Checking out Microsoft’s website home page of “Microsoft Security” (an oxymoron if there ever was one), MacDailyNews reader “MadMac” noticed that the image Microsoft is using next to the caption “Click. You’re clean.” is an Apple Mac!
Hey, with an Apple Mac, you don’t even have to click, you’re clean regardless!
We checked it out and “MadMac” is right! We found the image over on Fotosearch Stock Photography (#1734045) and zoomed in via Fotosearch’s handy online Image Zoom tool and identified the model as an Apple 15-inch PowerBook G4 based upon speaker grill width, port placement, and screen hinge reveal. Microsoft seems to have pasted a fullscreen shot of their “security” site onto the PowerBook’s screen.
MacDailyNews Take: Hey, Microsoft, if you’re going to pretend to be serious about security, shouldn’t you use a picture of a Dell or HP or something instead of reminding people about the truly secure Apple Macintosh?
[UPDATE: 11:58pm EDT: Microsoft has now changed the artwork on the page. It is now a mother and child checking their laptop, a laptop that looks like an Apple 12-inch PowerBook with the white Apple removed. – Thanks, Qka.]
Related articles:
Microsoft Windows five times more expensive for users than Apple’s Mac OS X – August 15, 2006
Chicago Tribune falls for the ‘Security Via Obscurity’ myth – August 14, 2006
Oxymoron: Microsoft security – August 12, 2006
With exploits in wild, Microsoft Windows braces for yet another critical worm attack – August 11, 2006
US Department of Homeland Security: patch Microsoft Windows now or risk complete system compromise – August 10, 2006
Get a Mac: Viruses, spyware cost U.S. consumers $7.8 billion over last two years – August 08, 2006
Microsoft’s oft-delayed, much-pared-down Windows Vista hacked at Black Hat – August 07, 2006
Ballmer analyzes Microsoft’s One Big Mistake, Vista… er, ‘One Big’ Vista Mistake – August 02, 2006
Symantec details more security holes in Microsoft’s Windows Vista – July 26, 2006
Symantec researcher: At this time, there are no file-infecting viruses that can infect Mac OS X – July 13, 2006
Sophos: Apple Mac OS X’s security record unscathed; Windows Vista malware just a matter of time – July 07, 2006
Sophos Security: Dump Windows, Get a Mac – July 05, 2006
What Microsoft has chopped from Windows Vista, and when – June 27, 2006
Apple: ‘Get a Mac. Say ‘Buh-Bye’ to viruses’ – June 01, 2006
Microsoft: recovery from Windows malware becoming impossible; better to to wipe and rebuild – April 04, 2006
Windows virus threatens 170-year-old Toledo newspaper’s perfect record, Apple Macs save the day – January 27, 2006
Security company Sophos: Apple Mac the best route for security for the masses – December 06, 2005
Hackers already targeting viruses for Microsoft’s Windows Vista – August 04, 2005
16-percent of computer users are unaffected by viruses, malware because they use Apple Macs – June 15, 2005
Who is getting fired for this one? Probably just some ad exec.
This is actually a wicked subliminal frame so that the viewer associates virus with those cute little laptops made by Apple ( at the subconcious level).
I it no mistake, It is Microsoft psycholagical warefare kids.
Does anyone think it’s ironic that Windoze users have to “do something” to make sure their operating system is clean?
Are Windows users so frigging dumb as not to insist on a product that works reliably all the time without user intervention?
I think I answered my own question.
You fscknuts give Apple users a bad name! WE ARE NOT TOTALLY SECURE YOU MUPPETS! Yes it’s funny, but it’s not a world defining moment!
I don’t know..Older guy…”swinging” on a hammock.
Maybe they are trying to associate STD’s with Apple laptops?
I agree with DBS using an Apple laptop is subtle attack but effective.
Older people live in fear of virus in general computer and otherwise
It is a very clever campaign
Absolutely perfect. Use a Mac, you’re clean.
Well, you can’t blame ’em for trying to look hip…
This has happened before. Anyone have a link?
Macs have no viruses, no spyware, no adware, unless you run Windows on them using Boot Camp. Then you should probably go to the site and install the security tool. LOL
Alex, take a deep breath, man, and relax a bit!
A brief lesson in philosophy:
It is a given fact that one can say he is ALIVE until he is DEAD. The fact that he will eventually BE dead does not–and should not–diminish the fact that he is alive at the present moment.
Yes, OS X probably will suffer the fate that Windoze users operate under each and every day of their lives with an occasional virus or two, but that DOES NOT AND SHOULD NOT diminish the fact that right here and right now . . .
WE’RE 100% CLEAN, YOU BOZO!
UNTIL WE’RE NOT, WE ARE! Jeez.
This is deceptive advertising at its most subtle. No PC vendor in the world makes a machine as beautfiul as a MacBook or MacBook Pro. Microsoft dreams that its box vendors had folks design machines like this for their unstable and unsecure OS…..
.
Alex
layoff the weed dude
This is stock imagery, folks. Corbis or Getty. They almost always use Apple laptops because they have the cleanest look. Rarely will stock photography from major image banks feature a PC laptop.
MS, like other huge companies, hires marketing/PR/advertising agencies to build their customer-facing campaigns. The client (MS, in this case) spends as little money as possible on print and web advertising, and they refuse to commission photography. Stock imagery is the alternative. As long as the image meets certain criteria for the look/feel of the campaign (clean, neutral in style, culterally diverse), it’s a go.
Intel, Bank of America, and many others use very similar imagery — nearly all feature Apple laptops because of their nondescript look.
How would you really know that your system is actually clean? After all, the company who can’t deal with all the worms, viruses, and mal-ware in the operating system they sell you, is the same one developing the software to supposedly detect and remove said pests. Hmmm
As a photographer, comments above that indicate the look of apple is much better than any other laptop, one of the reasons is the aluminum/titanium look and feel of the pro laptops, they just show better in the image, and are easier to light.
One ironic twist, I had a shoot once where the client INSISTED on the black (crap to light) dell laptop she had be in the photo.
In order to make it pop a little better, I PhotoShopped a screen shot of Mac OSX onto it…..hehehehe.
However, I ALWAYS us my 12 inch powerbook if I need a laptop in a photo, it is small, is easy to light properly, and does not take away anything else in the image.
Whoever put the banner up at M$ either had no clue it was an Apple laptop, OR they did and was making a joke on M$….most creatives have done that to some degree…..since they generally assume their big corporate clients are a bunch of suit wearing monkees powering lightbulbs with their mouths….
This reminds me of the Dell catalogs that show a 12″ Powerbook with a caption about going wireless. I wrote it up awhile ago at http://www.josephbayly.com. I never bothered scanning one of the pictures, but I guess I should soon. I think it is definitely worse for a hardware company to picture their competition’s products in a catalog! I keep expecting the pictures to just quietly go away, but it keeps showing up!
90% of the pc laptops are so heavy, the hammock would’ve crashed to the ground!
Honeslty, I don’t think anyone in the general public is going to notice or care that the guy’s using a Mac.
I don’t think it’s subliminal pro or con for Apple. It’s a stock shot…that’s it. No one’s going to get fired for the “gaffe”
It is funny though now that it’s been brought to my attention.
Hey! That’s the best ‘Get a Mac’ ad I’ve ever seen.
No need of “Hi, I’m a PC”
Thanks uncle Bill!!
Ever notice how Dell pouts Mac-like desktop backgrounds on it’s PC’s in ads? The envy goes beyond Redmond Washington folks.
Most non Mac users won’t notice it’s a Mac. They won’t even look that closely at the ad.
Plus, anyone that thinks they’ll be clean after clicking on a Microsoft site is severly retarded…
must be using bootcamp..
LOL!
Newsflash: windows now runs on Macs too.
Cpt. Obvious – Newsflash: windows now runs on Macs too.
Sad isn’t it? Adobe now refers to macs as PCs in some of their literature.
Justified —
Close, but no cigar. Most marketing and ad agencies, as well as photographers and directors use Macs. We’re the creative folks that everyone likes to claim the Macs are made for. So, on a photo shoot, or when doing a commercial, we’ll often opt to use our Macs instead of getting a prop windoze PC. The reason for this is the one you gave — yes, they look better, but by and large, macs are the only computer on-set, so they’re usually the ones that get used.
-AG-
Cpt. Obvious – Newsflash: windows now runs on Macs too.
He must be using Virtual PC because neither Boot Camp or Parallels Desktop for Mac will run on a PowerBook G4.
Also, I have one question for all of the geniuses screaming, “it’s stock photography!”
Did you miss the part where MDN wrote, “We found the image over on Fotosearch Stock Photography (#1734045)” or what?
Ad Guy,
Too bad you’re not playing horse shoes.
I work for the largest Ad/Marketing/PR/Promotions/Events conglom in the US. We buy more Corbis and Getty images than any other outfit in the world. We also commission a large portion of shoots for stock image houses, contract photographers for the shoots; set, style and direct. Apple laptops are used specifically for their clean, nondescript look. They don’t get in the way of the messaging.
BofA doesn’t feature an Apple laptop in their visual communications to appeal to “the creative folks that everyone likes to claim the Macs are made for.”
Microsoft sure has it made selling antivirus software for Windows… kinda like when Cheney pushed with all of his power for the “war” in Iraq and then made millions from the no-bid Haliburton contracts. They screw you over with their expensive idiotic plan, then screw you over again with their expensive idiotic “solution”.
They should be fired for a crappy PhotoShop distortion scaling of the screenshot onto the screen.
EEEEEK.
Only in the Mac world would someone go through the effort of ID’ing a laptop model based on “speaker grill width, port placement, and screen hinge.” Since it’s a stock photo, I doubt the Microsoft graphics artist even knew or cared that it was a Mac laptop in the original photo.
But if was intentional, it makes sense to put a Mac in the picture. What better way to NOT single out a specific PC brand as being “virus infested” than to make it an Apple laptop, since its users would have no reason to visit the website.
“I doubt the Microsoft graphics artist even knew or cared that it was a Mac laptop in the original photo.”
More to the point, the art director working for the agency hired by MS didn’t care that it was a Mac laptop — especially considering that Apples are now considered suitable for running Windows.
Honestly, if you hadn’t pointed it out, i would never had noticed, and even then, it could pass for an Averatec.
I don’t think there’s any correlation to security. It’s stock photo, so many designers just pick what ever looks nice. And then many designers are Mac heads anyways, so they want a way to imbue their love for the Mac. The amount of times I’ve seen a PC billboard advert with a DELL running OSX. Tsk
The mac maybe clean, but lets think about how much people actually care about the mac to make it unclean, unsafe and unsecure?
GG.
Oh and Secure doesn’t constitute full of features, multi-purpose, wide-spread, and more commonly used. Hence why there is so much crap to stop safe and secure use of windows based systems.
Don’t get me wrong one can only know such things from an unbiased judgement of both parties. As I use both systems daily. For several different reasons. But we can’t deny how much more wide-spread and standardized Windows based systems are than Mac.
So don’t hubble into your “We are Safe” shell. You’ll lose.
I’m sure that Microsoft did not intend that the PowerBook be pictured in the ad nor was even aware that the notorious notebook was an Apple product. However embarassing this ad may be for Microsoft it is quite likley that the gent in the hammock will be sporting a brand new PC very soon.
Seriously – it’s just stock photography that was used. This page was probably done by a creative in a 3rd party agency that looks after the content for that aspect of the MS site.
To all the anti-MS people out there – get over it already. Windows works on Mac’s now anyways now that Apple have embraced Intel, a very smart move on there part’s as it allows them to capture the PC market as well.
In 2006, Microsoft Windows runs on the PowerBook. Fact. Now get with the freaking program and stop grief ing like it’s 1999. Nothing to see here. Disperse. Another good example of the intellectual manure that gets dug.
The current mother/child image is also available from FotoSearch: http://www.fotosearch.com/SBY191/124146rke/
Ahahah! This is funny. Macs also have many vulnerabilities, they’re just not acknowledged, unlike in the PC world.
“(1 August 2006)
The University of New South Wales’s (UNSW) School of Media, Film and theatre last week took a server offline after discovering it was hosting a possibly malicious file. Spam email provided a link to the server, claiming the file was a Microsoft security patch. The “from” address of the spam was spoofed to appear to come from a Microsoft support address.
The system administrator said the situation was odd because the server in question was a Mac system.”
I work with many different OS’s, and they all can be broken. Why would you create a worm/virus that only affected 6% of installed systems. Let Mac get a larger install base and watch what’s going to happen.
As for the Photo, as said before, it’s canned pics for marketing use. Besides, did you actually see the Apple logo on it?
My 2 cents.
Google’s cache (“…retrieved on 14 Aug 2006 23:22:28 GMT…”):
http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:www.microsoft.com/security/
has it.
Who are all these people claiming Macs are so secure? I wonder if they know that at a PWN 2 OWN convention someone gained control of a MAC running OSX through SAFARI in less than 5 minutes, while the people working on Windows and Linux machines watched in awe. I wonder if they know that Safari has a security flaw right NOW that puts both Windows and Mac OS computers at risk of hostile takeover, and Apple is scrambling to get a patch out… NO computers are completely safe.
I don’t know what this guy is smoking, but Macs are in no way more capable than windows in thwarting viruses. In fact, it’s a thousand times easier to hack into a mac, because simply stated.. DOS is too annoyingly encrypted and hard to remember. So, Mr. pompous MacDaily News whatever, if you think that your precious Macs are safe from harms way, just wait until the hacker community gets wiff that Macs are the norm now. And expect lots of viruses that intrude the childishly easy OS.