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New Apple Campaign Target PC Flaws
Posted by
Hemos
on Tue May 02, 2006 10:20 AM
from the so-many-submissions dept.
from the so-many-submissions dept.
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 "
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This comment target lack of proof-reading. (Score:5, Funny)
"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?
*sigh* (Score:5, Funny)
Ever notice how Macheads never comb their hair? It must be like buying a Volkswagen.
Great (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Doesn't work (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Doesn't work (Score:5, Informative)
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 [slashdot.org] and by the Onion [avclub.com].
Parent
Re:Doesn't work (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
What if your strength is NOT doing something? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Parent
Absolutely -- MS trashes their own products, too (Score:5, Insightful)
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!
Parent
Re:Doesn't work (Score:5, Funny)
I'm sure you can play
Well, that's life with Linux.
-jcr
Parent
Re:Dumb. PC==Mac. Mac==PC (Score:5, Insightful)
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).
Parent
Re:Dumb. PC==Mac. Mac==PC (Score:5, Insightful)
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.)
Parent
Re:Dumb. PC==Mac. Mac==PC (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Parent
Re:Dumb. PC==Mac. Mac==PC (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Parent
Re:Dumb. PC==Mac. Mac==PC (Score:5, Funny)
The two cases where a mac user uses the term PC are:
1) Disparagingly, as in a comparison to Macs
2) Defensively, when claiming that Macs are PCs, since PC stands for Personal Computer.
It's in Chapter 1 of How to Be an Irritating Fanboy, page 17.
Parent
Re:Dumb. PC==Mac. Mac==PC (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Parent
Re:Apple should be honest (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Parent
Re:Apple should be honest (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:Apple should be honest (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Parent
Re:Apple should be honest (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Parent
Re:Apple should be honest (Score:5, Informative)
Why? On a Mac, I can use my thumb to hit the command key (the clover leaf), and use any other finger to hit any other key. It is a very simple reach, and works even on my laptop, where the size of the keyboard limits me to only one command key. Under windows (or Linux, for that matter), the control key requires a pinky finger, and a rather large reach (compared to, say, the shift keys). I much prefer the modifier key right next to the space bar. I am glad that Apple have decided not to change this. And, honestly, it doesn't take that long to get used to a different system, and if you are constantly switching back and forth from one kind of machine to another (I have Windows machines at work, Macs at home), it ceases to cause any confusion after a day or two.
In fact, most of your complaints are fairly trivial, and represent the cost of moving from one OS to another as much as anything else. Why would we need an uninstaller on a Mac? Most, if not all, dependencies are contained in the application bundle. To uninstall a program, move it to the trash. There is no registry to get corrupted, and no
Again, the complaints that you raise seem fairly minor and trivial, and would only really bother people that have been using Windows for a long time. Apple is not really targeting the hardcore Windows market, as far as I can tell. They are trying to target those people who do not have a great deal of computer experience, like the archtypal grandmother, or the computer illiterate English major. These people are not really going to care that the keyboard shortcuts are different (how many of them even know that there are keyboard shortcuts?) or that there is no Start Menu.
Parent
Re:Great, mudslinging from Apple. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Parent
Virus writing is a business (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Parent
Re:The sick with a virus ad... (Score:5, Funny)
Finkployd
Parent
Re:The sick with a virus ad... (Score:5, Insightful)
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!".
Parent
Re:The Linux Guy (Score:5, Funny)
00
01
10
11
So, it should read as such:
There are 1 types of people in this world, those who can count in binary and those who can't.
You just established yourself as one of the ones who can't.
10 = zero in the "ones" plus one the "twos" column. In base-10, you would write that as "2".
1 in binary is the same as it is in base-10 or hex. It's 1. You can't have "one types."
You also made an enormously stupid fencepost error.
You don't assign one item as "0" when counting how many things you have. Even if you do say something like "the apples in this basket are numbered 0, 1, 2, 3, and 4", you still have FIVE apples in your basket.
Also, where do you get 11 from??? 11 is more than 10. He said 10 types of people. Counting them would be done thus:
1.
10.
Done.
Parent