Apple Asked Microsoft to Stop Laptop Hunters
Microsoft's Chief Operating Officer Kevin Turner yesterday told attendees at Microsoft's Partners Conference in New Orleans that Apple called his company and told them to stop airing its Laptop Hunters series.
Calling it the "single greatest phone call he's ever taken in business" Turner said that once Apple had lowered the price of its expensive notebooks, its legal team called Microsoft and asked that the commercials not be aired any longer because they had reduced prices.
The whole thing began because Turner was bragging that the Laptop Hunters adverts were actually working. As proof he said the following (full transcript available here):
And you know why I know they're working? Because two weeks ago we got a call from the Apple legal department saying, hey — this is a true story — saying, "Hey, you need to stop running those ads, we lowered our prices." They took like $100 off or something. It was the greatest single phone call in the history that I've ever taken in business. (Applause.)
I did cartwheels down the hallway. At first I said, "Is this a joke? Who are you?" Not understanding what an opportunity. And so we're just going to keep running them and running them and running them.
Unfortunately, right before he let everyone in on the fact that Apple begged them to take commercials off the air, Turner said that the commercials were completely unscripted and that they just asked people their price range, gave them the cash and sent them in to buy a laptop.
Just giving people saying, hey, what are you looking to spend? "Oh, I'm looking to spend less than $1,000." Well we'll give you $1,000. Go in and look and see what you can buy. And they come out and they just show them. Those are completely unscripted commercials.
Hard to believe when you consider Lauren, the subject of the first commercial, was actually an actress.

and this is different from what apple does how?
man you just screw yourself there, if you see 90% of apple user are 100% technology uneducated, that is the reason they buy macs in the first place. They don't even realize what they are getting, because when you buy a mac, the spec are in a little, very small sticker on one of the remotely seen side of the box. Because almost non of the mac user knows what are those gibberish.
Not to mention, these people haven't even taken their laptops home and REALLY used them yet, how you they know?
I just saw a new one yesterday and they allowed $1,500, enough to buy a new 2.53 Ghz 13″ Macbook Pro with 4Gb DDR3 Ram, 250Gb HD and Nvidia Gforce 9400M graphics and the little part I love, a automatic backlit keyboard.
When the actor stopped at the Mac the comment was something like like Macs are all about looks and don’t have good guts inside. He had a point but not as extreme as one would believe. I would rather have a little less horsepower and get better battery life than the opposite and battery dies under two hours. Then there is the one of the key issues, OS X vs Vista, no comparison, OS X rocks. The actor then choose a HP with Millennium II in it, LOL.
I would grab the Mac for sure but I am sure I more informed than the average Joe that MS is targeting with these adverts.
and this is different from what apple does how?
man you just screw yourself there, if you see 90% of apple user are 100% technology uneducated, that is the reason they buy macs in the first place. They don't even realize what they are getting, because when you buy a mac, the spec are in a little, very small sticker on one of the remotely seen side of the box. Because almost non of the mac user knows what are those gibberish.
As you can w/ a PC. I have four PC's including my work computer and they all work all day every day.
Or, they buy a Windows laptop because everything is made for Windows.
What exactly do you need more than a 2.0 GHz C2D on a consumer grade laptop for? Are you willing to hurt your battery life and heat dissipation for it? Do you understand that in the laptop market, 2.0GHz C2D actually IS fast?
That's one of the most absurd things I've read. Apples relies mostly on the art/photoshop community and users who don't want to know what goes on inside a computer. That is why they are "easier" to use.
Most people who use a windows os at home use it because that's what they use at work and it's familiar.
Are there Apple uber geeks out there who tripple boot OS X/Linux/Old Apple DOS? Yes and they know what they are doing. But 99% of Mac users wouldn't know a line of code from an line of iambic pentameter.
i think the next call should be from Viagra or something.
i got an A on my American Pop Culture paper about how people like you buy things just to stand out and see themselves as higher class.
the commercials display people(i seriously doubt these are unscripted) with certain needs that sometimes a MAC can't handle. the same way a lot of people that do hardcore photo editing and graphic design that prefer to do it on mac's.
The guts are the same. A mid range laptop has a core 2, 3-4gigs of ram, 160-320gb HD, and say an entry level Nvidia 9300m-9400m (ATI 3200 etc). The Mac version costs $1500, vs say a Dell Studio at $800. Thats almost twice the price in "Apple Tax".
It's true too. An experienced user can get anything out of a windows pc that they can out of a mac, and an entry level user will get all they need out of either.
In addition, $1500 will put you in the desktop replacement budget range with cards like Nvidia 9800m or ATI 4800 series, which performs in games almost immeasurable better than it's apple counterpart in the same price range. If you aren't playing games, I see it as extremely difficult to justify spending over $1000 on a laptop.
If OS X was really that great, I'd buy a windows laptop and throw OS X on it. Same hardware, but it really isn't that great. Productivity? Windows XP. Gotta have DX10? Not OS X. Sorry Apple, you lose this round, have fun with that iPhone.
As far as OS X being better than Vista - well, don't believe what the monkeys tell you. It's not. If you like the OS to handle things for you instead of allow you to do MORE, then fine, OS X might be for you. Otherwise, go with Vista - better yet, Win 7. Same philosophy as the iPhone compared to the Palm Pre.
Buy a Linux distro over OS X - which is nothing more than a Linux distro itself, and the most expensive one their is.
OK, first, you better cite a source. Then, cite a source showing PC users have a better level of technology education.
Also, customers don;t get to see the box, except from a distance, until; they make a purchase decision. All the technical detail and pricing is displayed on the card in front of the displayed machine, and is exactly identical in content for both PCs and Macs. What's it issue is that little card only sais Processor speed (not type/model), RAM size (not speed), HDD size (and typically not speed), Optical drive type, and wireless card type. It lacks inclusions about backlit keyboard, 7 hour battery, graphics adapter (sometimes included), web cam, bluetooth, aluminum construction, firewire, and other hardware features nearly every mac has that few PCs in the same processor and size class come equipped with. It;s simply not a fair comparrison of specs.
Go to Apple.com, pick almost any model, then go to Dell and try to configure a machine to match the specs, same or better on all counts (i'll even let you exclude the battery life, SD reader, and backlit keyboard, and i'll even let the Dell weigh up to 2 lbs more)... Good luck. Get a gaming notebook from dell under $1500, a video editing notebook under $1000, a 24" anything, an 8core Xeon for even CLOSE to the PowerMac's price and features, a battery lasting more than 3 hours that's not in a netbook that offers a GPU and and even half the value adds of the macbook pro, they simply don't have it.
Yea, if you're looking for a generic POS to do little more than surf the web, email, and blog, absolutely there are cheaper machines out there, I'm not contesting that. That's not Apple's market, and they really could care less. Apple is only interested in selling machines to poeple who want to do something with media, like manage tens of thousands of pictures, edit video, or run higher end software. Look at their adds, short of the whole "OS X doesn't crash" thing, it's all about doing things el-cheapo PCs can't do at all, or do so aggrivatingly slowly.
... yea... but YOU feel skilled in the PC area... i imagine YOU know, what to do, when some errors appear and how to solve them? but what about a novice user...
Now eat your heart out mac