Don't be ridiculous. Seriously, don't. It perturbs my digestion.
Have you ever met anyone who started sneezing when his computer got a virus? Have you ever met anyone who stopped talking midsentence because of a crash? How about a computer user who referred to himself as having a power cord? Or that guy who starts speaking japanese because he's using a Sony or Nikon camera?
No? Didn't think so. Yet, somehow, despite the fact that the spokesmen in the Mac ads explicitly refer to themselves as computers, and refer to themselves doing the sort of computer-specific things I've listed above, you've somehow become married to the idea that they represent computer users. Moreover, they are intended to be representative of all computer users, which is just a weird interpretation of advertising. Somewhere between my becoming convinced that Coke is literally trying to tell me there are actually tiny elves in my refrigerator that assemble each can just before I pick it out and thinking only biracial hawaiians are supposed to vote democratic.
Computers. The Apple ads are about computers. I'm going to keep saying this until you accept it or point to something in the text which explicitly points to a certain pair of comedians are representing living human beings instead of inanimate objects and the impressions that they've gathered around them.
And, as already mentioned, when Apple was doing ads about users, it was a fairly diverse cross-section.
I guess you didn't have NORML and this was before Paultards.* Indeed, in my current experience, referring to Mac users as a "group" on campus makes about sense as referring to "people with brown hair" as a bloc. Anyway, go on.
What a pity it wasn't ten years earlier, when you could see her ask for a "real" computer instead of some "Mac toy" upon seeing her roommate's delightfully chunky IBM with that little pencil-eraser pointer thing. The wheel turns, does it not?
And I buy store brand orange juice because I want it to stick it to those smarmy bastards at Tropicana. That, or I think it tastes better.
Oh, amen to that. Why, I long for the day when Apple releases a piece of hardware with such an embarrassingly high rate of failure that they triple their free service period. No, wait, that already happened with MobileMe. However, they still have to acquire a reputation as being so shoddy that even their greatest partisans put off major upgrades until the company release enough free updates to make it usable.
Finally, I'm an old hand at the computer wars. Bleed in six colors and all that. And even with all that, I have to say, you're just a tad too invested in this fight. The '90s are over. Mac users no longer have to justify their decisions to a derisive and unsympathetic world. And Windows users never had to justify themselves. Let's just all get the hell over it and be friends.
*To be clear, only certain, extremely annoying Ron Paul supporters qualify as Paultards. Apparently, everyone who uses a Mac is a whiny rich princess, though.
Just before the release of Leopard, there was what was affectionately nicknamed the Sparta List of 300 new features and improvements. Several of these, like Time Machine, got star-billing in the advertising copy. Admittedly, Snow Leopard will be a rather harder sell, having few to none highly visible features like Exposé or Dashboard. I'd imagine the ultimate ad campaign will center upon what it is: Under the hood improvements, tune-ups, and future-proofing.
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