iPod used to steal $100 million (in a movie)

Speaking of strange uses for an iPod, have you seen the trailer for Scary Movie 4 yet? It plays off of War of the World's concept of tripods, replacing them with triPods... use your imagination... it's actually very humorous, check it out. http://movies.yahoo.com/movie/1808489310/trailer

The character "Walt Cummings" in 24 Season 5 episode 06 uses a PowerBook!! (or is that a Macbook Pro ???) :D ... I just saw that episode last night.

**SPOILER WARNING IF YOU JUST STARTED SEASON 5 of 24**
...right you are jbelkin that it doesn't have to be a hero or villain that uses a mac ;)

If you watch CSI, you'll notice that almost all of the computers are Macs. Mostly iMac G4s or something attached to Cinema Displays.

I did see one Dell flatscreen today, though.

Apple doesn't pay for product placement nor do they do much specific movie tie-ins (the car Harrison drives has its own promo web site).

What Apple does is provide you with computers & ipods (of course, the bigger your stars and production crew, the more likley your odds of being approved) their only main stipulation is that the Apple product is not used in an inappropriate manner (PB as a trigger device, etc ... etc ...). Unlike most companies, Apple doesn't insist on only the hero using the product - there are some movies that are SPOILER obvious because the "hero" is using a Dell or HP (who do have to pay for product placement) while the villian is using some generic PC.

And yes, most of the creative side in Hollywood use a Mac and/or (surprise!) they're a little more passonate about insisting on a Mac on screen versus Pc users.

In the case of Apple, it's not a major expense and they rarely spent actual money on a tie-in. There are a couple people who work for Apple doing this and I'm sure they have a couple hundred machines at their disposal - for Apple, it's a minimal expense but for instance, it will cost at least a couple million to do a tie-in these days and in fact, it creates an jarring breaking 4th wall situation since most companies insist on the label facing forward or the awkward reading of the full name of some product, "Would you like a lemon lime pizazzz Snapple?" (unless it's the 40-year old virgin on a date - then maybe :-)

This reminds me kindof of Peter Jackson who transfered all of the Lord of the Rings final shots on his iPod between computers (which were eventually worth more than 100 million).

Did anyone see the office last week where Michael made an iMovie?

Yeah, the whole iPod thing was pretty stupid. He used the scanning element from a fax machine to read account information on a dumb terminal. The iPod was magically connected to the scanning element and knew (again, magically) to write the data the element was passing to it. *sigh* Whatever. It's just a movie-it doesn't have to make perfect sense.

The film itself was okay, but Harrison's looking OLD. It's pretty typical HF fare: some bad guys choose the wrong guy to pick on. They have a fight, Harrison wins, everyone's happy, the end.

I hope that wasn't too spoilery... ;)

let's not forget the powerbook that saved us all from aliens in "independence day".....jeff goldblum could get it to interface with alien technology yet i still have trouble logging onto my windows server at work sometimes......

Not all of the product placement in the movie is iPod-related:

Firewall Chrysler Giveaway!
Uh... yay?

They did sort of the same thing in Runaway Jury, though it was the nasty, old version.

Blade trinity seems to have gotten a lot of funding from apple corp. There are loads of iMacs, Cinema Displays and iPods all over the place....