Four Nerds

You know, I've been seeing a lot of those "I'm a Mac, I'm a PC" commercials. For those of you who haven't seen them, Justin Long (from "Dodgeball") is the personification of a Mac, and John Hodgman (The Daily Show's resident expert) plays a PC. In each ad, they have a little conversation about what each machine is capable of, and the Mac always seems to come out on top. They're cute, and a good marketing campaign for Mac.

Unfortunately, they're also bullshit.

Don't get me wrong. I use a Mac at work and OSX is a great operating system. Leaps and bounds beyond OS9. It's done for Macs what Windows 95 did for PCs (except it did it about a decade later.)

They're still graphically better than PCs (a blessing and a curse to us and graphic web designers). They also have one of the best video editing programs out there. They have a lot to toot their own horn about.

I have no problem with a good Windows bashing either. Lord knows there's enough to complain about. But if you're going to do it, just speak the facts.

Let's run through a couple of examples, shall we?

Restarting
In this ad, the PC freezes in the middle of their conversation and has to be restarted. Yes, it's true that PCs can lock up on you, but if they wish to suggest that this doesn't happen on Macs as well, then they are kidding themselves. All operating systems lock up, even their precious OSX. My freaking Mac locks up all the damn time.

Network
In this, Mac and PC are holding hands, forming a "network". They say that they both network well together and all seems right with the world. Then, a Japanese chick walks in and holds Mac's other hand. Mac says that she is the latest digital camera, and begins a conversation in Japanese. PC looks perplexed, and tries to communicate with her with a sad little "buongiorno." The message: Your digital camera will not work on a PC.

Again, bullshit. Camera manufacturers want to sell their cameras to as many people as humanly possible. Naturally, they'd want to make their cameras work seamlessly with as many computers as possible. So, they've designed them to interface seamlessly with a PC, since Windows is the most common OS.

Personally, I have never heard of anyone ever having a problem hooking a digital camera to a computer, with the possible exception of people who just have really old machines. On the other hand, I have had problems hooking one up to a Mac, largely because despite the fact they've been using USB interfaces for their keyboards since 1999, they still only gave my machine two freaking ports. One is taken up by my fucking keyboard; the other is being used by my fucking printer.

Thanks Mac.

Work Vs. Home
In this one, the Mac says he's into doing fun stuff like movies and podcasts. The PC says he's into fun stuff too, like spreadsheets and piecharts. First off, they make it sound like PCs can't play music or movies, or do any of the fun things a user outside of an office might appreciate. Bullshit. In fact, back in 2004 the European Union fined Microsoft 497 Euros for bundling Windows Media Player in with Windows, which was deemed as creating an unfair advantage to other media players, such as QuickTime. (Guess who makes that player!)

Here's my script for how it really should be:

MAC: Hi, I'm a Mac.
PC: And I'm a PC.
MAC: I like to do all kinds of fun things, like music, movies and podcasts.
PC: I like to do fun things too. You can get literally tens of thousands of video games by every major game producer. Everything from first person shooters, to MMO games, simulators, RPGs, sports games, you name it, we got it. (Looks at Mac)
MAC: Uh... We have Tetris...

While most of these ads range from slightly distorted versions of reality to outright lies, there are one or two that are true.

Touché
The first is "Touché." This begins with Mac saying "Hi I'm a Mac, followed by PC saying "Hi I'm a PC." Mac then says "I'm a PC too" and goes on to explain how now you can run Windows on a Mac, and now you never need any other computer.

This sounds all well and good. Personally, I doubt it's as seamless as they claim, but we'll go along for the sake of argument. To me, there's an alternate message here. I know they're trying to say that Macs have pretty much everything, but to me they're saying "No one makes decent software for Macs, and the problem is so bad that we had to go out and adapt our systems to run the competition's operating system. You know the one, it's the OS crashes all the time and there's nothing fun to do on it. But don't worry, we have it!"

Powerful message folks.

Viruses
This is my favorite stupid ad. "Viruses" features a very sick PC. He says he caught the latest virus, and to stay back. Mac says, no, he'll be okay. PC says, "No, don't be a hero. Last year there were 114,000 known viruses for PCs." Mac says, "Yeah, but that was for PCs..."

You get the point. This is, in fact, largely true. There are hundreds of thousands of Windows viruses out there, more than any other OS. Because Windows is the predominant OS out there, virus authors like to target PCs, because they want to infect as many computers as possible. (I think they also got it in their mind that they're sticking it to Bill Gates.)

Of course, there are also a shitload out there for Mac as well, plus several thousand that don't give a shit what OS you have.

Personally, I think this ad was a mistake for Apple. It's like they put a giant "Kick Me" sign on their own backs. Now, I'm not a hacker, nor am I a virus author. But I imagine that to them, this ad would look like an irresistable challenge. ("Oh, you don't have enough viruses, Apple? I can help you there!" (Maniacal laughter ensues, with much stroking of a black handlebar mustache.))

Not really the message that you want to put out there.