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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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I think Slate got it right when it comes to these ads. They're kinda funny, but really mean-spirited. They're "Haha...you suck!!"-ads that don't appeal to me. That, and the fact that they kinda make me happy that I'm running windows (not right now, right now it's Fedora all the way, I double-boot) instead of apple. It makes the PC look productive and serious, instead of the slacker Mac OS X.
They also contain alot of stuff that's plain wrong. For instance, Windows runs fine out of the box, there's virtually no advanced configuration after you've installed it. Set the date and time, account password and keyboard configuration, and bobs your uncle! Same thing with my digital camera, that works fine with windows, contrary to what one of the ads say.
Don't get me wrong, I think Mac OS X is a stellar OS, far superior to windows, I just don't like these ads.
I'm sorry, it's the classic marketing mistake. Apple's competitors make the same one when they market their "not-an-iPods". You don't build market share by capitalizing on the fact that you don't have market share.
In other words, you don't insult your potential market. Macintosh has a lot of image they can sell, sell simply, and sell well, and yet they focus on the PC's problems?
Just because a large portion of Mac users seem to spend every waking hour mocking Windows doesn't mean that obsession is marketable (or is even what sensible Mac Fans do).
Secret of marketing: Nobody identifies with the butt of a marketing campaign, including the "PC" character in these commercial. The bald, plumpish, corrected vision types with their carefully engineered VBA-enhanced spreadsheet applications at work cheerfully latch on to iPhoto slideshows with musical accompaniment that work out of the box and make their wives and kids smile.
Only a few bitter "mom's basement" types actually latch on to loser-types in advertising.
How many Mac users even care at this point what the PC offers?
1) After being 0wn3d. Again.
2) After having to buy a desktop full of shareware to get the functionality Mac provides out of the box. Again.
3) After having their 6 year-old sign up for MSN/AOL because "it was on the desktop."
4) After the latest Microsoft updates started up all those insecure services. Again. For the seventh year running.
5) After being asked for the millionth time by PC users, "what did you use to put together that great slideshow of the cub scout soapbox derby?"
The Mac/PC campaign uses humor to deflate the Microsoft/Dell "juggernaut", and remind that there is an alternative. A humorous nod to their daily frustrations resonates pretty well with consumers, combining that with the implicit promise that Apple does it different seems like a pretty smart campaign to me.
Free Adam Smith! (Or best offer.)
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?)
Since OS X ships with Bash, I simply use Ctr-A and Ctrl-E for that. I have never missed home and end in terminals nor do I use them in Linux, as they are too far removed from the primary area of the keyboard.
For single lines in textareas of browsers, you can simply use Pageup/PageDown to go to the start and end of line respectivly - this is the only time when I ever used to use Home/End they way you are speaking of and really it's smarter to fold this ability into the same keys where it makes sense.
Why you think Windows is in any way more productive when it does not ship with a real shell is a mystery. I'd perhaps give Linux to you execot that Expose as an app switcher is a pretty big productivity boost.
and waste less of my CPU on stupid and meaningless crap like Dashboard, software rendered drop shadows & transparencies, etc.
GPU - all that is hardware accellerated. Kind of removes your whole point there. If your GPU is otherwise sitting idle why not make use of it?
Believe it or not, I value responsiveness, consistency, and day-to-day usability over polish.
So do I. That's why I use a Mac - polish is removed easily as it only covers the ugliness beneath. Good design goes through and through a product, which is what the Mac offers and why I switching away from Linux as my primary home computer.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
When I opened up my dual core mac, I had to download 123 megabytes of updates to the OS. . . I wasn't sure if it was to be "safe" or not, as there were no real details on this issue provided. So I just blindly clicked "ok." And you know what? When it was done, I had to reboot. But it was a very "advanced" reboot. Then when it came back up, it had me strike keys on my keyboard so it could figure out what kind of keyboard I was using. I thought it was the keyboardy kind of keyboard, but I guess it wasn't. Also, I noticed that my monitor and mac came in 2 different boxes. . . but the commercial indicated I could just open the box and make a webpage. Not so much. Then I discovered that if I wanted to do this "easily," I could pay an additional 80 dollars a year to rent the software that makes this easy to do. Yes. . . so advanced it makes me cry.