3 ms·

Agree many of the commercials are funny. To be clear...I bought Macbooks for myself and my wife in 2006 because I was tired of being XP support for her and her

Agree many of the commercials are funny. To be clear...I bought Macbooks for myself and my wife in 2006 because I was tired of being XP support for her and her IBM laptop. Her Macbook regularly kernal panics. Sometimes when trying to connect to Timemachine, sometimes when Firefox absorbs too much memory. The BSOD is not a thing of the past, but is drastically reduced since Vista SP1, and I haven't seen one in RC candidate of Win7, though we've only had that for a little bit. I was running build 7000 of Win7 on a netbook since it went up, and had no problems. I love my Apple products. I would love for them to focus on the doing of cool things and less on things that could be refutted. Great example of this from MSFT - why are you showing me an ad with a woman looking to do video editing. That felt like a pretty false premise, considering what you get natively with OS X.

tptacek 17y ago
I've had three experiences with Macbooks that panicked more than once. Once, I had a funky VPN kernel module installed. The other two times we replaced the memory and solved the problem. Of course Macbooks can crash. There's very little Apple can do about defective parts and physical damage, other than to very effectively service their gear, which is something no PC OEM has figured out how to do. Macs have an intrinsic reliability advantage over PCs. It isn't that their OS is more reliable --- it isn't; in fact, even inside the kernel, Win32 is more resilient than OS X. It's that for 99% of its users, Apple is the sole supplier of both hardware and system software. Within the OS architecture that OS X and Win32 share (monolithic kernels with driver code running as native unverified instructions in ring zero), and given the current state of the art, there is nothing Microsoft can do to negate that advantage. The only thing that can happen is for Apple to fuck it up, by sourcing crappier parts than the average PC OEM (not happening), or by providing poorer support than the average PC OEM (not happening). Sorry. I don't think these commercials are lying, even though the comparison isn't "fair" to Microsoft.
- BrandonWatson 17y ago
  These are great points, and your analysis is sound. I am giving an emotional response to a commercial, which, unfortunately, is how advertising works. People will emotionally respond to Apple consistently saying their machines don't crash. I'm not suggesting Windows never crashes, but don't make claims that aren't true. This is why I would prefer they stay off the slippery slope of "what is lying anyway" and instead focus on tangible, measurable data about what you can do with the product and platform. If the notion of "what is a crash" becomes a subjective one, it's hard to buy into a large marketing campaign predicated on it. Just my humble opinion...
  - tptacek 17y ago
    How about editing your post to say, "Nothing I wrote here is true, but it's how this commercial made me feel". Because from where I stand, except for Apple's high memory prices (which... aren't germane to the commercial), none of what you wrote is true.

tptacek 17y ago

I've had three experiences with Macbooks that panicked more than once. Once, I had a funky VPN kernel module installed. The other two times we replaced the memory and solved the problem. Of course Macbooks can crash. There's very little Apple can do about defective parts and physical damage, other than to very effectively service their gear, which is something no PC OEM has figured out how to do. Macs have an intrinsic reliability advantage over PCs. It isn't that their OS is more reliable --- it isn't; in fact, even inside the kernel, Win32 is more resilient than OS X. It's that for 99% of its users, Apple is the sole supplier of both hardware and system software. Within the OS architecture that OS X and Win32 share (monolithic kernels with driver code running as native unverified instructions in ring zero), and given the current state of the art, there is nothing Microsoft can do to negate that advantage. The only thing that can happen is for Apple to fuck it up, by sourcing crappier parts than the average PC OEM (not happening), or by providing poorer support than the average PC OEM (not happening). Sorry. I don't think these commercials are lying, even though the comparison isn't "fair" to Microsoft.

BrandonWatson 17y ago
These are great points, and your analysis is sound. I am giving an emotional response to a commercial, which, unfortunately, is how advertising works. People will emotionally respond to Apple consistently saying their machines don't crash. I'm not suggesting Windows never crashes, but don't make claims that aren't true. This is why I would prefer they stay off the slippery slope of "what is lying anyway" and instead focus on tangible, measurable data about what you can do with the product and platform. If the notion of "what is a crash" becomes a subjective one, it's hard to buy into a large marketing campaign predicated on it. Just my humble opinion...
- tptacek 17y ago
  How about editing your post to say, "Nothing I wrote here is true, but it's how this commercial made me feel". Because from where I stand, except for Apple's high memory prices (which... aren't germane to the commercial), none of what you wrote is true.