The web has been buzzing lately about Microsoft’s new anti-Apple ad campaign, which this time around focuses on the cost of a PC vs. the cost of a Mac, features a commercial of a girl shopping for a 17″ notebook for under $1000, and is (of course) best summed up by the line, “I guess I’m just not cool enough to be a Mac person.”

If you go to any of the Apple news outlets you can read a critique of this campaign, and then read many, many comments that range from (all paraphrased, but accurately) “Microsoft is actually admitting that Macs are cool and PCs are for losers” to “that’s not fair because Apple doesn’t sell any $1000 17 inch laptops” all the way to “that stupid red headed bitch is going to get what she deserves.”

First, let’s deal with that last theme. You know, the one where the commenter launches an ad hominem attack on the girl in the commercial. These people take commercials (and apparently life) too seriously, and can either be removed or ignored. But not responded to.

Now I want to dissect each of the first two themes, which seem to be the main ones.

1. “I guess I’m just not cool enough to be a Mac person,” is directly analogous to saying, “Oh, you’re cool,” to the guy in the Corvette who tries to engage a Jetta at a red light and takes off, chirping his tires through first, second and third. It’s not an admittance of anything. It’s sarcasm. That guy is not cool.

   There are only two ways someone hears that remark and thinks, “Yeah, you’re right about that. That guy IS cool.”

   1. They don’t understand sarcasm at all.
   2. They own or want to own a Corvette.

   Either way, this person is not your friend.

2. The fact that Apple doesn’t sell 17″ laptops for under $1000 (or anywhere close to that, in fact) IS the point. It’s not a trick, like, “Hey let’s pick some obscure feature that exists only in PCs and exploit it.” On the contrary, it’s precisely to say that there are people who shop with a price range in mind, and then fit a product into that price range. It’s easier to sacrifice something you don’t already have (a product spec) than it is something you do (your money).

   The demonstration is an exercise in reality. It’s not unrealistic in the slightest to expect a consumer to budget $1000 for a laptop and assume that they expect to find one to suit their needs. It only seems unrealistic to a Mac user, because for a Mac, that is unrealistic.

   Again, that’s the point. Should it be unrealistic? It’s not, if you buy a PC.

   A Mac consists of two primary components: hardware and software. It’s arguable that each Mac component is better than its PC counterpart, and I would argue that that is in fact true. Macs are high quality, a higher quality than most (if not all) PCs, but that still doesn’t matter. Why? Because higher quality costs more. Saying that a Mac is better and therefore worth the price is fine, but it’s not a good argument for buying a $1000 laptop. Don’t confuse “overpriced” with “too expensive.”

   Apple wants to eliminate money as a buying factor, and touts design and usability in its ad campaigns. There’s never a dollar sign anywhere, and for good reason: Apple wants to advertise that its stuff is better, not that it costs more. Microsoft is doing exactly the opposite. Look for lots of dollar signs in its new ads.

   Eliminate money from the equation, and Apple wins hands down in a (figurative) taste test. But add it back in, and now we’re talking luxury vs. economy. Now we’re talking Lexus vs. Toyota. Take the average, working class guy, stand him in front of a Lexus and a Toyota and take the dollar signs away. He leaves with the Lexus. But put the dollar signs back, and you’re sitting in traffic in front of a Corolla and behind a Camry.

   In terms of quality and experience, is the Lexus worth the money? Hell yeah. Those things are built RIGHT. But is it an appropriate choice to get you to work if costs twice as much as you can budget?

   Microsoft is trying to get consumers to ask that question, and that’s a pretty good strategy.

There is another angle I want to touch on, one that I saw mentioned in a couple different places in reference to Microsoft’s direct attack on Apple. Apparently, it’s well known in advertising that a company with the top market position never mentions another competing company in its own ads. The idea being, I believe, that mentioning, say, the company holding second position in the market, does two things:

1. Gives it free press.
2. Validates it as a worthy and likely alternative to the existing, #1 product.

Microsoft is going against this practice, and when we look at why we’ll see that not only is the idea of competition omission outdated, it’s also actually detrimental.

1. As a company, unless a competitor is paying you, then yes, technically mentioning it in your ad is providing free press. At one point in time, when all meaningful ads were either in print or on one of three networks during primetime, that mattered. The internet has changed all of that, though, and there is no looking back. An internet ad can become viral and viewed by millions in a single day; it can be viewed over and over again on demand, and almost regardless of the product itself, if it’s a good ad, it will be.

   A marketing plan that assumes or depends on a competitor’s inability or unwillingness to advertise is simply flawed. Any company can do it, with a just little creativity and almost no budget.

2. Because any company can advertise, as the top dog, you’d better believe that another company is going to compare and contrast its products with your own. And you’d better believe that it’s going to be a biased and skewed comparison.

   So there are two situations:

   1. The consumer doesn’t see any ads, in which case they are going to compare and contrast your product with your competitor, and make their own assumptions. Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that that’s a straight 50/50 shoot. So you’ve got a 50/50 shot of being passed up for a competitor.
   2. The consumer only sees the ads of your competitor, which are biased and skewed, but also funny or witty or just plain likeable. But nonetheless, skewed. Now you’ve got a less than 50% chance.

Microsoft is going with #3: Keep Apple in the spotlight, and compare and contrast the strength of the PC with the weakness of the Mac. Cost. I think it’s a smart decision.

Over the past few years, I’ve taken every opportunity to speak out against Apple, and have pointed out perceived flaws with its products and processes whenever possible. Everything I’ve ever pointed out as a flaw has been obvious. Macs are expensive. Macs are proprietary. Mac OS X is locked to Apple hardware. Apple commercials are hyperbole, biased and shamelessly one-sided.

All of these things are true.

Then there’s the Mac fanboy phenomenon. For whatever reason, many Apple enthusiasts take Apple enthusiasm to a level that approaches blind zealotry. A lot of these people are idiots.

Putting all of those points together creates a perfect arsenal for shooting the idea of Apple down. Nothing can refute those points directly. They are simply true.

But there is something missing. There has to be. Why are all of these idiots buying expensive, proprietary, hardware-locked products from a company that shamelessly bashes a competitor with ten times the market share?

Why? Because Macs are better. That’s why.

What isn’t obvious is what actually makes that true. Why are they better? It’s a lot of subtlety, and all of that subtlety runs throughout the entire line of Apple products, creating an ecosystem of beautifully designed, easy to use, powerful products.

The Apple design philosophies span both the hardware and software platforms, both of which it tightly controls. This is important, because Apple sells you not just hardware or software, but an entire computing experience, which is carefully calculated from start to finish. For me, this computing experience is the final frontier in current consumer technologies. It’s easy to miss, because a Dell is Good Enough. Windows is Good Enough. Linux is Good Enough. Good Enough is what most consumers depend on to surf the web, read email, do whatever it is they do with their computers. Good Enough is, put simply, good enough.

Apple products are not Good Enough. They are better.

It starts with the hardware. My wife and I were recently discussing whether she should abandon her Dell Inspiron 1525 in favor of a new white Macbook. I was all for it, but it would mean selling our desktop machine (more on that later) so I suggested that we stop by Best Buy to check one out. Reluctantly, she agreed.

She’s never used a Mac before, and when we got to Best Buy, she didn’t sit down to check it out. Rather, she watched me check it out, and then go check out a new 24″ iMac. Man, those are gorgeous.

But I digress. When we got home, she said, “I wasn’t that impressed. I don’t see what the big deal is. It’s white? What makes it any better than my Dell?”

“You didn’t touch it,” I said. At that moment, I realized that until only a few months ago, I felt exactly the same way. I hadn’t touched it, hadn’t experienced it. I couldn’t perceive the difference, so there wasn’t any.

It’s the difference between a Toyota and a Lexus. A Toyota is Good Enough. A Lexus is better. A lot of little things make that true. The build quality. The attention to detail. Both get you to work, but one feels better doing it.

With a Mac, it’s also the software. A lot of people I’ve spoken with recently, after my Mac conversion, have said something to the effect of, “I just don’t think I could use a Mac.”

I felt exactly the same way. One button? Just can’t do it. (Forget about the fact that you’ve been able to right click a Mac for a long time, nobody who doesn’t already use one knows that yet.) Before I started using Mac OS, I looked at it as a foreign language. It never would have occurred to me that it might actually be easier to use. Never. But alas, it is.

Sitting down with it for all of five minutes gets you to, “Oh, that’s how that works? Huh. That’s clever.”

With almost everything.

There’s a fit and finish in everything Apple creates that is a notch above its competition, in both hardware and software. Once you’ve tried a wide enough variety of alternatives, you’ll realize that really, the final frontier is polished quality. It’s that fit and finish that sets it apart. It’s when you’ve driven a Toyota long enough and you say, “Fuck it. I’m getting a Lexus.”

It’s why you’ll love a Mac.

The quest to turn my HP 6910p into a Macbook Pro went well, so I’m on a new kick now, with a new goal: To turn my Dell Inspiron 530 Desktop into a desktop Macintosh.

I want an actual Mac, meaning Apple hardware, so I’m ruling out OSx86. Even with a retail install, there are still a bunch of kexts that need to be installed, as well as some hacks to get everything working. And I don’t trust that whole process. Plus, it’s illegal.

Furthermore, the video drivers won’t have proper acceleration and sleep won’t work properly. (Don’t ask me how I know, I just do)

The choice is between an iMac and a Mac mini. Either one, really, would work. Ideally, I want an Intel-based machine, but I’d settle for a sufficiently powered G5 iMac. There does not exist a sufficiently powered PowerPC-based Mac mini.

I don’t want to (and in fact, won’t) spend any money on this, so either I need to trade my machine straight up, or sell it and buy something with exactly that profit. A trade would be easiest.

I’ll outline the specs of my existing desktop:

• Dell Inspiron 530
• Core 2 Quad Q6600 @ 2.4ghz (65nm)
• 4GB PC 6400 @ 800mhz
• 500GB, 7200RPM, SATA II 3.0GB/s
• Nvidia GeForce 8400 GS 512MB
• Vista Home Premium

The machine is powerful, and is somewhat immediate-future-proof. Yeah, I know the Q6600 isn’t the newest kid on the block anymore, and 800mhz RAM isn’t the fastest bike on the street anymore. But who cares. For the next few years, the average user (and I would dare to say the average power user) isn’t going to require more power than this. I’ll even go as far as to say that they won’t even require this much power.

I can definitely see the video card as being upgradable. But go for it. It’s a PC, upgrade it to whatever you want. PCI-E!

The fact that I’m willing to settle for an older, substantially less powerful Mac than the machine I’m offering should make this an even-stevens trade opportunity.

Just as I made my laptop conversion happen, so to shall I make this happen.

About two months ago, I bought an iPhone 3G. It’s about as fantastic a device as it’s supposed to be, and jailbroken, even more so. I can’t imagine not having it with me now at all times.

Having gotten used to the interface, multi-touch and general slickness of the device, and also playing around with Mac OS X Leopard at home for about the same amount of time, I find myself lusting after a new Macbook Pro. A co-worker warned me after getting the iPhone not to fall too far into the Apple Abyss. Too late.

The plan will have to be, “How do I turn my existing laptop into a Macbook Pro?”

I’ll outline the specs of my existing laptop:

• HP 6910p
• Core 2 Duo T9300@2.5ghz
• 4GB RAM
• 250GB HDD@7200RPM
• ATI Mobility Radeon X2300 w/64MB
• 14.1″ 1280×800 matte widescreen display
• Vista Ultimate

The specs of the HP and Macbook Pro are directly comparable, with video and screen sizes being a considerable upgrade (the Radeon X2300 w/64MB vs NVIDIA GeForce 9400M + 9600M GT w/256MB and a 14.1″ screen vs a 15.4″ screen, respectively.)

The prices, however, not so much. The default price of the Macbook Pro is $1999.00. With a discount, it’s $1899.00. And a refurbished one is $1799.00. Kuh. Ching.

So the question remains, how can I sell my HP, and potentially an internal organ in order to afford the work of art that is the new, aluminum Macbook Pro?

The EU is suing Microsoft, again, for including Internet Explorer with Windows.

First, I hate Internet Explorer. I use it one time following a Windows installation, to download Firefox. With IE, Microsoft bastardizes the HTML DOM, Javascript, and just about every other web standard you can name, making it difficult to the point of retardation to develop a rich web application that runs fine on all browsers, or even looks OK on all of them. That is a crime. A crime against web users and developers.

This lawsuit is an order of magnitude more retarded than Internet Explorer is, though. Let me ask you this, how often do you spend time on your computer not connected to the internet? When the internet goes down, do you care? Of all the applications that come bundled with your operating system, which one, by far, do you use the most?

I’ll answer:

1. I spend very little time on my computer disconnected from the internet. It is teh suck without the internets and the interwebs.
2. Yes, it is infuriating when my connection dies. I break things close to me.
3. Most commonly, I use a web browser. But not for pr0n. That would be immoral. Or amoral? I never know the difference. Sad face.

If your answers were not along the same lines as mine, you are in the teeny, tiny minority, and your opinion does not matter. Sorry. Without internet access, my machine, with all its bells and whistles, is useless. Yours also.

Suing an operating system company for developing and including a fucking web browser with its operating system, is like suing Toyota for putting wheels on its cars because it builds the wheels. Sure you could still sit in it, but it’s not going to take you anywhere.

This lawsuit is retarded. And I mean that sincerely. Screw you EU.

EDIT: On that note, if Windows shipped without a web browser, then how would you go about getting one? Yeah, that’s what I thought.

EDIT: It turns out, the EU wants Microsoft to prompt the user to pick from a list of browsers during installation. This is even more ridiculous than shipping without one. Not only would Microsoft have to eliminate a core component of its own OS and modify the Windows installation procedure, BUT ALSO FORCE THE USER TO CHOOSE BETWEEN COMPETING, THIRD PARTY SOFTWARE BUNDLES JUST TO COMPLETE THE INSTALLATION. How in the world can this be? And presumably, the actual third party browsers would have to be bundled and shipped with Windows, or else a network-less installation would result in no browser.

How can it be that a commission (or a “Union” or whatever the fuck) can force a company to INCLUDE PRODUCTS FROM COMPETITORS? Completely beyond me. WHY AM I YELLING? Because I’m mad.