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New Get A Mac Ad: Stuffed

The last two Compaqs I bought (three and five years ago respectively) were just jam packed with garbage. AOL seemed to have tentacles everywhere. "Delete AOL" "Do you want to delete AOL" "Delete" "If you delete AOL, other programs might not run correctly" ARRGGHH.

Just as bad as the garbage software was some sort of Compaq "control panel" that was supposed to be helpful... but was just a mess.

At least the trial software that came with my macs were ones that people might actually be interested in using (MS Office, Quicken, iWork.)
 
to be fair. I've never used garage band. I've never used iMovie. I've never used iDVD. And Macs don't come with an office suite something that everyone I know uses. Now to remove Garage Band is a massive PITA because Apple hides crap all over your hard drive in both library folders, along with the app in your app folder. The other apps I don't know if they take up as much space or not. I just never bothered to uninstall them because I could, at the very least see myself using them one day.
That isn't to say the ad is wrong. Your typical dell comes with 40 metric tons of bull crap. Every Dell comes with MaCafee Total Protection demo that times out after 90 days. This alone drags down 60% of the computers I during the week. People with 256MB of RAM, which I see surprisingly often, CAN NOT run this app without it dragging their system down. Even 512MB is pushing it. Then you have their lite burning software that can come from two different companies depending on the age of the system. But there also Apple doesn't have a robust burning solution in OS X either. What the real kicker is, is the helper software that Dell ships with ever system. This software looks for updates to drivers, looks for problems on the system, and generally annoys the crap out of the user with popups on the lower right side of the screen. This is why I always. I mean ALWAYS nuke the OS that any Dell system ships with. Nuke it from orbit. Its the only way to be sure.
you can always restore the software from the CD's Dell sent. IF Dell sent CD's. In the last year I've been noticing that they are "forgetting" to even send driver and app CD's with the system. (I'm 100% certain that its another cost cutting measure. (Like fast food places not offering you ketchup if you don't ask for it and if you do you get 1-2 packets only) So what happens is I get onsite to replace a DOA hard drive only to find that schmucks at Dell didn't send the end user restore CD's. either with the original order or with the sent out hard drive.
Thankfully I have a set from my own personal stash of Dell Restore CD's. So I can at least get the OS installed for them. I don't have the drivers, and frankly I don't have the time to download those drivers before I need to move onto my next call. But I do call Dell up and get new restore CD's sent out to the customer. Unless I get some butthead who says that they send out restore CD's with every order and won't for this user, because they already did. (This is what drives me up the wall about Dell. You get their US based tech support and you can get anything from them. Life is good. You get an India based tech support rep and you guarantee that it will be like pulling teeth to get anything done. I go out of my way to fix Dell's ****ups and I keep asking myself why. *sighs* I need a new job.

MacboobsPro said:
But Quicktime is VERY useful, even without it being the Pro version (which I always upgrade too).
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Meh. Whatever. It plays a very narrow set of media types unless you add third party hacks to it. That and you can't get full screen without....yep you guessed it. Third party hacks. Heck VNC, even with its bugs, is 10 times the media player Quicktime is, and its FREE. It shoves Quicktime to the floor and stomps on its head like Mario.
 
While I suppose that it can be argued that macs also include trial software, it has nowhere near the impact of said software on a windows pc.

On the mac you can simply delete the software, yeah some small files will be left behind but they wont negatively impact the computers performance.

On a pc, a user that isn't quite as computer savvy as one of us won't be able to tell what software is running that is slowing him down. He can ctrl-alt-delete and see that no programs are running when in fact tons of proceses with jumbled letters for names are running in the background. He may not even know to look at the proceses tab on the task manager.

How will he know what to delete, and whether or not deleting it will harm is computer. If he does'nt delete them his computer will continue to waste resources running them.

This is the main difference, on a mac if you don't want to use the trial stuff you don't have to, but with windows the computer does it for you, regardless of your desires. And if you don't know what you are doing, it won't ever stop, because the removal process isn't as intuitive as in OS X.

^My 2 cents
 
mp.cain said:
While I suppose that it can be argued that macs also include trial software, it has nowhere near the impact of said software on a windows pc.

On the mac you can simply delete the software, yeah some small files will be left behind but they wont negatively impact the computers performance.

On a pc, a user that isn't quite as computer savvy as one of us won't be able to tell what software is running that is slowing him down. He can ctrl-alt-delete and see that no programs are running when in fact tons of proceses with jumbled letters for names are running in the background. He may not even know to look at the proceses tab on the task manager.

How will he know what to delete, and whether or not deleting it will harm is computer. If he does'nt delete them his computer will continue to waste resources running them.

This is the main difference, on a mac if you don't want to use the trial stuff you don't have to, but with windows the computer does it for you, regardless of your desires. And if you don't know what you are doing, it won't ever stop, because the removal process isn't as intuitive as in OS X.

^My 2 cents
Click to expand...

The PC Decrapifier

It removes:

QuickBooks Trial
NetZero Installers
Earthlink Setup Files
Corel Photo Album 6
Tiscali Internet
Wanadoo Europe Installer
Get High Speed Internet!
Internet Service Offers Launcher
Dell Search Assistant
Norton Ghost 10.0
Symantec Live Update
MS Plus Photo Story 2LE
MS Plus Digital Media Installer
McAffee
Norton Internet Security
Google Desktop
Google Toolbar
AOL US
AOL UK
MusicMatch Jukebox
MusicMatch Music Services
Wild Tangent Games
Norton AntiVirus 2005
Norton Security Center
Norton AntiSpam
PC-cillin Internet Security 12
Corel Snapfire Plus SE
Yahoo! Music Jukebox
Vongo
Office 2003 Trial Assistant
Norton Protection Center
HP Rhapsody
ESPN Motion
Run Registry Entries
Desktop Icons
Startup Menu Items
Reset IE Home and Search Pages
Corel WordPerfect
Roxio RecordNow
Sonic DLA
Sonic Update Manager
Sonic RecordNow Audio
Sonic RecordNow Copy
Roxio MyDVD LE
Microsoft Office Standard Edition 2003
Quicken 2006


Its not going to catch everything. Esp the dell specific helper programs. But it helps. Again I say nuke it from orbit. Its the only way to be sure.
 
Zadillo said:
That's fine to have that attitude, but the reality is the same regardless. By your standards, a lot of people who buy computers these days are not competent enough to not have any of these problems.

I don't think that's really a satisfying answer though. Do we really say "OK, we've got this product that most people use now, but most of them aren't computer literate enough to specifically know how to do a clean install of their OS or manually remove everything they don't need, while keeping the few bits of software they do still need for their computer to run"?

A lot of people these days buy their computers to browse the web, send e-mail, write some letters in their word processor, listen to music, etc.

Admittedly we could have a long discussion about the importance of computer literacy, but either way, the reality is that for a lot of those people, the experience is marred, and they aren't going to have the expertise themselves to deal with it.

You can either take the attitude of "You just aren't competent enough to solve these problems so you should put up with them" or "We should take a look at what is being sold and maybe try and make a better experience for those people without having to learn what every little service and program does and what to remove and how to remove it".
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Admittedly it is true that many people aren't competent enough to fully utilize the modern computer as a tool. It isn't as easy as the monkey wrench or for some, even the chopsticks. But I think it is a bit negative for me to believe that people should play the game of tumble down the intellectual hill and expect professionals in every field to solve their problems in the form of marketable products. I think that is naive thinking. A lot of people who use computers never take full advantage of the complete programmability, but rather use them as full-time entertainment tools (something that can be good or bad).

I think that to put this in perspective, computers is a vast waste for a lot of uses and purposes in the modern life, and I think that a lot of people who really have trouble with computing in anyway, are at least some of them, who don't need computers.

But I do agree with you in theory, that we should provide some tools or means to alleviate the learning curve taken to the personal computer in the modern day, to simplify various aspects, but for those who need the computing experience.
 
SiliconAddict said:
Meh. Whatever. It plays a very narrow set of media types unless you add third party hacks to it. That and you can't get full screen without....yep you guessed it. Third party hacks. Heck VNC, even with its bugs, is 10 times the media player Quicktime is, and its FREE. It shoves Quicktime to the floor and stomps on its head like Mario.
Click to expand...

Don't forget Mplayer OSX (or *nix versions)
 
Macrumors said:


Apple has released a new "Get A Mac" ad named Stuffed. In the ad, PC appears bloated and explains how he is stuffed with a bunch of trail software that he doesn't need and how it is slowing him down.

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This comment probably has been made, but what about that trial version of Microsoft Office that has been shipping with Macs of late? :eek:
 
mac 2005 said:
This comment probably has been made, but what about that trial version of Microsoft Office that has been shipping with Macs of late? :eek:
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I don't like MS Oriffice. You can always get rid of it yourself I guess, if they keep on doing this.
 
I love these ads. Even if they aren't completely accurate and exaggerate certain aspects of each other's products for marketing purposes, they are usually very funny and well written and acted.

Have these ads ever won any advertising awards? Just curious.
 
The real irony here is that Intel Macs running Windows are much more lean and efficient than a typical user's PC. Whenever I have to boot up XP on my MacBook, people tend to be amazed that it's ready to go in like 30 seconds as opposed to the several minutes theirs take to launch all the misc. crap.

My dad was going to get a MacBook but our network guy at work talked him out of it, and now he's got some POS with horrible battery life that's slow as hell and getting slower by the day. Of course it's loaded up with a ridiculous amount of stuff he'll never use.

For the people who posted about Quicktime not running fullscreen:

http://www.dashboardwidgets.com/showcase/details.php?wid=605

or an alternative:

http://www.dashboardwidgets.com/showcase/details.php?wid=605
 
when somebody said that these usually come in threes...since they only released two (computer cart and flashback)...I guess this is just the third one. I like it best out of the three, cart comes in a close second tho...
 
I like this commercial because it's 100% true.
We got two new vista PCs in our house, and I had to spend an hour on each one deleting all the trial software, going into MSCONFIG and deleting all of the uselss start up items...I should have just formatted it...but whatever. There was stuff from every internet company I could think of - amazon, AOL, Ebay, etc. There were like 3 photo editing programs that were all garbage. PCs should ship with the following, and nothing more:
MS Office trial, MSN Messenger, Adobe reader, Norton trial, Picasa image editor, and that's it. That's all most people would need to get running, but they dont actually care about teh customer's needs, but rather how much money they make. When I got my iMac, I was surprised I didn't have to waste al lthat time deleting everything.
 
I haven't seen the new Get A Mac ad, but I did see the new Audible ad on MacRumours. It expands to cover most of the page when you mouse over it. Freaking annoying. Why not include some pop-ups and pop-unders too?
 
hagjohn said:
My macbook came with trial software. How stupid can these commercials get.
Click to expand...

I think by making PC so large they were trying to put the point across of "too much trial software that is irrelevant to the <average>
user".

My powerbook shipped with trial software that I wasn't interested in. Of course, Apple would be fools not to include iWork demo!

Sesshi said:
The best so far has been the security guy ad, but that was more of the same Apple hot air too.
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Yep. Thats my favourite too!

Macmaniac said:
I did enjoy the ad, however your mac does not come free with a word processing program or spreadsheet maker. Back in the day we got AppleWorks for free!!!

Come on Apple give us something better then text edit without spending $$$
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The rumours are iWork will be free with OSX10.5 - Hope so!

I'm surprised iWork doesn't come free with the machine, like iLife does.
 
Again, nothing says inferiority complex like blatant potshots (Pepsi, anyone?), but this one and the PC cart one are both spot-on and hilarious.

It'll be nice when Apple realizes they can just sell their software w/o referencing Windows at all, but that may never happen.
 
MattG said:
"This American Life" featured a funny story about him last week on the episode "Nice Work If You Can Get It."

http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=201671138&s=143441&i=15381155
Click to expand...
See also: http://www.areasofmyexpertise.com/
Mgkwho said:
Now who said the other day those two were the last of 'em? :p

This one's great!

-=|Mgkwho
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Me like too.
G5Unit said:
Justin Long's voice is really starting to get annoying.
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I think he's likeable. Don't find him irritating at all.
flopticalcube said:
We still find the ads amusing, but are they still working or are PC people just starting to get irritated by them?
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I think the concensus is that the ads have been highly successful. Now, Apple is really trying to ram their message(s) home and cement it in potential switchers' consciousness. They are right to continue the ads.
 
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