RSSMicrosoft 'Laptop Hunters' ad gets changed at Apple's behest
By Tim Conneally | Published July 24, 2009, 11:58 AM
Thanks to Apple's well-publicized complaint about Microsoft's "Laptop Hunters" advertisements (Kevin Turner, Microsoft's Chief Operating Officer called it "the greatest single phone call in the history that [he'd] ever taken in business,") the ads have been changed.
Apple's legal department called demanding that Microsoft change the "Laptop Hunter" ads because they are factually inaccurate. In response, Turner said, "We're just going to keep running them and running them and running them."
The ads showed consumers looking for laptops, and ultimately deciding on Windows-based PCs because of their value for the price. The series famously opened with a young woman declaring, "I'm just not cool enough to be a Mac person," and continued with a number of spots echoing the same theme, shoppers forgoing Macs for Windows computers over value issues.
Despite Turner's claim that Microsoft wouldn't change the ads, the latest in the series has reportedly been edited to mollify Apple.
The one minute "Lauren and Sue" spot originally had a girl and her mother shopping for a laptop, and the daughter said, "This Mac is $2,000, and that's before adding anything."
The mother then asks, "Why would you pay twice the price?"
"I wouldn't!" Lauren replies. Ultimately, the girl leaves with a sub-$1000 Dell XPS notebook. According to Advertising Age, this segment has been replaced by Lauren simply saying, "It seems like you're paying a lot for the brand."
Microsoft confirmed that it had updated the ad to reflect the new lower price of the particular Mac they showed in the commercial, but said it does not reflect a broad change in the campaign.
This really is a Winblows fanboy site. I never seen so much bitter Mac envy. Oh well, I'll leave you with a couple of quotes from that genius that seem to sum it all up...
"Sometimes one pays most for the things one gets for nothing."
"Great spirits have often encountered violent opposition from weak minds."
... thumbs-down away, Winblows Fanboy Hypnotards
Score: -1
|My Mac and OSX just plain kicks butt. I'll never go back to a PC\Windows with the kind of baloney MS puts you through. You've all been had and I feel sorry for you. The quality of the multitude of hours I spend on a computer is way too valuable to chince on a few hundred bucks to get a PITA Windows (P)ieceof(C)hit. You can keep your hunks of junk Terminalx and all the rest. Maybe one day you'll put yourselves out of your own misery and dump that
"expensive giant mess of kludgy workarounds to a dead-end technology" -dvorak
you call your beloved Windows. Best of luck.
Score: -5
|I have owned Apple computers since the Apple 2E up to an iMac, which this reply comes from, and a MacBook. In all the years since I purchased the first one, in 1984, I have never had one (1) computer crash. You PC people, none of you, could ever say that! My wife insists on a PC and I hear nothing but b****ing about having to De-Frag it, snail slow operation, loss of data and photos.
Who needs all that headache? We disagree on a lot of other things too. A PC might be CHEAPER but the real value in a computer is that it works, ALWAYS, without problems.
Score: -4
|Paid a premium for that hemi too I'd guess. How's that working out? I got a diesel that would tow your house off it's foundation and I'd bet gets double the mpg. And I bet 10 to 1 my stock motorcycle would totally smoke your hemi.
(lol) My son does computers for a living. The macs are crashing at record rates he tells me.
I have an I7core now running Win7 and what do you know...no crashes yet...HMmmm...
and I bet it will run teraflops around your mac. Hey...but really.. I have a pair of really fancy Prada shoes even though it's the Ecco's I wear. They haven't crashed either.
Good luck with that 2E thing. If you need some 5 1/4" disks...I have some spares
Score: 1
|Try to stay ON Top dimwit. The best you can do is make lame comparisons of trucks and shoes? LOL. Get a life and while your at it, get a Mac.
Score: -5
|Have you tried actually doing some work with a mac? ;)
I use both OSX and Windows. I bought a macbook pro because it's nice hardware, not because the OS is much good. It crashes more often than my Vista x64 laptop and cost much more too. Nicer screen though.
OS9 was a piece of s***. OSX is much much better, but if you're saying you've never had MacOS crash EVER then I'm suspecting that before OSX you had a mac in a box that you used as some kind of furniture.
Score: 4
|Microsoft knows better than to piss the Mighty Apple off. Who's your daddy Microsoft?
Score: -9
|_ me dumb consumer - need MicroMonopoly to tell me what buy. What do you know, they recommend machine with Window OS. What coincidence.
Score: -8
|some apple ipods cost as much as a pc!
so even if microsoft paid me, i wouldn't buy an apple.
sorry apple, i prefer value over statement.
: )
Score: 0
|and go figure they explode or blow up or burn you
and then the people that make them try to hide the fact about any and all of this
Score: 1
|Wow, you are a great friend...Viruses don't magically appear on computers, they come from doing something you shouldn't be or not keeping your computer up to date.
Apple and Linux can get viruses it doesn't affect them but they can spread em, so who knows maybe you sent it to him.
Score: 1
|A friend called me last night as his new cloner Vista laptop got a trojan installed on it; kept popping up adult entertainment ads. The funny part is, two weeks ago when he got it, he said he saved $400 over the 15" Mac Book Pro for the "same" thing, but that turned into well, i also bought Photoshop Elements, Premire Elements, Norton Internet Security, etc... which ended up costing *MORE* than the Mac which i found funny, but you do actually have to use the computer too....anyhow....i refused to help "clean" it out and told him that is what you get for getting the "higher value" (ROFL) cloner Windows box. Now he has to go to Geek Squad or whatever Windows users have to do to fix their broken OS and pay even _more_
Score: -14
|well it's not a fault of the pc, but a fault of your friend for going to those virus friendly porn sites. I never have gotten any virus on my vista pc and I have it since it was released. stop your fud on this crap. If one of your hobbies is going on porn sites then go ahead and installa linux distro... problem solved.
Score: 3
|so you are saying all those Windows viruses only come from porn sites?
Score: -12
|i welcome folks like your friend into switching to Ubuntu, Mac, prob ChromeOS
Score: -3
|A friend called me last night as his new apple OSX macbook kept kernel panicing; kept panicing whenever he clicked anything. The funny part is, two weeks ago when he got it, he said he spent $400 over the 18" Acer laptop for the "same" thing, but that turned into well, i also got the wonderful "Mac Experience", I have ithis and ithat all over up and down my AWESOME macbook, etc... it costs *MORE* than the PC, but is SOOOOO totally worth the value, which i found funny, but you do actually have to use the computer too....anyhow....i refused to help "fix" it and told him that is what you get for getting the "higher value" (ROFL) apple box. Now he has to go to an Apple Store or whatever Apple users have to do to fix their broken OS and pay even _more_, because ofcourse, his warranty doesn't cover being a moron.
....True story.
Score: 9
|@neoprimal obvious feeble troll attempt is obvious feeble troll attempt.
Score: -13
|And yours is not? Bad troll who is in troll denial
Score: 6
|...is in denial.
(fatty's apparently been browsing too many "lolcat" sites...)
Score: 6
|A friend called me last night as his oh so powerful OSX can't play any games that he wanted to play. The funny part is, two weeks ago when he got it, he said he got great advice from someone named fatty because fatty said OSX can do everything that Windows can do, and cost less in the long run, even though it's obvious that you pay for more shiny stuff, which I found funny, since you do have to use the computer too, and not just look at it...anyhow, I decided to help him, but told him he deserved to be broke because he listened to a blind hardcore fan and said that the thing to do now is he's got to buy Windows to run all the software he'll ever need. Now he's hating fatty because he had to buy an extra copy of Windows while paying for OSX that he'll never need to use again, and having to get an extra mortgage every time he wants to do an upgrade.
Score: 6
|Ever heard of Parallels, VMware Fussion or Virtual Box which is FREE Einstein? That should take care of your friends childish game cravings.
Score: -7
|yup thems are nice warez, too bad Apple won't make it easier for PC users to run a retail copy of OS X on that same hardware, virtually even, like another companys not so restricted OS allows for
Score: 4
|and i bet u like running games that look like slideshows interworld7
Score: 1
|your friend should probably check to see if the browser with "hijackthis". then delete the lines beginning with "R".
but you bring up an interesting point.
when people have a budget to work from, the money saved from not buying an apple can then be used to buy third party specialty software.
Score: 1
|Hey 'fatty', I agree with you. I wouldn't touch my wife's PC either. Frankly, I wouldn't be able to 'fix' hers anyway. I have never had any experience in fixing my Mac. I HAVEN'T HAD TO.
Score: -3
|Or.. howabout the free thing called.... BOOTCAMP. SO you can run Windows on the same hardware. If you need to game, reboot into Windows. If you need to do something else Windows related, use VMWare or Parallels on the Bootcamp partition (ie: if you MUST use Outlook for an Exchange server (though works fine in Crossover)). But, you also get 6+ hr battery life on the MacBook Pros.. the 17" is 7-8hr according to specs. My unibody 15" (1st gen unibody) gets about 5.5hrs with wifi and bluetooth enabled, with the screen at normal brightness. And, I've had to spend a lot more time fixing PCs than Macs, both hardware and OS wise. As another article I read recently, the lower the cost the equipment, the lower the quality of the parts. The sub-$300 netbooks generally are not made as sturdy as a $1000 PC laptop, etc.
Score: -1
|First of all, no he didn't. I sincerely doubt that the guy (who I'm assuming is some sweet gamer) went and bought a mac. I don't know any gamer in their right mind who would buy a mac. I happen to use a mac, but that's because I don't piss time away playing games because I'm GETTING WORK DONE. People want to complain about the price of Macs, that's their business and perhaps they're justified in doing so. If you can't afford one or don't want to pay for one or are more interested in playing Unreal Tournament 3, get a PC. But above all, don't make up some bogus story about how your friend took the time to call you up to talk about how he "can't play any games that he want[s]." This is a complete fabrication, you know it, I know it. If you were more concerned about stability and getting work done than playing redundant games, then perhaps your productivity would increase to the point where you'd have enough money to purchase a Mac.
Score: -1
|lol...so you havent had to fix your mac eh? I guess when you dont use something very much, you dont need to fix it...!! Maybe if I just used my PC to browse the internet like my neighbor does then it would never crash and never need to be fixed...lol :-) (My neighbor has a mac, bought it last year...and regrets it every day due to lack of games and the lack of ability to upgrade anything. He comes over to my apartment to use my laptop and play windows games over the lan with me (on my desktop PC) and my neighbor since his mac is worthless for games... So the OS is $30...yay...what good is it though if you cant do anything with it? Atleast that is my situation... :-P)
Score: 1
|I agree Apple should have stuck with the RISC CPU's im sure there were ways to make the RISC CPU's get speed of 2 or 3 ghz.
Score: -1
|What does the CPU instruction set have to do with any of this?
Also, if the latest Power offerings are any similar to what might have happened had Apple stayed with them, they greatly lack in the mobile and power-efficient areas, someting Apple is quite concerned with and probably part of the reason they left in the first place. Using Core, they can compete much better (and actually, for example, put a decent processor in their laptops--otherwise the MacBook Air, if not impossible, would have doubled as a handy frying pan).
Score: 0
|"Apple's well-publicized complaint about Microsoft's "Laptop Hunters" advertisements (...) the ads have been changed."
Great use of the Engrish ranguage.
Score: 2
|lol Seems to me that Apple is crying fowl when they have had ad's for years putting down PC's. Seems to me that Apple is just being a baby about the whole thing. I have both Mac's and PC's and they both have their pluses and minuses. Apples have always been more for less.
When the Mac's had their own CPU and other hardware it was hard to compare, but now that the only thing that really separates a Mac from a PC is the OS it is easy to compare them.
Score: 8
|i would be disappointed in this but this means Microsoft has won this fight so they don't need the commercials anymore. i mean i haven't seen a Mac vs. PC ad from apple in a long time
Score: 2
|whats the difference, still gets the message across loud and clear, broad range of choice and is anyone willing to argue we don't pay more for specific brands? lol... and about the prices? the ads run in canada too, Mac's aren't too cheap up here http://is.gd/1KxzM $1,149 MacBook starting price and you have 0 range of options for individual models. from my standpoint, the $ MS slaps on Apples products in most its ads are being kinda generous
the change in wording may have nothing to do with a request from Apple, maybe they just want to be honest, best to stick with the truth, hope to see Apple keep lowering their prices
Score: 1
|i mean, she said Mac seconds before anyhow, really.
Score: 0
|**** it. Stick a "recorded in 2008 - prices accurate at the time" at the bottom and keep showing them.
Score: 11
|Perfect!
Score: 2
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