First of all, hello to anyone reading. Koopa has been trying to get me to join for many weeks now, I kept turning him down since I didn’t feel that my usual rants and raves were anything people would care to read about. In any case, I’ve decided to give it a try.
In case you all haven’t seen, there’s been a relatively new Apple ad on TV recently. It starts with PC and Mac supposedly in a ‘therapy’ session, the therapist begins telling PC that all the problems on his platform are not “his fault”, and that the problems arise from PC’s components being manufactured by many different vendors, as opposed to a single vendor like Apple. By the end of the ‘therapy session’, PC ends up blaming Mac for all his problems, which is supposed to be the punchline.
Here is the video in case anyone wants to watch:
Now that everyone is caught up… I know Apple is trying to be tongue and cheek with these ads, but it bugs me that the ads propagate ignorance regarding what a computer even is. From watching these ads you would think that the computer is all about the operating system alone.
It’s also hypocritical, after all, Apple also uses components from many different manufacturers, such as ATI and Intel, and as any knowledgeable techie knows, with the recent switch to Intel CPU’s, the Mac *is* a PC for all intents and purposes, with OS X becoming the only dividing factor between the two. Mac hardware is no more reliable than a well-assembled generic PC at all, but many people are being given the impression that it is. The flaws attributed to the PC are actually flaws of Windows specifically, all of which become meaningless once one installs Linux (which obviously also runs on intel macs).
More interesting is the implication that it is *better* when one company controls the whole platform and no one else can extend/modify it. As an opensource/freesoftware advocate, I find this implication completely asinine. GNU/Linux as a system is developed by hundreds of thousands of developers all over the world, all with their own ideas, co-operating together for a common goal. And yet the result is an operating system that manages to stand toe to toe with proprietary UNIX offerings and is flexible enough to be used in anything from desktops, servers, embedded (set-top boxes, dvd players, tivo, cell phones) and perform equal or better than the competition in each one of those fields.
Honestly, I fear that endorsing Apple is like trading one monopoly for another.
These ads, rather than educate people about computers, merely confuse people even more. And to me it seems that Apple would rather hide behind their marketing campaign than come out and just admit that the Mac *IS* a PC once and for all.