Steven Lynch over at HardOCP (http://www.hardocp.com) reports that a new Apple Computer email advertising campaign hit his inbox today:
Presumably, clicking anywhere in the ad will lead the reader to the Mac hardware offerings at the online Apple Store.
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Well now, that ad is pretty straightforward, huh? Seems like Apple is putting those QuickTime and iTunes download email lists of Windows users that they’ve amassed to good use.
Advertisements:
• Introducing the super-fast, blogging, podcasting, do-everything-out-of-the-box MacBook. Starting at just $1099.
• Get the new iMac with Intel Core Duo for as low as $31 A MONTH with Free shipping!
• Get the MacBook Pro with Intel Core Duo for as low as $47 A MONTH with Free Shipping!
• Apple’s new Mac mini. Intel Core, up to 4 times faster. Starting at just $599. Free shipping.
• iPod. 15,000 songs. 25,000 photos. 150 hours of video. The new iPod. 30GB and 60GB models start at just $299. Free shipping.
• Connect iPod to your television set with the iPod AV Cable. Just $19.
• iPod Radio Remote. Listen to FM radio on your iPod and control everything with a convenient wired remote. Just $49.
Yes! Now just get some zombie PC’s to carpet bomb email everybody on the planet!
D. All of the above!
It’s true though. My Windows PC has done all the above recently…..actually weekly…..
Damn, Apple is FINALLY saying what we Mac evangelists have been trying to say for years! GO APPLE!!!!!
So has my G3 iBook running Jaguar.
Not the most up to date, but for what I want, it is enough… But recently it’s been getting… shall we say… crabby.
MW: higher, as in, If the price of the MB or MBP wasn’t so much higher than the old iBook, I’d have a new one.
If the mailings are based on Windows iTunes users, as suggested by MDN, imagine another mailing:
Wouldn’t it be nice if your whole computer worked as well as iTunes?
apple.com/getamac
(I recall one reviewer saying that iTunes was the finest piece of software ever written for Windows.)
Careful, this kind of tactic always backfires politicians all the time…
===============
In the past 30 days has your iPod:
A. Frozen
B. Scratched
C. Made you want to pummel your screen with a sledgehammer
D. All of the above
===============
In the past 30 days has your MacBook:
A. Turned yellow
B. Gotten too hot to touch
C. Made you want to pummel your screen with a sledgehammer
D. All of the above
===============
What could possibly cause a avalanch of new Mac sales is a affordable, powerful MacTel Pro Tower that supports all the latest PC expansion options.
Plus: Different options to run Windows/Windows apps, Linux/Linux apps.
No big performance needs = virtualization under Mac OS X.
Performance needed = Seperate Windows/Linux bootable partition (with encrypted restore feature partition)
More hardware options and price ranges, expandability options.
People like Mac’s and Mac OS X, but Apple just doesn’t offer a cheap laptop anymore.
Price out the MacBook 2GB RAM with AppleCare and see what I mean.
Would you pay $2000 with tax or $600 with tax for a PC laptop?
Now you see why PC’s are winning.
I like the fact that Apple is actually advertising. But I still have some concerns about the way in which Apple is going about it. Apple needs to avoid the “holier than thou” approach and the “you must have been stupid to buy a PC” and “anyone who uses a PC is dull and boring.”
Emphasize the advantages of the Mac without preaching or ridiculing. Show the freakin’ hardware, preferably in a Mac family approach with a Mac computer, and iPod or two, Airport/Airport Express, an Apple Hi-Fi, etc.
Good use?
I call it spam.
Trust MDN to support advertising… Look at this site. It exists to make advertising bucks. You have no morals.
I’m not sure the holier than thou thing is a problem for as many as we seem to believe. A lot of PC users have gotten reallly battered by their computer usage. I started teaching a new summer term class recently and saw 3 Apples and only one pc. That is a HUGE shift at my university. I believe far more are on the way.
I keep coming back to the same idea– when Apple was overtaken by M$, people didn’t know what computing was about, nor what they wanted. At that time, like most things in life, Americans chose cheap. Now that people know more of what they want and aren’t afraid to pay for it (at least a lot more), Apple is a viable option for them.
In the past 30 days has your Mighty Mouse:
A. Scroll ball stopped working
B. Displayed erratic mousing
C. Made you want to pummel your screen with a sledgehammer
D. All of the above
As a Windows/Linux user and definite future switcher I can say that my XP box does all the above at least every three or four days. Needs rebooting every four days minimum. My linux box runs under heavier load than my XP box and has been up ever since I installed Ubuntu, 56 days ago. The point of this comment is that I thought the Windows Way
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Timing:
It is very interesting that Apple is now pushing Macs consistently and strongly over the past month or so…
The question many are asking is: Is this finally Apple’s big push against Redmond, or is it something else?
Based on Apple’s history, along with timing, I am leaning towards “something else” and here’s why.
Apple’s iPods are quite stale at the moment. There has been further speculation in the past weeks that the next generation iPods are going to be delayed by a fair amount of time.
Apple has always been very very good at slight of hand “Look at what I have here!… but ignor what I have over there.”
The iPods represent nothing new, and if a large delay for new products is occuring due to various factors, it makes all the sense in the world for Apple to pull the Mac and Boot Camp/Parallels out of their hat.
Sell what you’ve got right?
Sadly, this would tend to indicate that once Leopard and the new iPods arrive, Apple will again push all things iPod, while Mac advertising will again take a back seat, leaving many of us wondering “Why doesn’t Apple get more agressive with their Mac ads!?”
“…a[n] affordable, powerful MacTel Pro Tower that supports all the latest PC expansion options.”
I thought we were done with MacTel and other derivatives of Mac + Intel.
I’m not sure what you mean by OO2 but if it is open office then I give you this warning. Open Office for x11 is an awful program. Under the hood it may work fine ut instead of atually building a GUI it looks like they took screen shots of the menus/buttons/dialogue boxes and pasted them into an x11 window. The transfer is so bad that sometimes you can’t read the text in the boxes/menus. I’ve been wanting to try the linux version to see if it is actually a good program underneath all the mac issues but the version I had on my iMac was completely unusable. I uninstalled it the same day I downloaded it.
I agree with King Mel. As a designer in an ad agency, I see a lot of pretencious ads being created. Apple should really be showing pc users what the OS looks like, how easy it is to navigate, etc. All of the ads – including the TV spots – seem to be geared more to Mac users than trying to convert Windows users. The ads mean nothing to me but another notch on my club against MS – that’s not such a great thing because I ALREADY OWN a Mac.
There is a lot of bad design and bad marketing ideas out there, not unlike the silhouette iPod ads of a few years ago.
To Static Mesh:
Where did you find a PC notebook with 2GB RAM for $600? The company I work for just bought several new PC notebooks and even with a corporate discount and a little scrounging, they came out with an average of $600, and thats with only 512MB RAM.
To Jay
Yes, I did mean Open Office. It’s not that pretty on Ubuntu but it is stable. Haven’t had a hang/crash in OO2 since installing Ubuntu 56 days ago. Can’t say the same for MS Word. Excel is stable though can’t recall a crash in 3 years. Buggy though.
In the past 30 days has your Dell notebook:
A. Crash-ish! (don’t remember how many times?)
B. Gotten too hot to touch
C. Explosive, got fire!
D. Windows XP still curses you with sledgehammer.
E. All of the above
BrooklynNYC:
And those silhouette iPod ads were bad? They seemed to do the trick. And I thought they looked great, and like nothing else on TV.
Timing:
It is very interesting that Apple is now pushing Macs consistently and strongly over the past month or so…
The question many are asking is: Is this finally Apple’s big push against Redmond, or is it something else?
Based on Apple’s history, along with timing, I am leaning towards “something else” and here’s why.
Apple’s iPods are quite stale at the moment. There has been further speculation in the past weeks that the next generation iPods are going to be delayed by a fair amount of time.
You can always tell someone that believes everything they read, and has done no research of their own. Even if iPod sales fall to 8.5 million units this quarter (I’m projecting over 9 million units), that represents a Year over Year increase of 39%. There is nothing flat, or stale, about iPod shipments. Wu’s statement yesterday was completely offbase. People are not goign to buy a competing product just because the iPod hasn’t been upgraded in a while.
Apple has commenced pushing computers because they are READY. The hardware is in place, the kinks worked out, and the OS is well beyond mature.
There’s no slight of hand caused by poor iPod sales here. Apple is positioned to dramatically increase computer market share. When you move to do that, YOU ADVERTISE.
I expect to see Apple’s ad campaigns get slowly more aggressive as the Intel switch nears completion and more and more ’embrace and extinguish’ strategy becomes available.
For all of you who have been complaining over the last few years that Apple has been all ipod and ignored the Mac, what you are seeing is the maturity of a strategy. To do an aggressive ad campaign ahead of a huge platform switch would have done more harm to the platform than good in having new switchers go through all of the requirements of that transition.
Now that it’s beginning to come to an end, I expect Apple to really get down to an all out assault on the Windows platform.
Okay, I will bite –
We have 4 Windows PCs here and my answer would be:
(E) – NONE of the above.
For a second I thought they were asking this of Mac OS9 users…..
…until I read last 30 days. I thought it said “last 30 minutes”…