14 DAY TRIAL // The "Get a Mac" campaign started last year, and if you didn't know that until now - although I sincerely doubt it - it's a television advertising campaign created by TBWA, a unit of Omnicom Group, the world's largest advertising agency holding company, for Apple. Directed by Phil Morrison, these ads star Justin Long as a Macintosh (Mac OS X), while the role of the PC using Microsoft Windows is played by author and humorist John Hodgman.
Following the format used so far, the latest "Get a Mac" ad sees Long introducing himself as a Mac and Hodgman as a PC, but now, we have a new character - Vista's intrusive User Account Control... All the ads presented so far as a result of this campaign were not the same if we were to consider the degree of "evil factor" when comparing the Macs and the Windows PCs, while others ignored small inconvenient truths, such as the "Viruses" commercial.
In this commercial, the Mac claims to have none of the viruses that plague the PC platform, but completely forgets about the macro viruses that don't rely on the operating system, but on individual pieces of software that are available on Windows and Mac platforms too, in most of the cases. At last, there are a small number of spyware threats known to attack any operating system that uses a Web browser compatible with their code, but let's leave this behind and move to the last ad, called simply "Security".
Exactly at the same time as new Excel flaws have been admitted by Microsoft, Apple starts airing this new campaign, aiming to expose one of Vista's weak parts, namely the security. Nice timing! The third character, Vista's UAC that I mentioned earlier, interrupts the conversation between the Mac and PC with constant - and useless - permission requests. This being done now, I would only want to know one thing - what's Bill's opinion about it?