This one has been climbing up the bloggeist for a few weeks, and it's a fine apertif for the start of the holiday weekend. Copywriter Laurie McGuinness, moonlighting as a commercial parody director, made a series of four Mac/PC ad spoofs in early 2007, with PC as the businesslike, successful protagonist and Mac as the geeky, freelance hand-to-mouth sidekick. (Is it just me, or does the guy playing PC look like a thinner, less crazy version of John Dvorak?)All four ads are viewable on McGuinness' site or on YouTube, and they're mostly moderately funny; one exception is the 'Music' spot, which suggests that iPod users are selfish goobers who don't like to share music. Poor form!
If you've got a favorite Mac/PC ad parody, let me know in the comments and I'll highlight the top choices in a weekend post.
Thanks, Beth!
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
5-25-2007 @ 2:59PM
Kendall said...
To me, all of these ads are awful. They seem to end abruptly without making any point at all.
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5-25-2007 @ 3:00PM
Les said...
Moderately funny. Although I don't think the "Music" one is suggesting that iPod users are snobs, I think it's just knocking on iTunes' overbearing DRM handling.
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5-25-2007 @ 3:00PM
Andrew Selder said...
Check out the parodies at railsenvy.com
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5-25-2007 @ 3:09PM
BillWhit said...
This one was good:
http://creativebits.org/hi_im_a_mac_south_park_style
but I think that these are some of the funniest I have seen:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=av6fWfmugds&mode=related&search=
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5-25-2007 @ 3:25PM
Jason said...
I hope this isn't considered spam. Or something. I worked on some Ruby on Rails parody ads recently. You can see them here: http://youtube.com/envyads
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5-25-2007 @ 3:44PM
Gedeon Maheux said...
These ads aren't funny or ironic. The PC is "going sking" with a friend? It makes no sense what-so-ever and exists solely to take jabs at Apple. I've seen funnier stuff come out of the cold war.
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5-25-2007 @ 3:47PM
Ahmad said...
they were all kinda lame
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5-25-2007 @ 4:07PM
Leonard Nimrod said...
I thought the videos were spot on from a Windows users perspective.
I like the irony of Laurie McGuinness using the Apple .MOV encapsulation with the Sorenson* video codec for her spoofs.
* Sorenson is a tweaked version of H.264 and was first widely used in Apple's Quicktime.
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5-25-2007 @ 4:37PM
Michael Rose said...
"Confirmed: TUAW staff a bunch of tasteless, crotch-grabbing switcheurs."
Confirmed: Obnoxious, trolling commenters ruining the fun for everyone else (as usual).
and for the record: my first Mac was a 128k original back in mid-1984. I suppose that qualifies me as a 'switcheur.' What's your Mac pedigree, "bang?" Got a Newton on your desk? (I do.) Remember the black SCSI terminator that shipped with the IIfx? (I do.) Was your first hard drive a Jasmine 20 MB external that was way too expensive, but looked awesome under your Mac Plus? (Mine was.)
So, in conclusion, bite me.
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5-25-2007 @ 4:40PM
Stephen Lang said...
I thought they were funny.
"We've got a meeting with the client in 15 minutes..."
"That was today?"
"Are you high?"
And they sorta just end, more or less like the real ads.
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5-25-2007 @ 4:42PM
Stephen Lang said...
"I like the irony of Laurie McGuinness using the Apple .MOV encapsulation with the Sorenson* video codec for her spoofs."
Wow, that's so meta!!!! ;-)
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5-25-2007 @ 5:17PM
ThunkDifferent.com said...
Thanks for the post, the ones Laurie did were the best, the GF one is pretty funny, nice to take us out into the weekend with that TUAW, certainly something to think about if a person is home with a computer the whole time until Monday.
http://ThunkDifferent.com
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5-25-2007 @ 5:18PM
navstar said...
Ironic that they are in Quicktime format, not WMV?
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5-25-2007 @ 5:27PM
Abdul said...
Apparently theres a Cracked Leopard OS X on the under ground auction
check it out
http://auction.cr-ak.com/listings,leopardosx,
good luck getting access, I cant. Keep the blogging going on good blog and interesting.
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5-25-2007 @ 5:38PM
K. Friðjónsson said...
I have 3 nice ones for you guys. Well strictly speaking they are not Mac vs. PC, but there is a PC and then a Not So PC...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZMPurFRmxs
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cSmkse9DBps
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A66hrQMUFy0
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5-25-2007 @ 5:42PM
matthew said...
that was a lame attempt to get back at mac for haveing totally funny comercials that bashed pc. these adds are pointless and hardly funny at all. that was a waste of time.
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5-25-2007 @ 5:44PM
nosebag said...
I always liked the Wii vs Playstation one best... can't imagine why.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AqWOnDqQ4v8
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5-25-2007 @ 6:20PM
Micah Neumark said...
These were pretty poorly scripted. See, in the real ads, they talk about some specific feature, and use their personalities to make it humorous. In this spoof, they have personalities, but they don't talk about features or anything related to computers. This is completely flamebait and there is no substance to it. I have seen many Mac vs. PC spoofs that are actually funny, and so far, this is the only one that wasn't.
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5-25-2007 @ 6:30PM
Paul said...
These were extremely funny. They're not about ripping on Macs for their features, they're about ripping on the Mac commercials. And they do a great job of it.
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5-25-2007 @ 9:55PM
Maddux said...
To be fair the actual Mac ads (while funny and pretty original) do take unfair and overly simplified jabs at Windows in general. It seems the basic premise for the ads is the Macs are for fun things and PCs are for boring spreadsheat-style business. When the truth of the matter is, if you want to game, you need Windows. True, a few games do get ported, maybe a year later.
That's not to say I'm a Windows fan or anything. I have a Mac for a reason. But lets not get ahead of ourselves.
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