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Microsoft have been playing catchup to Apple with their advertising strategy for years now, always attempting to respond to Apple’s generally much more memorable and effective advertising. (My recent study for my dissertation showed that a heckova lot more people remembered the Apple advert instead of the Microsoft adverts.) Their latest one continues to miss the point again- the video shows Lauren (an actress) trying to buy a 17″ Laptop with a budget of $1000. Heading into an Apple Store, she comes out without finding a suitable purchase- stating that they cost too much for what she wants, and that her budget would only get her one of the MacBooks with a 13″ screen. Ultimately she heads to the local Best Buy, finds a $699 HP laptop and leaves with that.

This could have worked well in this current financial climate- targeting those wishing for a cheaper option for their laptop purchases. But they make ridiculous numbers of mistakes. The first one is as I said in the title- coming out of the Mac Store, she states that “She’s just not cool enough to be a Mac person.” Microsoft, in their own advert has just reiterated what the Get a Mac series of Apple adverts have been saying for the past 3 years. That PCs are not for the cool populous of computer users. Well done guys.

There are editing errors abound, the most ridiculous being where she checks out the Apple Store. The same people can be seen in both scenes coming in and out of the store, showing that they’d just set up two cameras and filmed her walking in and straight out of the store. Ohnoes, don’t want to show any of the overpriced Mac stuff in the video. Just make sure that you get a good shot of the huge glowing evil Apple logo… Which brings me on to the main issue of the adverts- the advert stating that Macs are expensive and overpriced.

Of course Macs are expensive, they’re powerful, well built machines with longer life spans and require far less maintenance and security updates done by the user. (De-fragmentation, 3rd-party antivirus programs etc.) The comparison in the video was looking at the HP model versus a Mac with a hugely more powerful processor, higher resolution screen, better graphics, better battery life, and the usual Mac extras such as the multitouch trackpad, optical audio in/out, Magsafe, better Networking options… the list goes on. Apple computers are expensive, but they are not overpriced. I put down around £1500 for my MacBook Pro nearly 3 years ago, but unlike my parents Dell 17″ (which I’m having to repair) it is still running as fast as it ever was and it is still my main machine for everything from email, calendar, web browsing etc. to running Photoshop and Illustrator simultaneously with various other apps running in the background while hooked up to a 24″ display showing a 720p movie running off one of my 4 external hard drives hooked up via USB and firewire. See if you can do that with a 3 year old Windows laptop…

Try again, Microsoft.

Disclaimer: I use both OSX and Windows, but prefer Macs. I keep my PC machine updated frequently because I am a geek (no shame) and I know how things work and how to repair them. As such it’s around 5 years old and working fine, but only after 6-7 re-installs over the years, RAM upgrades, swapping over the GFX card and much faffing around with the system to get it as streamlined as possible. This post isn’t to say PCs cannot work fine years after purchase, but they do quickly become obsolete. About all I use it for is Firefox, uTorrent and a few PC games from a bygone era, so it doesn’t exactly get a lot of heavy usage- whereas people using it as their main machine would have a lot more on it and as such would find it sloooooow. I’m therefore not a typical user in this respect, and as such my PC shouldn’t be made a comparison to.