Hello. I’m A Really Annoying Personified Computer – Micro Mart

The plinky plonky music starts, and two familiar figures appear onscreen. “Hello, I’m a Mac” says one. “And I’m a PC,” the other one chips in. The new UK Apple adverts have started to appear everywhere, from London Underground platform billboards to cinema screens to newspapers; Mitchell and Webb’s smug faces peer out at you wherever you go. (Webb in this guise is particularly smug, even for him.)

The first time I spotted the posters on a Tube poster, it made me smile – it coincided, surely entirely by chance, with the launch of Windows Vista. At the time, there was very little fanfare for Vista (though that was remedied later with massive posters spelling out “Wow” at the end of Oxford Street, and video adverts at Tottenham Court Road station), so the sudden proliferation of Apple adverts stood out.

Also, I – along with a lot of other people – was still in the grip of Jobs-itis, since the iPhone had just been announced, and it seemed like Apple could do no wrong. But it didn’t take long before the adverts became really, really annoying…

Mitchell and Webb

In fairness, any ad campaign that showed up in as many places as this one did would get annoying. A quick quiz of friends around the country (and a query on the Micro Mart forum) showed that pretty much everyone has seen them, and most in a wide variety of locations. Seems it’s worse in London, but by no means confined to just London. And it’s just not possible to constantly be shown the same skits over and over and over without getting bored… and then increasingly irritated. However, the Apple adverts seem to have gotten up people’s noses for other reasons than just the fact that they’re plastered all over every bus-stop, shown in every cinema, and occupying all available space on MySpace’s home page.

Charlie Brooker wrote a blog entry over at The Guardian explaining why he hates Macs, starting off with a long rant about the Mitchell and Webb ads. He also pointed out, in a far more eloquent (and ranty) way than I could (and get away with) what’s wrong with the casting choices:

“They are a logical choice in one sense (everyone likes them), but a curious choice in another, since they are best known for the television series Peep Show – probably the best sitcom of the past five years – in which Mitchell plays a repressed, neurotic underdog, and Webb plays a selfish, self-regarding poseur. So when you see the ads, you think, “PCs are a bit rubbish yet ultimately lovable, whereas Macs are just smug, preening tossers.” In other words, it is a devastatingly accurate campaign.”

So, there’s that. I know someone who can’t so much as look at David Mitchell without recoiling in horror, and Mitchell’s voice practically brings him out in hives. Personally, it’s Webb that freaks me out the most; I can’t look at him in the same way ever since he spent the entire running time of Confetti wandering around starkers.

But the casting choices aren’t the only things wrong with the Apple ads. There’s also the fact that they play a little, er, fast and loose with the truth. Setting aside the bus stop and newspaper ads for the moment, there are currently twelve Mitchell and Webb ads on the UK Apple site. (Every single one features Robert Webb being offensively smug.) Each of them seems to entail ‘PC’ sniping at ‘Mac’ out of jealousy at Mac’s superiority – which is funny, when you think about it, because really the adverts are a series of swipes at the PC over inadequacies it doesn’t even really have.

Talking Scribble

The first advert, for example, is titled Naughty Step. PC explains that the Naughty Step is for people who want to enjoy ‘fun stuff’, and he proceeds to tell Mac to sit on it. Because PCs are serious business, whereas Macs are for fun. This is a common theme, actually; Office At Home, Tentacle, and Pie Chart all make the same assertions.

But if you were a serious gamer, which would you choose? Hmm.

Other accusations levelled at Windows-running PCs are that they’re difficult to set up, and don’t just work straight out of the box; that they don’t connect easily to networks; that they have to be restarted all the time, unlike the allegedly super-stable Macs, and that PCs are terribly insecure, falling victim to all sorts of viruses and spyware on a daily basis.

Although I’ll have to concede that yes, with a PC you might have to connect up some wires – colour-coded wires, at that – to get everything set up before you can load up YouTube, and that wireless networks are terrible, fiddly, obnoxious things, most people who work with Macs will concede that sometimes they, too, need to reboot; while a PC with a half-decent firewall and anti-virus program will be quite secure and happy, thank you. Indeed, there were reports recently that Mac users should be more aware of security and not just buy into the myth that Macs are inherently secure and unassailable. As the platform grows, the hackers and malware creators will start to target them with more ferocity than they previously have done, and all the bleating about how there are more PC viruses in the world than grains of sand on a beach won’t do them any good.

Other adverts show PC getting excited about exchanging files with Mac, whereas Mac is just vaguely smug about the whole process; and another, entitled Court, sees PC dressing up as a judge and accusing Mac of lying about how easy it is to create a photobook. (I’m not sure why the adverts are so bizarrely preoccupied with the idea of making photobooks; they really don’t look all that great.) The point, it seems, is not only that using Macs is easier than you might think, but that using PCs is ridiculously hard, and should be stopped at once.

Except… Is it, really? Alright, occasionally PCs can be very fiddly, refusing to do as they’re asked for no discernable reason until you want to throw them out of a window. But mostly, they’ve become intuitive to use just because we’ve been doing it for so long. And if Microsoft had as much control over the hardware configurations people run Windows on as Apple do over Mac operating systems, then there probably wouldn’t be any problems there, either – except that Microsoft would be slapped with more antitrust cases than it could count.

False Accusations

Most of the time, the Mac just seems to be accusing PC of things that patently aren’t true. The ‘fun stuff’ Mac wants to do seems to consist mostly of taking photographs, surfing the Internet, blogging, making home movies, and listening to music. It probably won’t surprise you to know that YOU CAN DO ALL OF THESE THINGS ON A WINDOWS PC, TOO.

Plus you can play games.

The UK Apple ads are all fairly new, too, so there aren’t as many of them as there are American ads in the same format. In the US, the Mac is played by Justin Long, a young actor whose CV includes such classics as Jeepers Creepers and Dodgeball, whereas the PC is portrayed by John Hodgman, an author and ‘humourist’. (Which is apparently different from being just a ‘comedian’.) Again, there’s some ever-so-slightly questionable casting going on there, but again it’s the substance of the ads that’s more questionable.

‘Stuffed’ claims that PCs always come stuffed with trial software that no-one wants, whereas Macs only come with programs everyone wants. Right… another ad, ‘iLife’, touts the brilliance of Mac’s built-in software, which is something the UK ads have only copied in the bus stop ads in which PC is holding a sign that’s held together with parcel tape, claiming that PCs must hobble together inferior software in order to carry out tasks that Macs effortlessly complete straight out of the box. Several of the other ads have been remade, so I’ll skip over them here – except ‘Accident’ in which the fact that Mac power cables fall out easily is claimed as a feature.

Tell that to all the people who’ve Sellotaped them in out of annoyance, then.

Then we get to some adverts which are just nonsensical; where the metaphor of the two men pretending to be computers just falls apart and doesn’t make sense any more. In Gift Exchange, the Mac gives PC a present of a book full of photos of the two of them, whereas PC gives Mac the C++ GUI book he’d been eyeing for himself. Er…

In another, Angel PC and Devil PC turn up to advise PC on his course of action when faced with a photobook Mac has made and wants his opinion on. In ‘Counselor’, Mac compliments PC on the areas in which the PC reigns supreme, while PC is too embittered to return the gesture, and in yet another one, called Sabotage, PC wheels in a fake Mac guy to say that PCs are way better than Macs, only to be interrupted when the real Mac turns up. If anyone knows what these are supposed to be about, please let me know.

Wrongheaded

There just seems to be something wrongheaded about the way Apple markets its product. Instead of talking up the actual good points of Macs that must exist in the real world (else why would people keep buying them?) they constantly belittle PCs.

The fact that so much of the advertising is online might explain part of that. If the person watching the video is online, they presumably have a computer of some sort, and they might therefore need to be lured – or scared – away from their PCs and into Apple’s comforting embrace.

None of which is anything new, of course. It’s just that Apple’s campaign seems to lack any real joined-up thinking. Take their sidebar explaining why Windows Vista is evil; seven reasons are offered for why just getting a Mac would be better, all of them flawed in one way or another.

Number 1 is ‘no upgrade nightmares.’ Instead of upgrading your PC’s memory, hard disk and graphics card, Apple asks “Why go through all that hassle, when you can just get a Mac?” Well, I’m sure your bank could think of a reason. Also, if you’re going to ‘just get a Mac’, you could just as easily ‘just’ buy a new PC to run Vista on.

The second reason is that you can run Windows on a Mac. ‘Not that you’ll want to.’ Argh! So is being able to run Windows a good thing, or not? If you want to run Windows, and you already are running Windows, then why would you buy a Mac? Conversely, if you don’t want to run Windows, then you might as well use the Apple operating system. Nonsense.

Moving on, the third reason is that it’s simpler. There’s more than one version of Vista, you see, and you might get confused. Even though in point 2, having more choice was a good thing. But now it’s just too haaaaaarrrrd.

The fourth reason is that you won’t have to buy new stuff; your peripherals will work with a Mac. And probably with a non-Mac PC, too, since that’s currently what they’re working with. The fifth reasons that you’re probably running iTunes anyway (not that illogical assumption, judging by how many people have iPods) then you’ll already know your way around a Mac. Just like you already know your way around a PC.

Point 6 says that Macs run Microsoft Office. Do I even need to say anything about that? And point 7 says that you can run everything you’re currently running on a PC on a Mac, too, so you can take it with you.

Not the most convincing argument, I have to say. (In the interests of fairness and balance, I should say that Microsoft’s 100 reasons why you’d like Vista were equally rubbish; there were maybe ten actual reasons, just slightly rephrased over and over and over again.)

Vista seems to have triggered a big push from the Apple campaigners, playing on the fact that while people might normally be resistant to change, if they have to change anyway, they might jump off the Microsoft ship and join the Apple party. One of the American Mac ads ridicules Vista’s security, showing the PC unable to do anything without the permission of a scary bodyguard in a black suit and sunglasses – but, oh, yes, this is the same PC who’s supposedly virus-ridden and full of spyware, isn’t it?

All mocking aside, it really seems like Apple could have made a better ad campaign, which played to its strengths without resorting to petty name-calling. It could also benefit from researching its actors (and the associations the public makes with them) a little better, and maybe introducing some consistency to their message. The ads could also try to stay on message, rather than just spouting nonsense.

I’m just saying.

Watch the ads yourself: www.apple.com/getamac/ads and www.apple.com/uk/getamac.

This article was originally published in Micro Mart magazine in 2007.