I’m a Mac Ads

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I’ve been so busy recently between Flicker, getting back into the swing of my (real) job for the summer, and catching up with people that time for posting in general has been pretty hard to come by. Hopefully I’ll start to settle into a routine soon and get back to posting regularly, but in the meantime I’m going to grab the opportunity to talk about some ads.

These “I’m a Mac” ads have been around for a few weeks now, and if you haven’t heard of them, you can watch them all at the apple web site here.

Since I tend to use PCs for most of what I do (and many of my friends don’t), these ads have been pointed out to me several times since they came out - so I thought I’d go ahead and post my thoughts on them.

On the whole, the ads are cute enough, funny enough, and made very professionally. They’re kind of disarming and kind of alienating at the same time, but above all, they’re advertisements.

There are six different shorts that compare Macs and PCs on a number of issues. The ads are titled Viruses, Restarting, Better, iLife, Network, and WSJ. You can kind of tell from the titles, but they all deal with specific features or aspects of a computer, and most of them boil down to the Mac guy going “did you know I can do this?” and the PC guy going “I can’t do that.”

This is misleading. I think the best example of this is the “iLife” ad, which basically runs down the whole iLife set and asks the PC “what do you come with?”

And, strictly speaking, a lot of PCs don’t come with comprable applications. Sure, there are plenty of programs that do everything iLife does that are easy to get hold of, and a good portion of them are probably free to download on the web — but they’re not pre-loaded.

So what the mac really does is skip the part where you go find them.* To go with a traditionally horrible analogy - a Mac is more like a hotel room that comes with certain furniture and appliances “pre-loaded,” where a PC is more like an apartment that you must furnish yourself. (So long as you don’t take that analogy past its surface, I think it works).

Next they have the type of ad where it compares the “reliablility” of computers. This is trickier, but still misleading in my mind. (Take the viruses short, where the PC has viruses and the Mac quotes a statistic about there being comparatively fewer viruses for Macs).

There are of course differences between Macs and PCs with regards to security and viruses - mostly to do with the way access is given to critical system files, etc. But I’ve found over the past 10 years or so that most virus problems come from careless use. Macs are little bit more idiot-proof because they don’t let you have the same kind of access to base configuration files.

Also, there are technically fewer viruses out there for Macs to catch, but there are also technically fewer Macs for viruses to infect.

In the end, one of the things I find myself asking is “what is their target audience?” I generally credit the Apple marketing crew with being one of the most savvy groups in the world, and so it puzzles me that these ads seem aimed at people who already use Macs.

I’m guessing this because they’re all vaguely insulting to people who use PCs. It’s something about the way the PC and Mac are embodied - the “nerd” and the “cool kid” seem to say “you use a PC? You are this nerdy, unsociable idiot, and this guy here? He’s much cooler than you.”

But it doesn’t come off like you want to be the Mac guy. You just think he has a superiority complex.

On the other hand, someone who really loves Macs will probably go “yeah! that’s right! we are better like that!”

So who knows what they were trying to do. Anyways, those are my thoughts.

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* incidentally, I’m curious about how Apple works with monopoly issues - it seems to me like embedding so much of their own software into the OS and their computers puts them in a very monopolistic position. It’s basically what Microsoft got in trouble for with Internet Explorer. Is it because they only have a small part of the personal computing market that they’re allowed to monopolize that share? I know nothing about this kind of law, but I’m curious to know.