“It looks like chip giant Intel has gone too far by attempting to have prospective buyers sold on Ultrabooks. Bright Side of News* editor Anshel Sag caught Intel’s Mooley Eden cheating during yesterday’s press conference at the CES show in Las Vegas. Mooley can be seen in the below video fake-driving a commonplace racing game by Codemasters called F1 2011,” Christian Zibreg reports for 9to5Mac.
“In reality, he simply played back a video file using VLC media player and proceeded to fool the audience into believing they were witnessing a live demonstration of the graphical capabilities of the Ivy Bridge platform that powers forthcoming Ultrabook notebooks,” Zibreg reports. “This prompted the author to dub the unbelievable move a display as ‘a gross distrust of their own demo.'”
Zibreg reports, “Intel promised a massive advertising campaign to help push MacBook Air-like notebooks that have been struggling to steal the limelight of Apple’s machine.”
Read more in the full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Dan K.” for the heads up.]
Ho-hum. Not news. This is how Intel operates. Nothing new.
Not really ho hum. This is Intel repeating the same mistake that Google made vis-a-vis Apple.
S.O.P. This is how they operate. Who is surprised? Overpromise. Underdeliver.
Seems like all of Apple’s partners want to stab them in the back. No wonder they seek to bring everything in-house. No one can be trusted. They all want to sap Apple’s strength away as if it’s impossible for the industry to actually do something different.
so when the MBA/MBP lines go ivy bridge will they suck as well?
MacBook Air-like UniBody strength too?
Intel seems to be slapping Apple across the face lately, they must have had an argument of some sort. Or the rumor of the Air going to ARM processor got to them. I have been waiting for Apple to buy AMD for about 6-8 years or so. I figured they would have bought AMD when they made the move to a CISC processor.
Intel, the new Samsung?
It’s called a “hokum”. And if you don’t think that this is done by everyone (including Apple), you’re fooling yourself. Demos are often carefully scripted with videos running in place of actual applications to prevent embarrassing gaffes during a big demo.
The funniest example I ever remember from CES was in 1981 or 1982 at the summer CES when Coleco was showing off their new Adam computer. They bragged that it ran an Applesoft compatible basic. At CES, they actually had an Apple II behind the curtain driving the monitor. And you thought Samsung was bad 🙂
Funny example you cited.
But when has Apple cheated with a game demo? Apple didn’t resort to that sort of base trickery at the iPad introduction. A VP for Electronic Arts demoed Need for Speed Shift. Looked real to me.
Hey there C++, or should I call you Cynical?
Faking demos is wrong, no matter who does it. Yes, including Apple, if they were to do so.
Thing is, though, Apple doesn’t need to do this kind of crap, because their products actually work. Whereas Intel’s either don’t, or they have so little faith in their own products that they’d prefer not to put it to the test.
It’s cynical people like you who are the problem – it’s never acceptable to pull crap like this. Just because “everyone does it” (when really, everyone doesn’t) is never an excuse.
We should always expect better from companies, politicians, anyone really – that’s the only way to effect positive change. Basking in cynicism does nothing to help anyone.
Did I say it was right?
I just said that if you think this is a special case you’re fooling yourself.
As to whether it’s acceptable, I’d argue that sometimes it is. Some products cannot be smoothly demonstrated in a CES-like environment. Using a scripted demo (even employing video rather than actual computer software execution) *is* acceptable if the presenter:
1) doesn’t directly claim that the demo *is* the live software (IOW, they only leave it up to you to mislead yourself rather than directly lie about it), and
2) Someone actually using the software would get the same experience of the demo, or
3) They announce that the demo is a “technology demonstration.”
As for Intel, did you watch the video? I think it was pretty obvious that this was a video; the original article was probably misleading when it claimed that Intel was misleading people here (a bit of hypocrisy, if I must say).
BTW, per the Coleco demo, there was absolutely no reason for the hokum; Coleco BASIC had been working a couple of months before CES. Never quite sure why they pulled the hokum. It was kind of interesting, we’d used a FROB device to develop Coleco BASIC for the Adam and we were showing the real Coleco BASIC running at the FROB booth (FROB made eprom emulators for Atari, Coleco, and other game machines back then).
“a production so foul and so [un]fair I have not seen”
Intel, the new Millie Vanilli
*DING* Bonus points!
Intel is so terrified that Apple will build a huge customer base for MacBook Air using Intel chips, then (somewhere down the road) switch to an A6 or A7 (or whatever the number is by that time). To me, the ideal time for such a move would be for the next major release of the Mac OS (after Lion).
They desperately need to build a market for “MacBook Air-like notebooks” that use Intel chips, and do it now. Even Windows 8 will be able to run on non-Intel hardware…
In the demo he walks away and it continues to play – hardly a deceit.
Certainly no bettor or worse than adverts for games that dont show the real graphics quality of the game during play
@max
Lots of people are pointing that out as if he meant to do that all along. All that means is that he is a decent presenter. Why things go sideways, revert to self-deprecating humor.
Someone forgot to tell the camera man who happens to be focusing the camera on the laptop display. Who also happens to keep focusing the camera on the laptop display even after the presenter announced the ruse.
MacBook Air:
The “MacBook Air killer” KILLER.