Binary computer ads end up full of zeroes

Hello, I’m a Mac, and a PC, and I hate them both with a fiery passion that consumes my soul. The bullspit, spin and misleading information that seems to spew forth from the Redmond- and Cupertino-based offices of Microsoft and Apple fills me with a desire to tear apart whatever computer I’m using with my bare hands and chew up the silicon chips to exorcize the demons inside. And nothing is more deserving of my rage than the ads that are plastered all over the Internet and TV.

As I write this, and probably as you surf the Internet in a vain attempt to avoid reading this, John Hodgman and Justin Long are staring out from the sides and top of The Onion’s website, and I watch in amazed wonder as the fat PC analog breaks the laws of physics by moving from one ad to the other, metaphorically stopping Windows users from switching to Mac. “One down, thousands to go,” he declares. Ha ha. It’s funny because it’s relatable.

At best, the sickening marketing speech spewed from the ads to the tune of that oh-so-annoying piece of piano music is propaganda, and outright slander at worst. Apple has apparently learned well the lesson from politics that the best way to emphasize your own merits is to point out that the other guy is a crazed psychopath who’s trying to steal your thumbs. Rather than engage in an actual debate based on merits, they prefer 90 per cent of the time to intentionally slag Windows at every opportunity. Their latest ad, “Broken Promises,” wraps up a blatant attack on Windows 7 in the guise of how easy it will be to switch to a Mac.

The problems found in the advertisements are a systemic issue that is pervasive in society, and it has its roots in the fundamental nature of choice. At the end of the day, you always have to decide on one of two choices — whether you buy a Mac or a PC, vote Democratic or Republican, buy two per cent milk or skim. Unfortunately, marketing companies have realized that duality means they don’t have to convince people that the reduced fat content of skim can be healthy, as long as they can convince people that two per cent milk is made from finely ground chihuahuas.

There are lots of reasons why someone should by a Mac, and Apple is doing a disservice to themselves and to their audience by not presenting those advantages in an honest format. The embedded Unix kernel makes it a friendlier development environment than Windows in many cases, and the added safety and security is useful in a world where identity theft is a real problem to those that don’t take precautions against it.

By no means am I playing favourites here. Microsoft is no better, steadfastly refusing to admit the flaws inherent in their own system. Executives at the house that Gates built have adopted the intelligent strategy of either holding their hands over their ears and trying not to hear the detractors, or ripping off competing operating systems and them claiming their innovations as their own.

More than anything, this hurts the consumer. If you listen only to the Mac ads, PCs are unusable monoliths of confusion that will corrupt your data and make you look unhip to boot; from the Microsoft perspective, Apples are overpriced pieces of silicon that deliver half of what they promise and a third of what Windows has to offer. As usual, the truth is somewhere in between, and the fact that this isn’t presented to the end consumer in an elegant way isn’t a crime yet — but it will be when I unleash the FREE_MONEY_VIAGRA virus and rule all of mankind with an iron fist.