Mac fans have been all over the new Microsoft ad featuring a redhead named Lauren looking for the biggest laptop screen she can find for under $1000. For my own take on this ad, I’m not even going to get into the debate about whether it’s real or scripted, or the fact that Lauren is an actress complete with her own IMDB page. Instead, I’m going to focus on the substance of the commercial.
The Apple Blog’s entry about this ad is typical of the Mac fan’s reaction. They track down the only HP Pavilion laptop they can find for $699 (Lauren’s final cost) at the HP site and list its inferior features. However, their methodology is flawed. They went to HP’s site instead of Best Buy’s. It turns out that there’s a $699 model at BestBuy.com which is a much better deal than the one pointed out by the Apple blogger’s. This particular model has a built-in graphics card, making it more multimedia friendly than the one pointed out by TAB. It also has the newest AMD Turion processor rather than “last year’s Intel.” Of course, whether this is a good or bad thing depends on your view of AMD processors.
The one unquestionable tradeoff is battery life. Best Buy’s $699 laptop has the exact same short battery life as TAB’s. You had to trade off something to get that screen size for the price, and the battery got screwed over big time in that process. This is where Lauren’s obsession with size (of the display screen) may have blinded her even to better PCs on the market. For example, for $729, she could have had this model. It has the same resolution as the $999 Mac on a bigger screen, making it more readable. It also has a listed battery life of 6 hrs., 45 mins. Even if that figure doesn’t quite hold up in real life, the end result should be pretty good battery life.
In order not to be overly confrontational, I will mention three things I agree with The Apple Blog about:
1. Lauren is totally hot.
2. Nevertheless, she’s clueless about computers.
3. If she really wanted value for the price, she should have looked into Linux. (In fact, if I had Lauren’s laptop with the 320 GB hard drive, I would be dual-booting Ubuntu or Linux Mint on it).
However, I think the Mac fans are exaggerating the quality tradeoffs for low-priced PCs.
Dances With Ubuntu 