Most of us have probably seen the previously ubiquitous all-white background commercial contrasting a trendy, young, and known actor who representing an Apple computer with the stodgy, suit & tie, middle aged lesser known actor portraying a PC. At first I treated this series of commercials with the same level of regard as I would water coming out of the faucet. But in the past couple of years as I’ve been interested in the computer market and trying to design a desktop computer for myself, the ad campaign has haunted my thoughts.
This commercial came to mind as I considered whether or not people actually cared about this supposed ongoing argument between Macs and PCs. The acronym PC is after all just personal computer, and are not Macs computers for personal use? Truly this is just a commercial that was meant to create opposition and conflict between different computer users, rather an “us versus them” attitude, all for the sake of crafting brand loyalty. In the market for computers, competition for consumers should be won and lost based on the performance and price of their products. There should not be any hesitance to switch computer brands just because you had previously purchased from “x” brand. It is similar to not being resistant to buying honey wheat bread if you bought nine grain wheat bread before.
To really say that the computing world is Mac versus PC is to say that the automobile market is Ford versus cars, or Bananas versus fruit. MacBook Pros, iMacs, Dell Latitudes, Inspiron Notebooks, and Alienware desktops, they are all computers. Within that playing field they are all equal; they all do, for lack of a better verb, computing. I don’t imagine many families getting torn apart after cousin Timothy bought a Mac when everyone else in the family uses non-Macs, except maybe if it was an iFruit…those were just plain odd.
If someone’s profession involves a lot of graphic design, it makes sense for them to buy an Apple as Photoshop and editing software are industry standard. Just as, if someone really wants to customize what goes into their computer from the type of hard drive to the color of the back-lit keyboard, they might look into a wide variety of brands or building their own computer piece by piece.
I can appreciate a great advertising campaign just as much as anyone else. I still get laughs out of the Old Spice commercials with Isaiah Mustafa, the live action commercial for Halo ODST still stands as my favorite commercial of all time, and the originally freecreditreport.com band’s songs still echo in the corridors of my mind. It would just seem what began as a humorous take on the difference between PC users and Mac users has only inflamed a fan base that was already fairly zealous to begin with. If there is anyone reading this who is thinking about how to market a new product please take the time to make any kind of advertising you produce to actually focus on what your product can do, and how it stands above the competition without being childish.
(And as long as we’re asking, don’t make a product that requires medical warnings and disclaimers spoken at slightly below light-speed. Looking at you, erectile dysfunction ads.)
There are not crowds of Apple or PC users waging an eternal war over who has a better computer product. In reality, there are people for each computer company, each hard drive manufacturer, each monitor company, all waging an eternal war to grab you, the consumer, and drag you aside to shower you with promises of the best performance, the coolest thing, and maybe even a free lanyard in the hopes of you choosing them as worthy of your dollar.
Of course, on the Internet, one can find anything. This includes people who will swear by their computer company and will spew nothing but hate towards any competing brands. But for every one loud and caps lock using forum poster screaming “death to Apple” there are a dozen other people who would ask what functionality you are looking for and point you in the direction of some pre-built computers or even suggest individual components for a custom build.
So, in the end there is no Mac versus PC, despite their trendy commercials and otherwise banter. Buying one type of computer over the other does not turn you into an alternative “cool kid” or an aging businessman. If it did, how to explain me, owning, and writing this very column on, a MacBook Pro…running a Windows operating system? Am I some twisted businessman/hipster hybrid? Do I go into Starbucks just to manage my stock portfolios and create slide shows in public?
Perhaps there is something about gamers or just technophiles that makes us predisposed to being attracted to battles of “us” versus “them.” Apple has certainly used this to their advantage to capture an audience for their commercials, as we are the same audience that entertains the PC versus console “war.”
Never forget that just beneath the claims of helping you, the user, become cooler or exponentially more efficient by purchasing their product is the ever-hungering maw of a company, questing ruthlessly for your open wallet. So before you go burning a pile of MacBooks or rubbing magnets all over your roommate’s Dell, remember this: you both use computers, you both might be nerds, and you both love the Internet.
At the end of the argument, who cares if his computer is white and has a half-eaten fruit on the cover, or if yours has anything but aforementioned fruit on the case?