Since when is Apple a PC maker? Apple is anything but a "maker" of something. They're just a software and marketing company. They never make anything! They let the poor people working at Foxconn and ASUS do all the making and if the devices that THEY themselves developed fail in some kind of way, it's always somebody else's fault... Poor Apple Fanbois, don't you have anything in your life worth arguing for so you have to defend the toy maker and its guru?!

to hss1 as smart as you might sound , do you realize you compare a pc maker ( yes apple is pc with diff OS) vs software company ? if you wanna compare why don't you add MS , HP , DELL , GATEWAY ,ACER , ASUS ... all together ok smart guy ? lol.
About the Apple campaign itself . i recently asked myself " wow when did i start to hate apple ? " , to apple: because of your Ads , they don't not only insult MS but insult "PC" user.. we are not stupid as you think. we buy Windows base for reasons .

(^:

apple will die beginning with the death of St Steve

MS will try to hold on, but be killed by political infighting

free software, egged on by whatever content company currently dominates, will deliver the eyeballs and money that supports the bottom line

welcome to the future

Lol Lol a none techie yes you can boot a Mac from an external USB or firewire DVD/CD drive i do it all the time at work when required.

You can also create a bootable disk image on a USB pen stick and install it that way.

Or if you in an office environment with an Apple server create a disk image and deploy it via Deploystudio takes 6 minutes to install over network for OSX 10.6

Ammeters really!!!!

==============================

@auramac

Now on to install osx, except the darling little girl failed to tell me her DVD drive was bad as well, she shared a soda with it about a year earlier and it hadnt worked since. No problem, i think to myself, i've got USB DVD drives in multiple sizes / colors / flavors, i'll just use one of those to install osx. yeah fucking right, macs wont boot off anything USB, how fucking retarded is that? theres no justifiable reason for it, its running intel hardware and we all know the hardware is capable of it, so it has to be another of st steves holy laws.

Apple has doubled its OS market share over about the past 5 years.

Over the time of this ad campaign, Microsoft stock has been roughly flat.

Apple stock has gone up about 2.5x.

That puts Apple's market cap at about 80% of Microsoft's, and Apple's growth potential still exceeds Microsoft's - which is constantly on the defensive and which still hasn't staked out another defensible market other than Windows and Office.

Meanwhile, Apple owns music players (Microsoft failed), is well on the way to owning smart phones (Microsoft is falling and basically irrelevant), and is ascending in e-readers (Microsoft is a marginal player).

Who exactly is laughing?

"As a tech support specialist, I've actually had the opportunity to work with and get to know much technology I would or could never avtually own (PC's as well as all the newest stuff), and the fact that in a school district which is 50% Mac, supported by mostly just me, and an ever-growing team of non-Mac support- I think that says it all regarding cost of ownership and ease of use."

As an independent consultant supporting small businesses running 99.9% Windows based gear. I would like to take this opportunity to ask you to kindly blow that last statement out your ass!? especially the "cost of support" part, you're either crazy or retarded.

Just this week the daughter of one of my clients brings me a macbook with a dead hard disk, asks me to recover data and replace the drive, and of course that meant also to install osx for her. easy enough... I zip on over to newegg.com and order her a shiny new Western Digital Scorpio Black 320gb drive, overnight shipped, had it the next day, sweet...

Now on to install osx, except the darling little girl failed to tell me her DVD drive was bad as well, she shared a soda with it about a year earlier and it hadnt worked since. No problem, i think to myself, i've got USB DVD drives in multiple sizes / colors / flavors, i'll just use one of those to install osx. yeah fucking right, macs wont boot off anything USB, how fucking retarded is that? theres no justifiable reason for it, its running intel hardware and we all know the hardware is capable of it, so it has to be another of st steves holy laws.

replacing the dvd burner is my only logical option at this point, since i didnt have a firewire drive handy. so i start searching for a dvd replacement, i identify the drive as being a commonly used slot loading dvd drive and begin the search, i find that the ones used in apple have a special firmware so only an apple branded drive will work, i found plenty, selling for around two hundred fucking dollars ($200), after digging a little deeper i found one new on amazon.com for $85 + shipping, the exact same drive, used in dells, gateways, acers and a few others are selling for $25 used and $33 new, but no not the apple drive the fucking price is 3x higher, 3 fucking times, and that was the only one i found under #130!!

Tell me again how the cost of support / ownership of a fucking mac is lower than a PC?

I guess you dont pay for the parts huh?

'Nuff said. Ubuntu is awesome, stable and free.

And command line is only scary if you allow it to be. Do your research, back up your computer and make the changes. Simple. Easy. And no spyware unless you're a moron. And if you're not a moron but download spyware, no biggie because you can put the stuff you don't trust as it's very own user. I run BOINC on my computer, so technically anyone has the ability to make my computer do stuff. But BOINC is used by user BOINC(Yes, both the user and the program are called BOINC, simply because that's the sole purpose of that user, to run the BOINC stuff) so the program only has the rights of the user, and the user only has the rights to the BOINC directory and the processing resources of the computer.

(Stuff deleted because I was rambling)

My point is that an intelligent person is almost guaranteed to not have a problem if they do things in a careful fashion. And use Linux.

I'll miss the ads- they were entertaining. I didn't need them to influence my feelings regarding my love and respect for the beauty and innovation of Apple. As a tech support specialist, I've actually had the opportunity to work with and get to know much technology I would or could never avtually own (PC's as well as all the newest stuff), and the fact that in a school district which is 50% Mac, supported by mostly just me, and an ever-growing team of non-Mac support- I think that says it all regarding cost of ownership and ease of use. Most of the snide remarks here are from sheep who only know Apple from what they see on TV or hear from other Mac bigots.

Well 8% Market share got Apple the below:
=========================
APPLE

$40 Billion in cash in the bank

Apple has $220 Billion market cap

Profits of $7 Billion per year

Turnover of $55 Billion

8 % Market Share

========================

MICROSOFT

Microsoft is market cap $262 Billion

Cash in the bank $25 billion

$10 Billion profit per year

Turnover of $66 Billion

90 % market share

Info from FT and Bloomvberg

===================

Apple will probably overtake Microsoft in market share and revenues within the next couple of years.

The ads showed that Apple felt threatened enough by their competition that they had to go on a negative smear campaign. They really should leave those tactics to the politicians and stick with telling people how smiley their products can make you. But Steve Jobs has shown over the years that he's an angry vengeful person. Just look at what they're doing to adobe, one of their former partners.

"I'm a PC, with slightly locked down firmware and more rigidly controlled peripheral specification, and a fruity logo"

An uncomfortable truth for the fanbois

I would imagine Microsoft liked the ads too. It entrenched the idea that PC = Windows better than they ever could. OK, so Apple were playing on the negatives, but still... I'm sure it resulted in more people erroneously believing PC and Windows are one and the same, than new Apple customers.

"I'm a PC, and no Windows in sight, thank you very much" (well, on the laptop at least - who cares, if it works)

"Apple's Macs are at the high end of the market, which has been abandoned by most PC makers, whose customers are little more cost conscious, or broke."

Or... we just hate Macs. Novel concept, I know.

"If anything it reinforced the stereotype about Apple fanboys being smug gits and arrogant tossers."

Huh. Where's the problem? Smug and arrogant seems to be the attitude advertizing sells and people strive for everywhere else.

Was that if you are a mac you are obviously a smug little oik who could have the crap kicked out of them by your average teddy bear.

The PC on the other hand would have its stuffing kicked out of it by a womble, so definitely harder, well actually just a bit fatter and hence can take more of a beating.

May I use this as a teaching exercise for recognizing slanted writing? Adjective choice, descriptions and attitudes come through as clearly as anything I've read, so I'd use this as an intro and then move on to more subtle slanting.

Tha campaign alone was enough to make me decide never to buy anything made by Apple. Previously I had respect for their products and used to speak well of them, but after that flagrantly misleading and trashy campaign, I wouldn't touch a mac with a bargepole (even if it were a practical alternative to a gaming PC, which they're not).

Great campaign. Spent millions, ran for years and it's got Apple to what? Around 8% market share.

Way to go.

The Get A Mac campaign was much better than that terrible one Microsoft had running at the time, with Bill Gates and Seinfeld in a shoe store.

I think they were trying to promote the dysfunctional Windows Vista, which Seinfeld must surely now regret.