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New Mac Ad Attacks Entire Windows Lineage

by - source: Tom's Hardware US

Microsoft launched Windows 7 yesterday, and along with it a pretty neat ad for its I'm a PC campaign. However, Apple also released a new commercial yesterday.

Below is Apple's newly released commercial entitled, "Empty Promises." It seems that simply updating its notebook and desktop line in the same week as the Windows 7 launch wasn't enough for Apple, as the company's latest commercial aims to take Microsoft down a peg by reminding customers of days gone by.

Justin Long doesn't even mention Apple once. He just stands there while John Hodgman points out that there have been issues with every single Windows OS, going right back to Windows 2.

Check out the video below and let me know what you think.

Broken Promises

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joshthor 10/23/2009 6:17 PM
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i dont like apples marketing campain. sure, all windows os' have had problems. but they are computers. all apple os' have had problems too. windows 7 is solely about polish. its gotten great reviews from everything ive seen, it runs very fast, very smooth and is very pretty.

Anonymous 10/23/2009 6:18 PM
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I wonder if Apple fans realize what this type of attack makes them look like... cuz Im sure that none of those iterations of Windows ever influenced ANY of apple's design choices... no, none of them....... dicks.

lightsaber 10/23/2009 6:18 PM
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Apple is just jealous of Microsoft....everyone knows if it was not for the Ipod Apple would be a non-factor today. All hail Microsoft!!!

Nik_I 10/23/2009 6:20 PM
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I love how apple goes and attackes every version of windows ever made, like they've always put out consistently good operating systems. I'm sorry, but OS9 was way behind the times, and was quite buggy. Apple really needs to stop with these sad attempts.

jj463rd 10/23/2009 6:22 PM
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Windows 2? I think they mean Windows 286 or Windows 386 (I have both in the retail boxes).Apple is grasping at straws with futility here with Windows 7.

ssalim 10/23/2009 6:22 PM
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It never ends!

wildwell 10/23/2009 6:23 PM
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ssalim 10/23/2009 6:25 PM
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How are they empty promises if the OS has been used and liked by many users and not just internal testers even before the release?

tayb 10/23/2009 6:27 PM
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Okay. I don't care what your preferences are, that was funny.

fulle 10/23/2009 6:32 PM
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wildwell :
Stop taking a company's TV advertisements personally, suckers. Do you guys back Mc Donald's against Carl's Jr. advertising too? I hope the new TV ads by both Microsoft and Apple spur strong sales for both companies as they are both major components in my 401k.



At least Carl's Jr puts on display their actual product in their ads, instead of just spending the entire time bashing the competition.

Anonymous 10/23/2009 6:39 PM
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Haha, that commercial did at least make me laugh. It's true that PC users expect there to be some issues that will eventually be patched, despite claims to the contrary. With Apple the issues come as a surprise to their users, are usually significant (e.g. exploding iPhones, deleted data,) and users are lucky if Apple even acknowledges the issue let alone fixes it ¬_¬

archigos 10/23/2009 6:40 PM
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Yep, agreed. Funny ad. To give opinion, it was one of the weaker ads I've seen by Apple. I do agree that we need to keep ourselves in check and not get so worked up about ads and things like them. It's marketing, that's the way it goes. Apple is marketing their products, Microsoft is marketing theirs. Pick what works best for you and roll with it. Friendly competition? Sure! I wouldn't say some of the comments left here are in that spirit though. Just food for thought.

doc70 10/23/2009 6:40 PM
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that's what I was expecting from Apple; no lesson learned about anything, just more bitching about the competition.

Can not even begin to compare this ad with the one from MS ...

Just a minor point: if the Mac OS would have been so flawless, why do we have so many versions of it? Unless they were trying to fix and improve on some problems of their own...

Stupid ad.

matchboxmatt 10/23/2009 6:41 PM
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ahahahahahahahahha

captaincharisma 10/23/2009 6:44 PM
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lol "its not going to have the problems windows ME had"

i also seen the one with that biatch saying she is moving to mac to avoid all the headaches. man wait till she sees snow leopard deleting all her photos :)

captaincharisma 10/23/2009 6:45 PM
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jj463rd :
Windows 2? I think they mean Windows 286 or Windows 386 (I have both in the retail boxes).Apple is grasping at straws with futility here with Windows 7.



you think thats bad i found an OEM copy of windows ME that was never opened (and never will be ) :)

96stangman 10/23/2009 6:46 PM
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yep that shows why mac is the number one computer company in the world....... wait a minuet windows has 90 percent of computers ???

Anonymous 10/23/2009 6:47 PM
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Steve dude, Windows marketshare > 90%, Mac OS X < 10%. TRUST ME!!!11!!

foody 10/23/2009 6:48 PM
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I don't think Apple realizes that every OS that ever has been and ever will be has had problems. The entire point of releasing a new OS or updating it is because they have problems or room to improve. It's pretty obvious to me that Mac has problems and has a lot of room to improve. They have released 7 versions of the same OS since the beta in 2002, and if I'm not mistaken, those 7 versions were released to fix problems and improve. Apple doesn't seem to mind being slightly hypocritical in their ads as long as their users don't generally think about what they hear in them.

Also I don't recall anyone saying that Windows Vista was meant to fix any problems that XP had excluding security maybe. It was meant to be an upgrade that offered more. Microsoft is more into improving Windows with new OS's and fixing problems with free service packs and upgrades unlike Apple which charges for their update packages. There's a reason Microsoft dominates the computer market. You can only teach an old dog so many tricks before it dies.

dheadley 10/23/2009 6:49 PM
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You all take it way too seriously, I'm a Vista 64 user on my way to Windows 7 64 but I think the clip is humorous and to be honest it is completely true. They never say they don't have their own problems they are just pointing out that all the hoopla over Windows 7 is the same as over every previous version.

I've used Windows 7 beta and I will be ditching Vista for it real soon on all three desktops in our home with a family pack, but that doesn't change the fact that I still remember my top 100 computer horror stories all deal with some flavor of Windows giving me errors, blue screening, not running programs correctly after a service release and making me visit driver hell more times than I care to remember.

I still use it everyday, but it definitely a love-hate relationship.

sdcaliceli 10/23/2009 6:51 PM
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Too bad OSX sucked up until around 2002-3. That's where the commercial should've stopped.

mustwarnothers 10/23/2009 6:54 PM
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I thought it was clever, except for the fact that when he gets to Windows XP, he should stop. Since when has Windows XP been known to be unreliable? It's first week of release?

The Mac operating system for the past few years hasn't had any major face lift (not that it's dying for one), so the last updates have merely been revisions.

That's not to say that Microsoft's attempts at redesigning the wheel are always reliable or smart, but Windows changes from version to version have been significant overhauls.

osxsier 10/23/2009 6:56 PM
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I like Windows 7, but I think Apple is very clever in marketing to the ignorant masses. The average person does not read sites like Toms Hardware and don't know the difference between ram and hard drive capacity. They think both are memory. So for those people, Apple is being very smart and playing to their fears.

rocman3001 10/23/2009 6:58 PM
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It's marketing alright - and borderline logical fallacy at that.

This would be like Toyota running an ad where they show Honda's cars from the past few decades throughout the ENTIRE commercial. All the while, the voiceover would say things like "Honda's cars from the 80s would fail today's frontal impact test miserably", "Honda's cars back then also didn't have side curtain airbags" or "Honda's cars back then just sucked".

And then at the 29th second of the 30 second commercial, the Toyota logo would flash onto the screen.

Logically, this doesn't say jack about the performance of Toyota's cars. It just points out the bad stuff about Honda from Toyota's point of view (not necessarily the consumers).

megamanx00 10/23/2009 7:00 PM
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Ouch... and yet I can't stop laughing.

Of course windows 95 was a big improvement over 3.1 and was way more useful. Win 98 had alot less problems than 95, but then come ME and that is really what really makes the joke. Well that and the horrible experience a few people had with the release version of Vista.

Problems from the win 9x series are really the result of bad coding practices at Microsoft. The trouble with XP was that it had to support software written with those bad coding practices and Vista, which was built with good coding practices, had to be patched continuously to support old programs that had bad code.

Win 7 is a step in the right direction as it uses an XP VM to run older programs rather than trying to replicate buggy behavior to support older programs. I really wish MS would take a page from apple though and simply not patch the OS just to run buggy code. With apple, if your code doesn't run on their new OS your SOL and that's it. We this with their major transitions especially going from OS 9 to OS 10.

Anonymous 10/23/2009 7:02 PM
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delusion77 10/23/2009 7:04 PM
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all i have to say is 93% market share.

moejoe4420 10/23/2009 7:05 PM
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First, for disclosure, I own both. The ad is certainly pithy and most people who've experienced nonsense with every version of Windows will identify. Wasn't that the point? MAC's have had issues as well but nothing remotely close to the havoc of Windows. Most people aren't aware of MAC problems because the market share is so small. XP Pro has been the best of all the versions I've owned starting with WIN386. I like it for games. Sorry guys, for business I use MAC because mine has NEVER, EVER crashed or had malware. I'll try 7 if gamers find it reliable with the games I have.

dman3k 10/23/2009 7:06 PM
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ROFL. Kettle calling the pot black on that one...

Drag0nR1der 10/23/2009 7:08 PM
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wow, that advert just seems desperate... I do like how the windoes adverts show people out in the world doing things, and mac adverts have two people in a white box cut off from anything, with no context, no life, no personality (either of them)... it's somehow fitting

socrates047 10/23/2009 7:09 PM
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