Comments on: New Apple ads tweak Microsoft marketers

Two new Mac vs. PC commercials starring John Hodgman and Justin Long play on recent Microsoft marketing moves to reclaim its image while hitting back at Apple.

[jdanielw]

Well you cant have your only argument be " you cant play games " thats retarded. i play games on my mac book pro and iMac all the time and with no problems so yeah go take a look at the apple web site and look at the 70+ games on there. And with apples partnership with EA thats a start to get into the gaming world and if you want to play games get a GAME system because thats what there made for. and mac's design of computers and (cases are way better as well as the operating system). Oh and video editing any one(final cut pro studio)? macs are more superior at video editing hands down! so go buy your self a game system and a mac and be a happy camper and stop with this " mac cant play games" stuff

[goodspeed8701]

But they cant play games without the help of windows. See when M$ do their Os, they make it to bringout the power of a pc i mean all the usage of a pc, but apple noway their Os cant make the MAC do anything. I know a friend that install leopard on a Dell gaming laptop and guess what games cant work. Apple know they need windows, so they came up with booty

[gwhiz2K]

About the video thing. Excuse me? Could you please explain exactly HOW Macs are superior to PCs for video editing? This argument is pure hogwash. I've seen many Mac owners shamed by how much faster my PC renders video with a quad-core processor and dual dedicated WD Raptor 10,000RPM RAID drives with 8GB of RAM (yes, running Vista 64 which only gets rebooted every couple weeks, sometimes longer). Your Mac with basic hardware will NOT out-perform my PC just because it's a Mac. Your Mac running EQUIVALENT hardware will perform, well.. the SAME.

As for Final Cut Pro, gimme a break. Real TV/Movie production uses AVID, not FCP. FCP is really in the same low-end professional realm as Premiere Pro CS3. I know several AVID editors who are forced for one reason or other to use FCP, and they HATE it. Personally, I do professional video with Premiere and After Effects. Name me ONE THING that you can do with FCP Studio (with Motion, etc) that I can't do with Premiere/After Effects/Encore. I'll name you lots of things I can do with After Effects that you CANNOT do with FCP Studio/Motion. Again, since many video professionals also run Adobe video products on Macs, tell me again how a Mac can do it better using the same hardware AND software as my PC. Be sure to back this up with technical facts.

And cases? Whatever. I have a CoolerMaster Cosmos 1000 sitting by my feet that is a work of ART, and is infinitely better than any Mac case you can come up with. You can't say something as dumb as "cases are way better". It's how much you want to spend. And speaking of that, my home-built kick-ass Vista64 machine with top-of-the-line parts was HALF as much money as the EXACTLY equivalent Mac. I actually priced out both machines just to silence all Mac-heads I know. Is your Mac TWICE as good as my PC? No. Does your Mac crash HALF as often as my PC? (what's half of never?) No. Does your Mac's OS look prettier than my Vista64? No. I even have pretty much the same dock as you, thanks to RocketDock. My Dell laptop was also about 2/3 the price of the equivalent Macbook.

IMO, Vista and PC's in general get a bad rap partially because of PC vendors who load too much garbage in order to make a buck. Apple doesn't need to, because you Mac fans pay bloated prices for slightly above average hardware. I can put together great PC's using well-researched hardware, and NEVER have a problem.

You can argue what OS/Hardware is better till the cows come home. At best, they're the SAME. Both are pretty. Both are easy to use. Fine. But answer me this: Why the heck would I want to pay TWICE AS MUCH for the same?

Justify how you spent all that money as much as you want, but at the end of the day, it's not really any better, comparing hardware to hardware. The major difference is that it's possibly to buy a garbage PC, but not a garbage Mac (no, I won't stoop to saying Macs are garbage. They're not, just overpriced and over-hyped).

I won't line Steve Job's pockets for no good reason. Nor will I buy an over-hyped iPhone that will only do 1/10 of what my Windows Mobile phone will.

[medezark]

MAC Os is only noticeably better than windows when handling Quicktime video. And it's not because Mac's are better than PC's, or that the MAC OS is better, it's because Apple crippled the PC implementation of quicktime.

[sselliotts]

Until about a month ago you couldn't even get a decent video card for a Mac and you pay 3X more even for the crappy ones....

Seriously. Gaming on a Mac? You're joking right? Solitaire doesn't count as "gaming" dude and that contract you claim Apple and EA have signed - EA makes the worst (graphically speaking) games on the market. As for your go get a Mac and a gaming console and you'll be happy argument: Hm, lets see, 2560 x 1600 resolution at 0.25 mm pixel diameter or 1920 x 1080 (if you're lucky, and 1080i doesn't count) with 2.2 mm pixel diameter... what a tough choice. Crysis or Mario World... what a tough choice. Hello dude, consoles suck compared to the cinimatic beauty you can get on a WINDOWS PC.

Now, I must add a comment to go with gwhiz2k's comments:
I absolutely agree. I have been dumbfounded for years by the willingly blind idiocy every Mac junkie I have ever talked to has exhibited - every last one of them thinks that their pathetic Mac is better for video editing/rendering than any PC you can possibly buy. I can't understand how Mac people can be that blind and that stupid. Especially when developers are starting to take advantage of the power of GPUs for performing the tasks of video rendering/editing. When that becomes the norm Mac will be left even further in the dust because good old steve jobs insists on being a hardware nazzi, controlling to his last dieing breath. Because jobs is such a moron you Mac junkies will alwasy be behind the technology curve.

You might think that is not a big deal but it is, especially where GPUs are concerned. Just a month ago I went to Apple's website to put together the very best MacPro that pathetic configurator lets you put together and I was surprised to see that the very best GPU configuration you could get was Quad HD2600 XTs while you could get Quad HD 4870X2s for any real computer. Now, since Mac junkies have no F'n clue what the difference is between those two options let me explain in layman's terms how significant the difference is.

The Maximum throughput of a single HD 2600 XT is about 300 MFLOPS (that is how many floating point calculations it can do in one second; 300 million). Sounds like a lot right? Well, check this out. An HD 4870 X2 is actually 2 GPUs on a single card and each GPUs Maximum throughput is 1.2 TFLOPS (that is 1.2 trillion floating point operations per second). Now, since there are actually 2 GPUs on each 4870 X2 and 4 of them are being run in parallel...the math comes out to roughly Mac = 1.2 TFLOPS while PC = 9.6 TFLOPS. Can you smell the difference? And the killer is that you will pay just as much for those 4 HD 2600 XTs as I will pay for those 4 HD 4870 X2s.

Now, when my video rendering/editing software is running 8x faster than your stupid Mac because the developer is taking advantage of those 9.6 TFLOPS what is going to happen to Mac? No one is going to want to develop for them any more and the only thing they have traditionally been known for being good at will disappear.

Think about that long and hard you moron Mac junkies. Why do you subject yourselves to steve job's flavor of communism?
a and it may be just enough that developers will stop developing to Apple all together because no one wants to be outperformed and anyone who chooses to stay with Mac will be in that boat.

steve job's idiocy will eventually doom his stupid company.

[Jake4228]

I dont concider myself either a MSFT or apple fanboy, but i can say the apple fanboys annoy me 30X more than the MSFT fanboys, you arent helping your cause guys.

[ComputerUser119]

I agree that apple fanboys are 30x more annoying.

[blinkdt]

Amen. I'm not a Windows lover, I'm a Mac h8ter. Committed now for life after only six months of researching whether I should be advising my clients to switch or not after my interest level was piqued by some of the hooplah. The answer is an emphatic NEVER.

[jasonenglish77]

Today I got on the internet. Read some mail, played some games, printed some stuff, you know the deal. Same as I do every day (probably the same as you). Then I opened up a document I was working on earlier, edited it, added some pictures (that I had just cropped and resized). After that, I went to work on some spreadsheets for the household budget. Then I decided to kick back with a DVD I just downloaded from NetFlix.

What OS am I using? Who cares, really, so long as we can do these things. One is no better than the other in the end. (BTW - I'm actually using XP in a VMWare box under Xubuntu).

[sselliotts]

I am so tired of hearing Mac junkies spout BS like the guy above who said "Also, Apple has one hell of an advantage in already knowing up-front how OSX is going to behave on Apple hardware."

Apple hardware? Would you care to tell me exactly what Apple hardware is? Nevermind, I'll tell you how to discover the answer for yourself. Open your POS Mac and look up the serial numbers you find on the MB, RAM, HDD, etc (if you even know what those are) and tell me who makes them... IT AIN'T APPLE. Holy Crap, is it even possible for you people to be less intelligent than you currently are?
Every time a Mac junky opens his mouth he reveals how F'n stupid he is. Of course that's why you use Macs in the first place - cuz you aren't smart enough to use a real computer. Ignorance is pretty expensive if you ask me.
Apple? Microsoft? I'll take Linux thanks - free and better than both of those options.

[mrpiddly12]

@ i_am_still_wade
With your suggestion, microsoft would only appeal to a small share of users that are slowly dying off. And that market already uses windows.

@Selfkill
The money is not the point of the ad. The money is more of a representation of Microsoft's priorities and how they are trying to cover up vista's flaws with advertisements.


@Zanny_Blowzsteve
"Vista is just fine. (Ask the 180 million PLUS people that use it. {compared to maybe 8 million OSX-Leper'd users) This is all marketing hoo-ha. Apple is still a single digit marketshare also-ran, & Microsoft still entertains a 90%+ marketshare.

Same as it ever was.

Anyone stuck w/ an Apple is stuck with (what was Steve Jobs' words?) Oh yeah, "A BAG OF HURT".

OUCHIE!"

A majority is NEVER correct just because it is the majority.

To see what Microsoft should be worried about, look at the extremely strong gains of the mac market share over the past couple of years. Over the years, numerous companies that once controlled the vast majority of their market have been slowly torn down by rivals and their own errors.

[sselliotts]

On the contrary, my friend, the majority usually IS right. MOST people are relatively intelligent (about 94% of them apparently). The other 6% reveal their lack of intelligence as soon as they put out the cash for a Mac.

Microsoft doesn't need to worry about anything.

steve job's communist-like-control alone will keep enough people from buying Mac that Microsoft will never have to worry about losing more than the whole 6% market share they have so kindly conceded to Apple to avoid being called a Monopoly.

Please, do tell us why you have chosen to become an Apple lemming and subject yourself to communism. I'm sure it will be amusing. If you are that anxious to give up your freedom why do you live in the land of freedom? Shouldn't you be in Afghanistan or something? Seriously, you like having no options and being dictated to?

[blinkdt]

". . . torn down by rivals and their own errors?" Microsoft? Oh, smell the glove, baby.

[elgarak]

The reason Apple can do the new ads has nothing to do Vista's problems; they can do it because Microsoft blew $300 million away. It's obvious that the $300 million went into a massive campaign that would have featured a series of Gatesfeld commercials, and a lot of things around it.

But then the first one aired, and everyone scratched their heads. Instead of riding the wave of THAT, they pulled the plug -- did you notice that there's just the three "I'm a PC" ads for weeks now, while they had two Gatesfeld ones just one week apart? Instead of going with Gatesfeld, which clearly WERE going somewhere, they slammed the whole thing into the ground.

And looked awfully inferiority complexed in the process. "Hey, we're just as cool as them!" Well, no, if you have to shout it out, you aren't.

That's why Apple took their sweet time for the response. The wanted to make sure that Microsoft was really THAT stupid, and did not start up Gatesfeld again. Now, it's too late. Microsoft cannot save the campaign no more.

[sselliotts]

You base your computer buying decision on how cool the company "seems"? Dude, you're pathetic!

[cannabisindica]

I go to MIT - if you go to our IT support web page, they have the following to say about Vista:

"Windows Vista, in our opinion, is like an SUV - its guzzles CPU, memory and doesn't go any faster (Microsoft will tell you that you will be safer and more comfortable but this remains to be seen)."

[goodspeed8701]

You forgot to post the link of your MIT IT support web page link to tell us how real you story maybe... Oh i forgot MAC users are like MAC ads... LIE LIE LIE...

[sselliotts]

In response to superswiss:

Yet another Mac junky opens his mouth to reveal is ignorance. This will come as a revelation to you but APPLE IS AN OEM and they use parts from the same third party vendors that DELL or HP or Lenovo uses. Since experience has already taught me that you will exhibit standard Mac idiot blind faith, I'll say this to you in advance. Go open up your Mac and look at the parts inside. To your shock and horor you will discover that I have just told you the truth. Those parts are NOT MADE BY APPLE. Heaven forbid your biased ears should hear everything because if they did you would know that there are just as many if not more hardware failures on Macs as there are on any other OEMs machines.
The Mac cultist's willful ignorance baffles me. You are all like a co-worker of mine who told me that he recently bought a MacBook for his son to go to college (a new one mind you, not used or referbished) and two months later the hard drive failed. Well, being a typical Mac idiot, not knowing how to fix anything himself, he took it to the Mac store to have them troubleshoot it. They told him that the Seagate hard drive in his son's MacBook had gone bad. Yes, you read that correctly, the hard drive was made by Seagate, not by Apple. Imagine that - Apple using parts they didn't make themselves. What is the world coming to...
and true to standard Mac idiot mentality this guy told me within 5 minutes of relating his pathetic MacBook story that "you go to the best if you want to get the best" (refering, of course, to Macs). Are you friggin serious? Can you people truly be that stupid?
Everything you said in your comment reveals that you actually think that Apple uses "better" parts than other OEMs. Where does that assumption come from? Are you that easily duped by Apple's clever advertising?

[D3vildog699]

:) i like you

[superswiss]

More to this post below in a seperate post, but morons like you give us Windows user a bad name, yes surprise surprise Windows users. The only Apple equipment in my house is my wife's iPhone and an iPod Nano that I got as a gift, but that doesn't mean I don't know what a Mac is all about. I know exactly what's inside a PC and a Mac. I was probably designing and building circuit boards when you were still crapping in your pants. What I was getting at is that there are cheap PC that are built using cheap integrated graphics, slow cheap memory, slow disks and then there are PCs that are built with a Nvidia GPU, fast memory and fast disks and then there are the PC OEMs that install tons of crapware and ship their systems without installing the latest drivers, windows updates etc. As opposed to fanatics like you, I allow myself a healthy amount of critical thinking even though I'm a Windows user, because I think a properly configured Windows PC is way superior to a Mac.

[cyberbian]

But PC's fun game claims are being threatened by Console.
And MS Xbox Console is being eaten alive by PS3 and Wii.

[goodspeed8701]

What are you talking about.... Another ignorant mac fan.

[D3vildog699]

Im not sure if you know this but the 360 has waaayyy more exclusive titles than any other console, Wii isn't even next gen so that matters none... Does gears of war 2 mean anything to you? or Halo? Fable?? PS3 lost its giant exclusive title of FF to 360 to... Not to mention that a big majority of titles are multi platform.

This is coming from a PS3 fan... (me)

[prkabster]

I own a high end Mac Pro tower with OSX and a PC laptop with Windows. I picture edit professional films on my MAC with AVID and edit sound using ProTools. Windows sucks with AVID, and Adobe Premiere is terrible as well. Anything that involves video is terrible on a PC because WIndows hogs so much of the RAM and processing power.

That said, programs in OS X still crash all the time. At least once a day. I'm probably hit "COMMAND S" at least once a minute with everything I do, because you never know when that spinning beach ball of death will show up. MAC is also still not compatible with BluRay, so even if you can manage the work around of getting a BluRay burner installed, you can't watch a BluRay movie.

Microsoft Office programs all work better on PC. Also, the windows in Windows are much better than the window in OSX. The maximize window buttion square in Windows is vastly superior to the little + green fill button on an apple window. iPhoto is a terrible program that creates redundancy all over the hard drive, and hardware support software is rarely supplied for MAC (i.e. camera software). Netflix streaming movies cannot be viewed on a MAC either. And try installing a wireless card in a Mac Pro yourself, forgetaboutit. Take your Mac to a Mac Store for repair, and they ship it somewhere, and you might not see it again for weeks.

Both have problems, these Mac commercials come off like bad campaign commercials now.

[goodspeed8701]

Stop telling lies, you know windows gets the job done... And talking about video editing! kunfu panda was made with windows/pc. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6jksOEwwabM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c1KMnO7HAcM

[wonderkris]

The only reason I am interested in getting a Mac is because it looks great and can run Windows because Apple has migrated to the x86 architecture (Intel processor - though x86 can be AMD also).
I would not consider a Mac simply because OSx considers the user to very dumb and makes me feel like a 5 year old.
All the problems that Windows has, is because of the number of users and the fact that Windows allows programmers to make anything they want on the Windows platform unlike Apple where everything has to go through the dictators at Apple.

[tadd1985]

Don't forget that Microsoft has to support hardware from tons of other vendors, whereas apple only has to support what they certify. Its easy to stabilize what you know and vista's biggest failure was not in the OS but in other stupid pc manufacturer's using crappy hardware that was not designed for vista. Vista is a power hog and was stated as such before it even came out (publicly) and yet people wanted to use low-end hardware, and intel graphics chips (these are the worst lowest grade chipsets around for graphics, even for their new high-preformance alleged HD chips suck). It also came to the hardware manufacture's not wanting to adopt Microsofts new standards for drivers in Vista.

In the same lite, try running CS3 (photoshop, illistrator,inDesign) all at once on any system, mac or pc, with low memory and low graphics, and its horrible, slow...and well now say that Adobe screwed up...oh wait, no! It means you need the right hardware. If it wasn't for the weight differnce in my MBP over my XPS (a difference of maybe 5-7lbs?) I would be doing all of my design and programming on a PC, heck, oo.org and eclipse run better and with fewer crashes in vista than mac, yep really stable (not to mention the lastes OSX update came with bad nvidia drivers causing kernel panics when dvd is used on a couple of my highend-professional presentation programs)

[end of rant] :o)

[solitare_pax]

It's like "The Daily Show" - the truth can be funny.

[Zarland]

Except in places where Apple has spent billions on advertisement, PC is the synonym for Computer. As far as Apple computing goes, it is identified with incompatibility.

Apple failed in the 90s for a reason, and so far, they haven?t learned the lesson yet.

[Renegade Knight]

Well now, I ain't getting a mac, and I don't like Vista because I STILL have driver problems with it that prevent it working as an upgrade to systems certified by their makers to run Vista.

[Pickyru2]

What I don't understand is, if OSX is so great, why would apple koolaid drinkers need to dual boot with XP?

[makilgore06]

It's just like the the hXc (re: hardcore) scene kiddies that ruined metal music -- they started caring about their haircuts and pants more than the music, so the scene failed and is a huge joke now (even though they all still wear the pants). Same with Mac, the users started caring so much about status of having something that says "Apple" that they forgot you can't use a Mac to do crap because nobody designs software for Macs.. Best case scenario you get a port of the original that has 75% funcitonality of the Windows version. Yeah, Windows sucks, but at least I don't try to define myself by a computer.


[CNET editors' note: Offensive content deleted.]

[dcmanuel]

The self delusional myth that MAC users tell themselves (and anyone that will listen to them rant) that PCs crash more than Macs is laughable. I guess if you yell something enough times in a forum post, it will eventually become true...*shrug*

[FutureGuy]

Apple's ads sound a lot like McCain's, negative and more negative. I prefer the "I am a PC" a lot better.

[jtcnet101]

For God's sake, you'd think a "professional" writer would know the term is "couldn't care less". If you could care less, go ahead and care less. You don't need tell us you're going to care less.

[Tom Krazit]

Thanks to you for catching the slip, and thanks to the other people who found politer ways to make the same point. Fixed.