Apple UK debuts new ‘Get a Mac’ ad: Office Posse (Macs run Microsoft Office, too)

Apple UK has debuted a new ‘Get a Mac’ ad called, “Office Posse” which stresses to the average Joe and Jane that Macs, do indeed run Microsoft Office. Oh, joy.

Too bad they didn’t shock the blank out of the great unwashed with the fact that Microsoft Office was first on Apple’s Mac, not Windows.

And, for Jobs’ sake, if you want your audience to remain awake during your presentation, use Apple’s Keynote rather than PowerPoint!

The newest “Get a Mac” ad, “Office Possse,” from Apple UK:

Higher quality versions here: http://www.apple.com/uk/getamac/ads/

Related articles:
Apple UK posts new ‘Get a Mac’ ads – March 12, 2007
Apple UK posts six new ‘Get a Mac’ TV ads featuring Mitchell and Webb – January 29, 2007
Apple UK’s ‘Get a Mac’ campaign features Peep Show’s David Mitchell and Robert Webb – January 27, 2007
Apple’s Keynote frees presentations from ‘Death By PowerPoint’ fate – November 15, 2006

35 Comments

  1. It’s the accent. Ya just gotta laugh at a punch line when it’s delivered in the queen’s english.

    “England and America are two countries separated by a common language” – GBS

    MDN word is Numbers, as in I hope the new version of iWork has Numbers in it.

  2. “England and America are two countries separated by a common language and a fscking great ocean thank Christ” – The Pub Landlord

    Three cheers for the beer, all hail to the ale
    Pint for the fella and glass of white wine or a fruit based drink for the ladies
    Those are the rules!!!
    If we didn’t have rules then where would we be? Thats right FRANCE!!!
    If we had too many rules then where would we be? Germany!!!

  3. Apple definitely needs to make an American version of this one!

    As for English, nothing worse than a bunch of Yanks, Canucks, Brits, and Aussies all together at a meeting an a country where English is the second language. The so-called native speakers can barely understand each otehr – let alone the poor locals!

  4. I heard a British historian suggesting that the English that Americans speak is closer to the 17th & 18th century English spoken in Great Britain at the time. He was saying that it is the English who have modified the accent over the last few hundred years, and that America is the repository of the accent of earlier Englishmen.

    I’m not saying that I subscribe to this theory, but it did come from a Brit with (as I recall) pretty good credentials.

  5. Yeah that ad has problems b/c Office 2007 files are not compatible with Mac Office.

    That ad is 9 months too late.

    Just my $0.02

    P.S. I agree with Cubert on the funniness of the Britt Apple ads.

  6. Spark:

    He’s right, more or less. Colonial peripheries have all been noticeably more conservative with linguistic change than have colonial centers, over the past several hundred years. (And very large cities, like London, are the places that have innovated most; a modern Cockney accent would probably sound bizarre to almost anyone who heard it in the eighteenth century or earlier, if there were time-traveling Cockneys, just as a modern New York City accent would nonplus revolutionary-era New Yorkers.)

    Anyway, it can be pretty well documented that many of the features of modern ‘received pronunciation’ in Britain postdate the mid-eighteenth century: widespread use of broad a’s (“pahst” instead of “past”), invariable r-dropping (“fah” instead of “far”), and the like. Some Irish accents are closer to the way many people English-speakers of Shakespeare’s day would have sounded than are American accents. (They got colonized first, after all.) And metropolitan French-speakers describe Quebec French as sounding antique, woodsy, provincial, and old-fashioned, which compared to the current Parisian accent it evidently is.

    Interestingly, this is true, in a funny way, even for spelling. Many early eighteenth-century British texts spell “honor” without a u, and a fair number spell words like “center” with an -er instead of an -re. Noah Webster picked up on this when carrying out his spelling reforms, and claimed that his use of such spellings was actually a return to older, better methods of English spelling and not an innovation.

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