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New Microsoft Ad Campaign Targets Mac Prices

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k2k koos said:
No seriously, even if two machines on paper are the same (say a Macbook Pro 17" and a similarly spec's HP) do you really think they are? I bet that the Macbook screen is color callibrated, has a better backlight (I've seen many pc's with that weird blueish hue around the screen edges, which admittedly get's better on more expensive models, and hey presto not as much more different than a Mac) is better put together, etc.
Look you can get 4 people in a Toyota and drive them around at 70 MPH relatively comfortably, and you can do the same in a Mercedes, but which ride will they enjoy most, and is it worth the extra money to you?
That's why there is a market for Macs! :apple:
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Please stop with the car analogies.
Design: The Merc looks nicer, the Mac looks nicer definitely. The laptops in the ad looked awful.* +1 for Apple.
Speed: The Merc would be faster, but the Mac faster than a PC? Nope. -1 for Apple.
Interior: The interior of the Merc uses high quality bits, the Mac? The same old hard drive, RAM, graphics card, processors you can find at any tech store. -1 for Apple.

*That said I dislike the design for the 17" MBP. The MacBook design does not scale nicely to 17" as one would like.
 
It will be an effective ad. Price is the deciding factor for most users.

I've been looking to make the switch myself but price has held me back. Every time I get close to enough money for a Mac and Adobe CS"insert any number here" something happens or comes up that I need the money for. My girlfriend has only used PCs. I have demonstrated the Mac in the stores to her. She likes it but she points out the price. Her $599 laptop gets her on the net and has MS Word for school papers.
I've explained why PC's are cheaper to many people (the bonus crappy trial software from companies that pay the manufacture to install the software...thus lowering pc prices) and the lower price wins. Honestly XP is fine. Windows Virus...I mean Vista is still the worst OS I've ever used. I recently started running Ubuntu off a CD and it runs faster off the CD then Vista from the harddrive. I also get double the battery life out of Ubuntu.

I wish Apple could get their computer prices down a couple hundred to win over more average PC users. I think if you want ease of use and to be productive a Mac is worth it. If all you want is email and f'n' myspace a PC is fine.....
 
I prefer OS X but if MS were to bring out something better I'm not such a fanboy as to never consider switching back.
I can't even be bothered watching the advert. Reading these posts it's just restating the same old same old. However, if their point is OS X is a premium product then I can't see that Apple would be too unhappy with that. Recession or not people like having something they see as the best even if it may cost more. Most people already think Macs cost more - if the best MS can say is that it's cheaper then they've just spent a lot of money telling people what they already feel.
 
bigtriece said:
Not to add salt to the wounds but Apple made a very bad decision going with Nvidia.

From the Wall Street Journal:
http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-20090326-718033.html

Once the Intel releases their own i5 Core processors for laptops, Apple will not be able to adopt them because their operating system is tied to Nvidia's Open CL architecture.

Apple will have to write two different codes for Intels own GPU and the older Nvidia (current) GPUs. This will incredibly time consuming and inefficient, and will result in all sorts of problems for Snow Leopard.

Nice one Apple:)
Click to expand...

Do they give out prices for cluelessness? OpenCL is an open standard, developed and supported among others by NVidia, ATI and Apple. A program is translated into code targeting the LLVM runtime compiler, which then picks the optimal hardware on your machine for the code in question and generates code for it. It is used for OpenGL on MacOS X today. It has backends for NVidia and ATI graphics hardware, for PowerPC, for ARM, and for Intel processors including SSL today. Intels planed Larrabee hardware is just an Intel x86 processor on steroids. It is absolutely trivial for Apple to create an LLVM backend for that processor.
 
When I was young, single and financially retarded, I paid $8,000 for a PowerBook G3.

Now I'm shopping for a computer again married, poor and financially destitute.

There's only one choice for me -- Hackintosh!

I have about $400 and if I get a laptop it will probably be a used X60/T60 for compatibility/performance or a new/used MSI Wind U100 for ultra-light and a few coolness points.

Another desktop would be more bang for buck, but I'm going to be working from home and if I can sit outside coding in my undies that equals more coolness points than any Best Buy or Apple Store can provide:cool:
 
I really like the way they now cemented in the fact that her FIRST CHOICE would have been a Mac. Sorry she's just not cool, but oh well.

Now that she was given a $700 for even if its an inferior machine... Finish the commercial by:

  1. find her, may be she should be returning it to the BB and then finally redeem her self by buying the 15" or 17" mac!
  2. capture the spirit after a month of use when the machine is much slower
  3. or after the her 1st virus attack, trojan, spyware, malware, etc...
  4. or her friends on how happy they are after she infected them!

Then see how happy she be.

what else can you guys come up with!!!:p
 
applecultvictim said:
Build your own bmw...oh you cant...
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Are you really using a car analogy to prove a point? Try and get all the parts together to build a BMW... take quite a few years of mechanics to understand how to build the motor, travel to Germany to learn the BMW mechanics specifically...etc..etc..

It's not rocket science to put together a computer. Youtube that crap, or go read up on the hundreds of tutorials. It's simple, I've done it many times. (restate-I'm a mac owner)

You're grasping at straws bud.
 
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 2_2_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/525.18.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.1.1 Mobile/5H11 Safari/525.20)

I'm not quite sure why so many people are getting so defensive of apple - if anything it might help apple realize that we are in the middle of a recession and that it is about time they had another look at their obscene pricing.

Good on you microsoft.
 
Didn't they forget the TCO ?

I recently printed out a list of the software I use for my MacBook Air - a long list, coming out of 1Password. I was on a train, with a couple hours to spare, USB 3G at the ready, so I got the idea to compare my portfolio of Mac Hard and Software with equivalent Windows stuff ... so I spent the next while on eBuyer etc. to find prices for the comparable software.

I work in IT, mainly as a bid manager, where TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) often is the dealbreaker. And the result of my minisurvey was absolutely convincing. Here's the result :

Total purchase at list price of fully operational Mac with all software I currently use (list too long for this - 53 different apps, and 25 Gb to spare on my 80Gb Air) : UK £ 3244,- all inclusive

Comparable hardware spec for a HP Laptop and full complement of similar software : UK £ 5334,- all inclusive.

So the hardware may be more expensive, but the software you can get for the Mac is both better and cheaper - I use iWork, Merlin, PixelMetrics, OmniGraffle and Rapidweaver, for example. Try looking at the list prices for those, and compare to Office, Project, PhotoShop, Viso and FrontPage, and you will see a price difference worth writing home about.

Add to that the time you save NOT waiting for the OS to make its mind up whether it should work or not, NOT fiddling forever to uninstall an application, NOT spending loads of time protecting yourself against attacks, and NOT losing a whole day's work because your Word document crashed and couldn't be retrieved. Also consider all the built in features in OSX that are extras in Windows, such as PDF exports, and the general useability of OSX on top.

I don't know about the honored readers of this, but I use my Mac to make money, be productive, generate stuff - I need a computer I can rely on to work, and have no patience adapting the way I want to work to the way the OS thinks I should work.

Therefore, Macs for me. Or Linux, for that matter, but definately not expensive bloatware. In my personal experience, the cost/benefit ratio for a Mac is, on all counts, far superior to a Windows box.

And then you are a bit cool, too ... :eek:
 
Not that anyone will read this post, but I just wanted to be part of the historical thread. The ad ultimately works. It's drawn a MASSIVE response here and has struck a chord. It's great that there is a $700 17" option and Netbook options We'd love Apple to offer them, they don't for many reasons. Though Windows 7 seems just fine to me. Ultimately it's about the Applications -- Scrivener is the best writing program and Final Cut my preferred editing program.

I think that people forget that as lovely as computers are for music and photos and file management or whatever, it's the serious applications that matter.
 
Hot or not?

Yes she may not be cool enough for a Mac, but I think she is kinda hot. Thoughts?
 
maya-aaah

I disagree, but one thing I do know is that your business doesn't use GPU intensive applications. If you try Maya side by side on Windows vs Mac the Windows machine will blow it away because drivers for the insane graphics subsystem you are so fond of are terrible on OS X.
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sorry, wha? with vista? HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

ha, ahem...

and isn't this a thread about a sub-$1000 notebook? you want to run maya on that computer she bought?

HAHAHHAHAHA.

ya, I'll have the macbook pro thanks...
 
Microsoft should have never created Ads mentioning there competition. A market leader should never do that.
 
Cassie said:
Ah yes, I'm a fan of XKCD myself.

I really need to stop reading and posting in these threads. They make me angry and I can't do anything about it, which just makes me even more pissed off. :eek:

My main stance is this: Some people prefer Windows, some Linux, some OS X. Some people are happy with their cheap PC's with Windows. Let them be, and try not to make snide comments of which this thread would be empty without.:rolleyes:
Click to expand...

Everyone feels a need to prove everyone else wrong, because it's the internet. Mac users overpay and need to justify their purchase. Windows users experience BSODs all the time and get viruses. Linux is too hard. Let's keep the generalizations and BS going!
 
I'd call the ad a cheap shot. I know that girls love big screens. But they'd never ever buy a 17" monster without particular need.

I was shopping at least twice with females for notebook. Price is the king. But portability is even more so. Girls do not want to carry big bags around. And 17" PC based cheapo notebook does require to have an enormous notebook bag - because without ultra protective case 17" PC cheapo notebook would break within months of use.

I'd love Apple ware to be cheaper. But at the moment they still easily justify the price tag to me.

And in my case - UMBP17 - I know for sure how PC counterparts look like (uglier) and how they are spec'ed (better). And I also know how (un)portable they are when compared to UMBP17. I've been working once for two month in same room with consultants who all had 17" of all possible origins - HP, Dell, Compaq and Sony. Compared them all to each other to my heart content. HPs by far are best - but not the cheapo crap for $700: my colleague had a 17" HP lappy company bought for him for ~$2800. Professional 17" all cost in the range. Sony (not Apple!) I'd say are the most expensive because they are quite portable yet packed with all possible geek/nerd stuff (and the kitchen sink!).

P.S.

BlizzardBomb said:
You're not paying any more for "premium components".
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Devil in details. Try to build a PC using peripherals with e.g. only solid capacitors. Have you seen the prices? That's what I call a "quality components". You wont believe what kind of s**t generally is used to glue the PC components together. Two PCs with same "components" at same clock speeds would have both performance and price difference of 50-100%.

I'm not implying that Apple uses higher grade components. (*) But most Macs work like if Apple actually was doing precisely that.

(*) Actually they selectively do.
 
Yeah, Apple are just plain overpriced

It's true, the only reason that a person is going to choose a PC over a Mac is because of the significantly higher price of the Mac counterpart. And in this recession, which option do you think the people on a budget are going to choose?

On another thought, if Apple reduced the prices of their computers to be on-par with their PC hardware equivalents, perhaps Apple would provide a decent challenge to Microsoft in the computing world?
 
philips said:
Devil in details. Try to build a PC using peripherals with e.g. only solid capacitors. Have you seen the prices? That's what I call a "quality components". You wont believe what kind of s**t generally is used to glue the PC components together. Two PCs with same "components" at same clock speeds would have both performance and price difference of 50-100%.
Click to expand...
This fact alone tells me that you need to take a look at hardware again. It's very hard to get a board without solid capacitors unless you are literally scraping the bottom of the barrel. Even the lowly, entry level Gigabyte G31 motherboards for just over $50 have solid capacitors.

Lets not even bring up the rash of bad capacitors in not just the iMacs/eMacs just a few years ago.
 
Whatevers!

Microsoft looks sooooo lame when trying to be hip.

I bet you Lauren is a Mac person in real life... a lot of LA actors have an old Mac lappy and are too poor to buy a new one. She's going to buy a new MacBook with the duckets she's getting for this national commercial: that's good money.

I do want to say, however, that she is a redhead. And a geek. And I love her glasses. I want to love her long time.
 
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