Tuesday, April 17, 2007

Apple Goes Bad

Okay, the Mac-PC ads were funny at first. They didn't start out as attack ads. At first Mac poked gentle fun at PC for thinking that his graphic add-ons were easy to use. The message was that PCs are designed for business purposes but that Macs are better for home use. Very congenial, ha ha, very nice.

The last few weeks the tone has changed. Now Apple is running full-bore attack ads against PCs. They're nasty and unpleasant and inaccurate. (I say the latter as a current Vista user and a former user of Mac. I didn't expect to like Vista but I do - very much. The Allow/Deny dialogs are not a problem, and except for a minor bug in the email import wizard, I haven't had any problems with it.)

It's too bad Apple didn't quit while they were ahead. They had a really good thing going, and they blew it. They started out looking like the cool company, and now they just look like another bunch of big business jerks.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

do u see the parallelism between the apple ads and the tory ads?

Anonymous said...

I think they're dead-on in slagging Vista and the "allow/deny". Funny stuff with the secret service-type security guard.

You claim it's not so bad because you're used to it. It's amazing what you get used to.
Step back and think about the nanny-state it's created on your computer. The first thing I did when I got my Vista NB was disable it. Ahhhh, bliss.

Anonymous said...

Could you post a link to some of the new Apple Ads? I'm curious to see them.

Yappa said...

Hi southernontarian -

Here's the link:
http://www.apple.com/getamac/ads/

Ruth

Yappa said...

Hi sulieman -

I didn't say I got used to the allow-deny dialogs. I said I didn't mind them. They're less intrusive than the similar dialogs on XP; you can choose not to see many of them again; and there just aren't that many of them. They are simply not an issue for me.

As for the rest of Vista - I think MS finally got it right. It's a great OS. I did not expect to feel that way and I am no Microsoft cheerleader.

Ruth

Yappa said...

To anonymous who mentioned the tory ads -

Thanks for the comment. I do see a parallel. When something is nasty and unpleasant I recoil from it and reject the message. I don't mind negative political advertising at all (in fact, I wrote one once) but only if they're accurate and fair and done with a degree of dispassion. To my mind, the tory ads were nasty, unfair, and personal attacks. They reaffirmed my sense that the tories are a mean-spirited, ungenerous party that seeks power at all costs. Not effective!

Ruth