Get Me Rewrite: Microsoft Alters Laptop Hunter Ads

PCWorld Magazine ^ | 07/24/2009 | Philip Michaels

[Swordmaker]

Microsoft Chief Operating Officer Kevin Turner may have done "cartwheels down the hallway" when Apple called him to complain about the Redmond, Wash.-based company's "Laptop Hunters" campaign. But he must have cartwheeled past Microsoft's legal department because, as Advertising Age reports, the company has quietly altered its ad campaign in an apparent response to Apple's complaints.

. . .

Does it seem disingenuous to boast about Apple's apparently-quite-legitimate complaints one week and then quietly accede to that same request the next? Maybe. But from Microsoft's vantage point, maybe it's better to eat a little crow than stare down an FTC complaint.

[Da Coyote]

Pay for a Yugo (Microsoft) - get a Yugo.

It’s the computer equivalent of voting for the Obamaloon.

[Swordmaker]

Microsoft re-edits their "Laptop Hunter" ads to cut comments about Apple pricing... PING!

Mac v. Windows Ping!

If you want on or off the Mac Ping List, Freepmail me.

[Swordmaker]

Thanks to Vox_Freedom for the heads up.

[theFIRMbss]

>quietly accede to that same request

Maybe Microsoft
is getting warm and fuzzy,
changed it to be nice . . .

[randomhero97]

I will never buy a pc or laptop with an OS and bloated software crap again. I’ll build it myself and use a Linux/Unix distro or do without.

[tubebender]

As MSFT reports a 29% drop in profit and it’s stock suffers a heart attack...

[vox_freedom]

Thanks Swordmaker, for the
!

Cartwheels down the Microsoft Headquarters hallway indeed! Ha.

[PA Engineer]

Snicker. ;-)

[Terpfen]

Heard about this a few hours ago. Microsoft is spinning it, but the earnings reports speak for themselves.

[Richard Kimball]

Hmmmm... Microsoft pulled the people giving the price of the Mac out of the ad after Apple changed prices. The price change meant the ads were no longer accurate, not that they were originally inaccurate, so it's not like MS did anything illegal.

OTOH, Turner's original statement that he did cartwheels down the hall and that it was the greatest phone call he's ever gotten is stupid unless he's a gymnast that never gets phone calls. It was a simple call from a legal department to notify a competitor that claims about a product weren't accurate. Turner tried to spin it like, "Oh, we're REALLY getting to Apple! They called us to complain about our ads!" In fact, it's a little pathetic that MS acts like it's a great victory that the smaller company reacted to them. The PC shopper ads are good. For MS, after the Mojave and Seinfeld commercials, they're like a masterpiece. How tough is it to follow a seven minute commercial about a stolen leather giraffe that shows Jerry Seinfeld clipping his toenails, though?

The PC shopper ads show people who don't know much about PCs getting sold a PC by a PC salesman who's giving them the computer and trying to convince them to get the PC instead of the Mac. They're good commercials, but...let's face it, I'm a Mac guy and if someone gave me a fifteen hundred dollar PC for free, I'd look happy, too.

[martin_fierro]

It’s the computer equivalent of voting for the Obamaloon.

Here, you're gonna need this.

[Richard Kimball]

Yer tough, dude. Only the REAL Mac phanboys can stand up to the tirade of the Microbots.

[SampleMan]

Macs are horribly expensive. When I last looked to purchase, the cheapest Mac was about four times the price of the cheapest PC. Coupled with the fact that I didn’t want a new monitor, I quickly overcame my idea of getting a Mac, which I had finally considered doing.

[antidemoncrat]

After using MS PCs for more than 20 years I got my first Mac. It was not too much more expensive than a comparably equipped PC but what a difference in operation. It comes on and shuts off about 10 times faster than a PC. Some of Mac software crashes occasionally but it recovers incredibly fast. Sometimes when a MS program quits responding, it takes several minutes just to terminate and restart the app. All said, the Mac blows any PC I’ve owned away. When I can afford it, my PC laptop is going bye bye in favor of a Mac book.

[antiRepublicrat]

Macs are horribly expensive. When I last looked to purchase, the cheapest Mac was about four times the price of the cheapest PC.

I'll go with Wal-Mart, the land of cheap, and their cheapest Windows machine. $298 gets you an eMachines EL1300G-01w:

• AMD Athlon 2650e 1.6GHz/12KB L2
• 2 GB DDR2 Memory
• VIDIA GeForce 6150SE Integrated graphics
• 160 GB SATA II Hard Drive (7200RPM, 8MB Cache)
• 18x DVD+-R/RW
• Multi-in-One Digital Media Card Reader
• 56K ITU V.92 ready Fax/Modem (RJ-11 port)
• 9 - USB 2.0 Ports (5 Front, 4 Rear)
• Microsoft Windows Vista Home Basic

The cheapest Mac is double the price with a mini:

• 2.0GHz Intel Core 2 Duo 3MB L2 cache
• 1066MHz frontside bus
• 1GB 1066MHz DDR3 SDRAM
• NVIDIA GeForce 9400M graphics 128MB RAM (256 MB if you have 2 GB RAM)
• 120 GB HDD
• Slot-loading dual layer 8x DVD+-RW
• One FireWire 800 port
• Five USB 2.0 ports
• Built-in 802.11N and Bluetooth
• Gigabit Ethernet
• OS X Leopard

On the PC side: Little larger hard drive, more memory, faster DVD drive, card reader and a modem. Tempering that is that few use modems these days and the DVD drive is only single-layer. Also 2 GB is the realistic minimum for Vista. The bad: The processor is an Intel Atom (read: Netbooks) competitor and the graphics are ancient.

On the Mac side: It has a MUCH faster processor, bus and memory. It has only 1 GB, but that is Leopard's realistic minimum. It has wireless, Bluetooth and Gigabit Ethernet. It has fewer ports, but one of those is Firewire 800 (VERY fast). The Mac also doesn't have a low-end, castrated operating system, but the complete, fully-capable version.

It's seriously a case of you get what you pay for. Just upgrading the PC to the full Windows will get you quite a bit closer to the Mac price, but then you have to upgrade the processor, video and memory (most of your system) to run the full version well anyway.

And you only needed a $20 adapter to hook a Mac mini up to your current monitor.

[normanpubbie]

I decided to check out the new low-priced Macs to compare them with the PCs. I went to bestbuy.com which sells both PCs and Macs. The Mac laptops on site ranged in price from $1199 to $2499. I then looked at the Dell laptops. Dell's most expensive machine on site was $1099.

In other words, the most expensive Dell was $100 less than the cheapest Mac!

But you Mackies can comfort yourselves knowing that you have a vastly superior system. Yeah, right.

[RightOnTheLeftCoast]

"...When I last looked to purchase..."

When was that? 1989?

Today, the cheapest Mac is the Mac Mini, about $600, and it's a premium machine compared to what you'd get for the price in the Microsoft side of the aisle, especially if you factor in the antivirus, anti-malware, firewall and disk-defrag stuff a PC needs and a Mac doesn't. And any Mac is way more secure and stable and functional and easy to use than a PC, and you can run Windows on it if you need to.

I really have no dog in the fight, as I go between Mac and Windows and Linux all day long... and in fact my Mac is running Windows in a virtual machine right now as I type. And I'm here to tell you that this "Mac is 4X more expensive" stuff is as false and misleading as an Obama campaign promise.

[Tribune7]

so it's not like MS did anything illegal.

If they didn't change them they would have.

[Tribune7]

so it's not like MS did anything illegal.

If they didn't change them they would have.