I was reminded today of Apple’s ‘Get A Mac’ ad campaign from the early 2000s (thanks to Jeff Johnson’s recent post). Now well over a decade old, those Mac vs PC commercials depicted a “Mac” played by Justin Long and a “PC” played by John Hodgman. They were incredibly popular and entertaining — and successful. I remember getting my very first MacBook around the time this campaign started.
The irony of this old ad campaign really is shocking in retrospect. The particular commercial that Jeff linked to was this one making fun of Windows Vista, which did not age well. Today, you could rewrite this ad (and probably many of the others in this campaign) with one small tweak and they would be as relevant as ever. Instead of “Mac” vs “PC”, the two characters could be “Mac OS X” (the ‘Big Cat’ releases) and “macOS” (the ‘California’ releases), where the former ruthlessly pokes fun at the shortcomings, usability issues, security theater, bugs, and other problems in the latter.
I wonder if anyone in Cupertino ever thinks about this?
I truly lament the degradation of macOS in recent years — not because I think it is now equally as bad as Windows (it’s not), but because I know how great and nearly flawless it used to be.