The Mac ads – A Marketing Mistake
January 10th, 2007 at 3:02 pm by Colleen (Colleen's Blog)
Right. You have seen these ads. Our pal Justin from Dodgeball (Mac) and the stiffneck guy in suit who represents the PC. In the ads, MacIntosh claims to never need rebooting, always work with any components, and offer fun and games.
I have a new MacIntosh in a house with a PC engineer. It was a fight to get it, believe me. However, I have been doing graphic design for over 12 years and I felt that it was justified. It has come in handy, but it has died on me a few times and required rebooting, does not work with my scanner and definitely does not work with many of the games on the market that are hot right now.
I never expected anything else really because it is a computer and computers do those things. However, I think it is just stupid for MacIntosh to advertise as though they do not. They are just setting themselves up to fail. Also, saying that they are hacker-proof is just an INVITATION to the mindset of a hacker…HELLO?! Have you never MET a hacker?
Well, those are my thoughts. Those guys NEED me at Mac.
April said,
January 10th, 2007 at 4:21 pm
Well, they actually never say they are hacker proof. They say they are safe from spyware & viruses that are circulated through emails & downloads. It’s a bit of a difference. There have been one or two viruses which have been written specifically for a mac, but really not too many.
Also, a lot of peripherals don’t work with the mac not because of the mac, but because the manufacturer of the device doesn’t make a driver for the mac. My scanner doesn’t work with my new iMac, but it worked w/ my power book. That is mostly just due to the fact that it’s just too old. My scanner is 5 years old now so they’re just not making drivers for it any longer. They say they work with a large # of components. And generally nowadays if you buy a new digital type thing which hooks up to the computer it is going to work automatically with the mac. It’s just the older stuff that doesn’t because the Mac OS didn’t exist in its current form back then.
BTW the website looks all purdy
Chad said,
January 10th, 2007 at 8:37 pm
They aren’t safe from spyware and viruses… No computer is. They just haven’t been targeted in real force yet. Since most computers hooked to the Internet are Windows PCs, then hacker time writing viruses, trojans and spyware (oh my!) isn’t a good investment. If PCs were suddenly all replaced by Macs, rest assured it would be a matter of hours before Mac vulnerabilities were exploited in the same way Windows is. As painful as it might be for me personally to admit it, Macs are complex, useful computers. As such, they are as vulnerable as any platform.
Colleen said,
January 11th, 2007 at 6:02 pm
Oh, I would say that they imply “hacker-proof” hard enough for a 15 year old hacker to get bent and going about it which is my point. It is dumb marketing. And of course, the reason that the peripherals don’t work is, in effect, the same reason the hot games don’t work. People don’t write for Mac nearly like they write for PC.
I am not saying it is a bad machine at all. I am just saying that for such a smart company, this is some of the poorest marketing I have ever seen. It is really disappointing. Of course, they are cute and catchy which makes it even worse because they are getting seen. Being seen is not the same as being effective and being effective is not the same as being effective in the right way.