Just when we were starting to think they’d forgotten about them, Apple has posted three new “Get a Mac” television ads:
• Podium: In which PC exhorts the sufferers, “Don’t give up on Vista!”
Direct link via YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oXcimfzLLoY
• Boxer: Some people just want a computer that’s simple and intuitive, that works they way they do. The ring announcer’s closing quote is an instant classic, “Actually, my brother-in-law just got a Mac and loves it!”
Direct link via YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9PGusvq70V0
• PR Lady: PC hires PR lady to smooth over Vista disappointment and downplay Mac OS X Leopard in effort to ward off switchers.
Direct link via YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xzhvByaCEic
Apple’s “Get a Mac” Webpages are here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Macaday” for the heads up.]
These are great!
I want a PR Babe!!!
MW:love
hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha!
I would LOVE to see Ballmer & Gates’ reaction to these!
Podium is my favourite, but I love all 3 of ’em!
absolutely brilliant! love them all!
“No Comment” LOL
She’s hot for a suit.
Cool ads…now run the hell out of them!
I had some stupid cow tell me the other day that Vista was “more Mac-like.”
How the hell would she know anyway? She’s a PC user!
Vista does look kinda nice…but that’s all there is to it.
No substance.
“I had some stupid cow tell me the other day that Vista was “more Mac-like.””
People have been saying that since the 90’s.
ROFL!
‘Lose a turn’.
Ballmer & Gates can’t comment because their heads just exploded after seeing these.
Great!!
Now just make a commercial that shows off the actual OS!
And all the free high end apps you get with a Mac, esp. a new one.
-r
I saw Vista for the first time, 2 weeks ago – and Wow! is right!!!
The visuals are amazing, honestly, only problem, the experience is perfect for 90’s video gaming, extremely annoying for ‘getting things done’. What were they thinking? The Vista desktop – is like a digital pinball game — you spend the first 15 minutes looking for the little ball and some flippers.
Ahhh, Podium is the best, for sure. You can’t beat “I switched back to XP last week” with a stick
@MacRaven
These are the type of ads that get people’s attention and gets them talking. Commercials that show off the OS itself would be completely ignored by the majority of consumers.
I’m glad Apple isn’t showing off the new Leopard desktop. The really interesting parts of Leopard aren’t the visual aspects. The rest would just sound like “me too” statements to most consumers. These ads stand apart from that.
@Reclaimer: you should have told your PC ladyfriend that it was like you saying that ‘she looked like Kate Moss because she has eyelashes..’
You have to laugh when people say Vista is Mac-like..
Hot PR and Boxer are gems. But as I can’t get Skype to work at the moment I feel a bit of the Vista incompatibility issue myself..
“The Vista desktop – is like a digital pinball game — you spend the first 15 minutes looking for the little ball and some flippers.”
Best review of Vista I ever read – thanks maclover!
Benches! Benches! loverly benches for sale!! BOGOF!!! Buy One Get One Free!!!
Benches! Benches! loverly benches for sale!! includes handy handle to assist in throwing it further than chairs!!!
Benches! Benches! more loverly than wenches!!! especially if you are an M$ executive!!!!
Benches! Fenches! Wenches! get them now while the tempers are hot!!!
Genius Girl is still the hottest…..
Apple does a Three Stooges bit with these. Slap across the face… a mallet whack to the head and a good poke in the eyes.
Showing Leopard (or even Jaguar) features really wouldn’t do much. Like those car ads that rattle through a bunch of specs… who cares, it’s just another look alike silver car… zzzzzzzzzzzz.
These ads get people thinking, with a laugh, which is what good advertising should do. At this point I’d guess that just about every computer user… Mac, Windows, Linux, Ubuntu, whatever… have heard Vista horror stories… as if we forgot all those XP horror stories from BEFORE Vista. So, there’s context that people can relate to. I know several switchers who decided enough was enough and the thought of wrestling with Vista was TOO MUCH! So, they switched to Macs.
Microsoft is GIVING Apple ammunition… MS keeps XP on store shelves, Dell sells XP loaded machines, etc., etc., etc..
Then there’s iPod and iPhone 24/7 everywhere you look.
These are good days to be Mac users!
Man, you guys are pretty sad if a middle-aged woman in a grey business suit talking about PC’s is getting you hot and bothered.
You need to stop refreshing the pages in this forum and get out more.
What’s up with the white Apple logo on the iMac in these clips? Is this a new BTO option I’ve missed?
PR Lady’s “No comment”, while not as good as the “sad realization” of an earlier ad, is priceless. But I don’t understand why some don’t want Apple to show Macs or Leopard in action. Virtually every iPhone ad does exactly that, often quite dramatically.
@Gasser
No, it’s just the lighting they used to disguise all the reflections and glare from the glossy screens has also taken the shine off the chrome logo.
I heard Steve Ballmer had ordered a truck load of new chairs.
Apple BLASTS!! I’m starting to think MDN is really a tabloid newspaper.
“But I don’t understand why some don’t want Apple to show Macs or Leopard in action. Virtually every iPhone ad does exactly that, often quite dramatically.”
———————-
That’s because the iPhone has a multi-touch user interface which is something that has never been seen before on any device. It’s quite easy to show how pinch, squeeze and zoom works on an iPhone in 30 seconds..
In contrast, OSX’s iPhoto, iMovie and iDVD would not appear to be all that different from PC applications until you actually spend some time using them. At first glance iPhoto looks quite similar to Vista’s photo application.
@ Gil
“Genius Girl is still the hottest…..”
Totally. But did anyone else think the PR babe was Jammie Lee Curtis for a second?
This is getting a bit old. Yeah a lot of people are still using Windoze but I think it’s time to move on to ads which let the OS do the talking.
You have just one too many buttons on that blouse.
Hey MZ!!! That Lady in the suit is young and cute . . . see that’s the joy of being 55 . . . an ever larger percentage of females are younger & cuter! 😀
@ Less is More
That’ll work. Right after we start seeing positive political ads.
Say what you want, but Vista is more stable than Leo.
@jonh
Just an FYI. “Leo” is short for “Leonardo,” not “Leopard.”
You want to show Leopard “working”? There are but a few graphic changes, beyond that it mostly looks “the same”. OK, “close enough for gubmint wurk”.
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What I’d like to show Apple is how a couple of things used to work in Safari 2 but no longer work in Safari 3 – but still work in Firefox.
I’d like to know how to get Folding@Home to run in “nice” mode … again.
I’d like … well, actually, most of the rest is just great. But I don’t dare put it on my wife’s Al iMac at least until 10.5.1, maybe 10.5.2, fixes at least a couple of these problems.
Why show Leopard when that will just give the FUD-meisters a standing target to take pot-shots at. Make them work for it! I haven’t heard of anyone switching back to Tiger from Leopard, which is the focus of these three ads.
Check out
(I won’t mention this again if nobody complains about “this time”)
Only 55 tz? A youngster.
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These ads are not bad, but “Security” is still my favourite.
I saw one of the adds and laughed my head off for the next 5 minutes… there great and very pointed!
Its’ official now Microsoft is the laughting stock of the whole industry… and they earned that title with Vista!
Vista little more that old software… reworked and batched up… all in the package!
Less is More wrote: “… I think it’s time to move on to ads which let the OS do the talking.”
Respectfully, that’s probably not a good idea. The key to advertising was, is, and will always be: “Sell the sizzle, not the steak.” In this case, merely showing the OS is trying to sell the steak. Instead, the goal is to help people make an emotional attachment to the produce by showing its benefits. Compare:
They don’t sell jeans by focusing on how the fabric is made.
They don’t sell cars by focusing on the auto’s fuel injection system.
They don’t sell gum by focusing on the ingredients.
They don’t sell Mickey-D’s by focusing on how the cows are slaughtered.
Look at laundry detergent. They sell it by simply saying it gets your clothes cleaner, it does a better job than other detergents, or you’ll FEEL BETTER (fresher, prouder, happy, etc.) if you use their detergent.
To do good advertising for OS X, they need to help people have an emotional attachment to the OS, not brag about the advances in QuickTime or that there are MORE! EMOTICONS! IN! ICHAT!
Personally, I think they’re doing a great job selling the sizzle and not the steak (AKA selling benefits, not features). The massive sales and profits earned by Apple seems to prove that point.
Apparently I’m in the minority here but to me these ads don’t seem quite as funny as many of the earlier ones. But maybe they will be good for their intended audience, people who haven’t heard about all the problems with Vista.
@ Gil
Maybe you forgot the one with Giselle.
Raymond from DC: PR Lady’s “No comment”, while not as good as the “sad realization” of an earlier ad, is priceless. But I don’t understand why some don’t want Apple to show Macs or Leopard in action. Virtually every iPhone ad does exactly that, often quite dramatically.
It works for the iPhone because the multitouch GUI is totally different than what’s out there and you grasp this new concept in 30 seconds. Also, the features such as a full blown web browser stand out by themselves. However, the distinction between Mac OS X and Windows is not that clear unless you actually use the OSes. What can you say in 30 seconds to show that Mac OS X is miles ahead of Windows? You may show Time Machine, but you’ll spend most of the time explaining what Time Machine is and why you should back up your files instead of what Time Machine can do and how it does it.
Renderdog is right.
These latest commercials have really run out of steam. The earlier ones were much more subtle, clever, and funnier.
The PR babe is Mary Chris Wall, best known for her role on the PBS kids series Wishbone.
Never let people who know nothing about audience tell you something about PR. Do you think an ad that shows Leopard in action will make a big impression with a television audience? Why? You have 30 seconds to make your point. Not only that, it has to be memorable, repeatable, and simple. That is not the forum for discussing OS differences.
In short, the people who want to see “the OS do the talking” are tone-deaf and know nothing about the area they claim to know so much about.
I don’t know why, but when PR lady was talking about “upgrading to a more familiar experience”, I kept thinking she was talking about herself. Trade in younger g/f for the older more familiar one!
Jonh, more stable? For what? Hardly anything runs in it correctly.
PR people use Macs…
@MZ
Every (current)iMac I’ve seen has a gloss black Apple logo which matches the black display bezel. Not a chrome logo. Just curious why the ad makers favored a white logo, clearly with Apple’s consent.
Not even much point in poking fun at Vista. Leopard is more user friendly and users will be satisfied for the most part. (I’ve used Vista Ultimate in Parallels on my MacBook Pro 2.33 and it required too much processing power). I’m more than satisfied running Windows XP Pro for my Windows needs.
I never did like smear advertisements. It’s okay to boost your products, but not by tearing down another product.
I guess these ads are meant to be funny, but they really just seem like a cheap shot at Microsoft. Like Microsoft gives a damn.
The older model has a less twitchy uvula.
The Podium ad is improperly named. He is standing behind a Lectern and not on a Podium. The ad shoud be named Lectern.
Pet peeve, I’ll take a few breaths and move on.
A good example of what is wrong with Microsoft and Windows is the Zip extraction tool. What does it say when you right click on a .zip file? “Extract All…”
What happens when you click on that? You get a ridiculous Wizard that forces you to click thru pointless screens just to get the job done.
The command says “Extract All”. So why can’t Windows just extract the damn file to a sub folder in that directory, pop up the newly created folder with the files in view and be done with it?
Or anytime you attach a portable drive. Notice after notice after notice of what’s happening. How about just a simple popup teliing you that it’s working? And why can’t it then just open the “My Computer” and show the newly added drive? No, it has to bring up another wizard to get in your way, asking you if you want to transfer the entire contents of the new drive to yours, which doesn’t have global options the very first time it runs to tell it “Never Bother Me With This Again On Any Device Ever You Retards”. For that I have to dig around in some other collection of checkboxes and settings to tell it to leave me the hell alone.
The Mac leaves you alone unless it actually is important. After all, you have better things to do.
The PR lady is a babe. So what, if I need to get out more.
“The Mac leaves you alone unless it actually is important. After all, you have better things to do.”
Sometimes it leaves you a tad too alone. Such as when you try to dismount an external drive… and nothing happens, so you click on its icon in a Finder window and just by doing that pop it disappears… but not its Desktop or Sidebar ones, so you click on its Sidebar icon and it tells you that it can’t find the device even if it still is there, so you wait for ten seconds more or so, until they finally vanish. Finally! So you happily disconnect the drive and ooooops, WARNING: the device wasn’t unmounted properly yadda yadda. Since Tiger it happens to me everytime, every Mac, every second FLASH memory stick.
Windows is too frantic a companion, but Mac OS X is so the silent type sometimes one doesn’t know if it is quiet or it is dead.
Myself, Apple can brag as much as it wants, but two things are clear:
-It actually was really, really afraid of Vista, battle of the eye-candy-wise. There is no other explanation to the incredibly un-Apple-like set of cosmetic UI changes, so many of them so ill-conceived.
-Its graphic design team surely was on crack when they redesigned so many elements to make them or their states undiscernible. Old or bad eye-sighted people will have a real trip with Leopard. Let’s not talk about the general transparency settings everywhere difficulting legibility.
-I shudder when I think of the next tower we are going to purchase when the Penryn Xeons show up. The new Dock is so unnbelievably broken my workflow is going to go straight to the trashcan unless at the very least we get classic Dock menuing back with 10.5.1, and even so…
I don’t feel like laughing too much.
(Well, these were three, wasn’t it? 😀 But I’ve tried Leopard’s Dock, and it will be my death, I tell you)
I feel just the opposite. I like the new transparencies. They did it right this time, not like in the early versions. The new dock looks great, and once you get used to doing things a new way, the stacks are a real time saver. Quick View, what can I say, brilliant. System is snappier, jeez look how fast the apps load now. I love it. Cover flow, works well in many areas, and if you don’t like it, just switch over to the conventional views. Spaces, I have a feeling that this is one thing that is going to grow on a lot of people. No more super cluttered desktops. Bravo Apple. You’ve hit this one out of the ball park.
Never had any problems dismounting external drives, ever. Just drag the icon off the desktop to the trash, and you’re good to go!
Don’t see any problem with the new dock functionality. A right click on the icon gives you the old way if you must have it. Everybody was griping about the old dock, so they changed it. I like it better.
It’s not a podium! It’s a Lectern!
I want to join robosapien becaz i want to reaseach in robotics.
I am from Paraguay and now study English, please tell me right I wrote the following sentence: “Include cheap airline tickets, hotel, rental car, activities and attractions.”
Thank you so much for your future answers 8). Carine.