Microsoft currently has a new ad campaign running, where they try to show macs as being basically just more money for less computer, justified only by a pretty external housing. Fortunately, many people can see through Microsoft's silly ads, which have wound up backfiring on them time after time (lately, Apple has taken to specifically attacking Microsoft's new ad campaign). The first ad had some woman try to buy a 17" laptop for less than $1000. Apple only sells one 17" notebook, and it is of extremely high quality. Forget the fact that there is no PC offered with similar specs for less than $1000, but there is no PC in existence that matches the features of the new unibody 17" MacBook Pro!
Well, they've got a new commercial now, and it's even more absurd. In the newest commercial, Giampaolo (that's his real name) says he's very technologically savvy and knows what he wants. Specifically, he wants portability, battery life, and power. He looks over a mac and says it's "so sexy," but it's more about aesthetics than computing power, and that's just not what he wants!
So, what does tech-savvy Giampaolo wind up buying for $1500 (the budget Microsoft gave him)? He got an HP Pavillion HDX 16t. So, what's wrong with this whole advertisement?
1. He wanted something portable. But, the HP he picked out is a 16" widescreen model that, at 1.7 inches thick, is nearly TWICE as bulky as the MacBook, and that's before you add on extras (adding extras to a PC also makes it larger). That 16" screen also happens to have a miserably low screen resolution.
2. He wanted something with good battery life. But, HP's battery is rated for less than 3 hours, and reviewers say it gets less than two! The MacBook (15") is rated for 5 hours. Of course, he could spend an additional $150 for a more powerful battery, which hangs off the back of the already huge [plastic] computer, to double its life. This would put it right around what the MacBooks already achieve.
3. Probably most importantly, he wanted POWER, and the MacBook is all about aesthetics, right? Well, the memory architecture in his brand new computer is slower than what Apple was shipping in their MacBooks three years ago! The latest MacBooks use a new processor with newer RAM that's about twice as fast as the HP he bought! Also, although he got a computer with 4GB of RAM, the normal version of windows (which is installed on 94% of computers) can only use 3GB of it! This is not an issue he'd face with Apple.
Add to all this the fact that he will have to spend easily several hundred dollars on software to match the included features of OSX, and several hours installing and running anti virus and adware tools. Giampaolo really wouldn't appear to be that tech savvy after all! Doesn't sound like he got that great of a deal, does it?
AppleInsider summed it up best: The strangest point of this ad is that Giampaolo didn't get the portability, battery life, and power he was looking for, he just ended up with a cheap-appearing machine that obscured its real technical limitations under a flashy layer of misleading, specification-oriented marketing, the very thing he thought he was avoiding with HP: buying a brand rather than a computer. And that's exactly what Microsoft wants people to do: buy its brand rather than a computer that does what they want it to do.
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