It's a Mac Mac World!

Since the rest of the Software, Hardware (and Nothing-To-Do-With-Both-Hardware-And-Software guys too), seem to be talking about this I thought I might as well chime in and put in my insignificant two cents. This is the picture of my desktop:

A couple of years ago I worked on a Mac for an hour or two. I liked a thing or two about the UI and went searching for utilities and tools that would let me tweak my windows and let me have the parts of the Mac's UI that I liked. I came pretty close to the Mac. Then In a few months I missed my start button. So I changed the skin, tweaked a couple of things, and a little bit of the Windows flavor started showing up again on my Windows desktop which was now looking pretty close to a Mac.

After about two years, the desktop of my work laptop is a perfect Hybrid that looks somewhat like Mac but is 100% PC (running on 100% Windows). For me that's going to stay like that (At-least till Microsoft throws a Vista Release at me. Not running Beta and RC Versions of an OS on my work machine. Just not that adventurous, anyways, I digress... so I'll come back to the point!).

There was a time when Mac Ads used to have a little bit of "something" in them. Remember the "Here's to the crazy ones" Ad? Ok, I'll admit, I never figured out what that Ad had to do with Apple but I kinda liked it. I was always into Microsoft Tools and Technologies so I wasn't going to spend cash on anything which doesn't run Visual Studio (or QuickBasic at that time)! But to an outsider like me, who has nothing to do with the Apple world, Apple looked like it was decent company making good products (that had nothing to do with my life) and good Ads.

Recently, Mac seems to have a sequence of Ads which the entire world seems to be talking about. Why? You have to see them to figure out why. Go ahead, click on that link! But if you just want a quick one line description of these Ads, the most accurate one I've found till now is Rory's comment on his own Blog:

"The ads aren't witty. They aren't clever. They aren't creative... with such a small market share, I suppose they have to be careful with their marketing budget, eh?"

Some of these Ads try to depict that a Mac never crashes. Honestly, I've never used one long enough to figure out the truth, but Greg Riaz shows a Screen shot of the Blue'ish Screen of Death on a Mac.

Rory explains his reactions to this Ads using his Artistic Skills. Hilarious! But Not as funny as some of the other Reactions out there. He says, he's trying to be the "Nice" Rory instead of the "Mean" Rory. He keeps his Artistic Skills objective and makes a perfectly valid point, quite elegantly and humorously. Well, others haven't been as Nice on Apple as Rory and Greg have managed to be.

Take a look at this spoof for instance. I was a little confused about this spoof though, It starts off with Mac being better at PodCasts and PC's being better at Pie-Charts and then turns into a confusing fight between... well, are Pie-Charts more important or Pod-Casts. None-the-less, it's two minutes of completely insane entertainment worth wasting your time and Bandwidth on. And if you have more than 2 minutes, go on, read the comments under the spoof. You might see a couple of Zealots - both from the Apple and the PC side (you'll be able to spot them easily).

Entertaining? Wait, there's more! There's a whole host of spoofs at YouTube. For Example, there's one on Gaming on PC Vs. Gaming on Mac. No Offence to the Linux guys (I was one, almost for a year) but the inclusion of Linux in this spoof is "Sofa King" (to be read very fast, three times over) Hilarious! If you've made it this far you just have to waste some more time and see it to understand what I mean.

So you thought that's the end of it? No way! Follow the links on the Connected Video or just search for 'Mac Ad Spoof' on YouTube and you'll find tons of them. Some of them seem to be as good as the Originals (only much more funnier). In fact, with Linux and BSD in there for the added humor (example: this one), some of them seem to have a bigger Marketing Budget than Apple's Advertisement which just have the Mac and PC. :)

And I'm sure by this time, if you're into humor that's completely void of sense but really funny you would have found some Spoofs like this one. Keep browsing on YouTube. There are more!

In one of his comments Rory remarks:

"They make me embarrassed to be a Mac owner... I've still spent about $10,000 on Macs over the past several years, and these ads have actually strongly negatively impacted my capitalist-driven consumer joy... It's just Apple throwing its own feces at the other side of the fence, and it's ridiculous."

But then, every action has an equal and opposite reaction. And if you want to get some kick out of some of this feces being thrown back into Apple's backyard go visit YouTube and see the spoofs! It's a Mad Mad Mac Mac World!!

And Btw, I'm keeping my slightly Mac'ish Desktop till I move to Vista. Why? Because I like mixing the best of all world when-ever I can. If there's a Mac Zealot somewhere who feels that Mac is better just because I used some UI tools and skins that look like Mac, go ahead, get happy! I won't make a spoof! Honest! :)