/mouse any more, but since most vendors color code all their cables, its really just a matter of either not being color/tone blind (and also being able to match colors), or at least being able to tell the difference between the icon that looks like a keyboard, and the icon that looks like a mouse. Even if in spite of all of this, you manage to get them mixed up, most computers will still work fine. The rest of the cables only fit into one socket, so the only way to misconnect them is either to forget to, or requires a hammer.
Honestly I am not sure why all the keyboards and mice are USB now, the plug is no smaller, and you also give up at least one USB port to something that every non-server computer has. My Mac Mini at home only has 2 USB ports, and because I didn't want to drop $120 on a keyboard & mouse for a $450 computer, I have no free USB ports by default. Instead, I have an extra device sitting with my mini (USB hub) complete with associated wires.
And can we get a Mac with a USB port on the front of the box? I know that it's supposed to look like a simple design, but when I have to drag the expensive and fragile screen of the iMac I have at work around to get at the back of it so I can plug in the cable/thumb drive, so I can turn the screen around again so I can see it, so I can copy a file off of it, then turn it around and unplug it again, before turning it straight again so I can go back to work, it suddenly stops seeming like such a simple design. Whatever happened to form following function? Macs are all about being pretty, and somehow most people accept this as actually meaning "more user friendly."
Slay a dragon... over lunch!
These ads never say anything about "Windows." They talk about PC-vs-Mac. What they are talking about is not Windows per se, but the experience of running a non-Mac PC for most users. Most users don't understand the difference between Windows, PC hardware, add-ons from OEMs, and Microsoft Office. In their minds, it's all the same thing.
These ads play on that fact. Whether that's fair or unfair is another question entirely.
So what's not accurate about the new ads? Is the magnetically connected power cable a big hoax? Are spyware and viruses not a significant problem on a Windows computer? Does Windows offer a anything comparable to the iLife suite of programs with each install? Is getting the average Dell (including not just assembling the hardware but deleting the 200 trialware programs installed) up and running out of the box indeed easier than the iMac?
I'll grant you the freezing, then rebooting Windows days are behind them but really, what is Apple lying about in these ads?
Great - in a Windows vs OS X comparison, you resort to the argument that you don't use Windows or OS X because you prefer Linux; you don't think it's a problem that the out-of-box experience for Windows is poor because it's the OEM's fault (how else is a typical consumer supposed to buy one?!); you've got a smug attitude about how your set of values is more important than other users'.
Can't argue with you - you're definitely a classic early-stage techie. When I hear a end users complaining about the fact that when they leave their computer alone, it runs up a few CPU cycles, I'll start giving that kind of logic some weight.
So, interestingly, I talked to three different people - independent of each other - about these ads yesterday. All three were women with low to mid-level experience with computers. I tried to explain why people on the internet were angered by these ads being mean-spirited (although I sort of like them...). All three women argued that is was stupid people didn't like them, and that what they were depicting was true. Two of the three women have virtually no experience with Macs, and yet they still believed what the commercials were telling them.
What I am saying is that it has become clear to me that the ads are not back firing, and in fact, are reaching the target audience. All three of these women expressed a desire to buy a Mac for their next computer, when their current one finally breaks. This actually was surprising to me, because I assumed the ads probably were back firing because of what I had read on Slashdot.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
What I am saying is that it has become clear to me that the ads are not back firing, and in fact, are reaching the target audience. All three of these women expressed a desire to buy a Mac for their next computer, when their current one finally breaks. This actually was surprising to me, because I assumed the ads probably were back firing because of what I had read on Slashdot.
This was pretty obvious to me because the ads are actually not mean spirited at all, unless the viewer is reading all kinds of things into the ads that simply are not there.
Think of the experience these women probably have, PC's at home that they have to get viruses and spyware cleaned off of, mysterious things that the computer tells them they do not really understand when they just want to hook up a printer. What about these ads would be untruthful to them? To someone who knows how to keep a PC clean by using firefox and firewals and so on and so forth the Apple ads appear untrue because that user has no spyware. But again, these women and most other consumers do see the spyware, and virues, and things that these ads talk about - so why would they have reason to doubt the pro Mac arguments the ads offer when the statements made about the PC are 100% true to them?
It's also pretty obvious the ads are working because Apple keeps making them and also paying a fair amount for good timeslots (like the emmys for the msot recent ones). An ad campain that was going south would have been pulled by now if it was not seeing some results.
Slashdot is a really bad filter to try and descern how Apple products are perceived, just look at the iPod when it came out. You can almost delcare Slashdot a comically bad judge of Apple products to the extent the direction of groupthink here is probably always the opposite of what the general market thinks.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
"What is a great way to promote the new Apple product to geeks? I know, we will have a story posted on Slashdot featuring the new ads, the geeks love Slashdot! And it will have real 'street-cred' as it will be coming from Slashdot so they will think it is from other geeks. Perfect."
It isn't a question if Apple is doing paid advertizing on Slashdot - They most certainly are. The question is:
1. Will Slashdotters fall for it?
2. Is someone at Slashdot really getting paid? Or are they getting a free ipod or something totally lame like that. If Commander Taco isn't getting at least $30,000 for this "article", then I lose all respect! It is one thing to sell out, it is another thing to sell out like a total buster!
"Well, I can do all of those things as well, and also fun stuff like playing all of the latest games."
"Yeh, Microsoft makes great game machines. My owner's got an XBox, but he seems to like his Playstation better."
If your main reason for buying a computer is playing games, the gap between computer and console is narrower every year. Why not save the money and just get one?
I think you can go further: Slashdot is a horribly bad predictor of the success of technology meant for the average computer user, because no one who posts here is an average computer user, me included. When I think of average computer users I think of my brother, who asked me if I would help him fix his Powerbook. He had dropped the thing from a good height more than once and had so bent the case that he couldn't plug in the power cord. His idea of 'fixing' the thing was to take to computer completely apart, take a hammer and bang the case back into shape. I tried to explain to him that taking apart a laptop is not a small thing and that banging the case back into shape was no easy thing. I told him to take the thing to Tekserve and have them do it, because I wasn't going to take on the responsibility of possibly ruining someone else's computer.
The difference, I think, is that the average computer user thinks of the machine as a monolithic thing: it's a magic electronic box. When something goes wrong with the machine, it's universal. It's not that the USB has fried, or that a software update has choked, but that the whole magic box is now sick. This explains a couple of things. It is why people throw out perfectly good computers after two or three years rather than upgrade; if you think of the computer like a microwave (the principle of which most people don't understand) then there's no way you'd ever think of upgrading one. It explains why Slashdot was dead wrong on the success of the iPod; Apple created the mp3 player as magic electronic box, something your average user could relate to. Attach to computer, manage in iTunes, music appears on iPod. It's monolithic and, for someone who thinks of technology that way, simple.
And it explains the success of Apple's ads, and the displeasure they cause here. Apple is selling the computer as magic monolithic box and saying, essentially, our magic box is easier to use than someone else's. Most on Slashdot know that computers aren't magic boxes. Many here take great pride in how deep that knowledge runs, and take great joy in delving deep into the guts of their machines and OSes. But your average computer user doesn't want to, and doesn't care. That is the target audience for these ads, and for devices like the iPod. Beyond that, your average computer user wants a magic electronic box, something which functions more as an information appliance than anything else.
Most Slashdot readers don't want a magic box. But Slashdot users are the minority.
I am a believer of momentum and curves.
It's a sure sine that you are reading Slashdot when the offtopic tangent is geometry puns.
Mac cannot run most of the programs which most people are used to using
There are a lot of people who use their web browser for everything.
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