New Online Mac Ad Rickrolls New York Times Readers
By Harry McCracken | Tuesday, April 28, 2009 at 6:49 pm
Apple’s “Get a Mac” guys are back in another Windows-bashing ad–on NYTimes.com and PCMag.com and maybe elsewhere–in which PC claims that PCs are “as easy as one to twenty-three.” It involves a list of PC-related woes that captures the spirit of Windows irritations, although you can certainly quibble with the specifics. (I seem to have disk-related issues that cause mysterious glitches at least as often on Macs as I do on Windows machines.)
Like other recent Apple online ads, this one involves a special page configuration and action going on outside of the banner ad’s real estate-PC unfurls the list of twenty-three items partway through the ad. But the list doesn’t cover up editorial content. It blocks two ads that were there already:
Except the ads seem to be fakes–if you click them before the list falls down, you go to Apple’s Get a Mac page.
It’s a sort of innocuous-but-commercial form of Rickrolling. (I’m not sure if earlier Apple beyond-the-banner ads have done anything similar.) Wonder how many people looking for mortgages or European trips have unwittingly clicked on them, and if they’re more or less likely to buy Macs once they figure out what happened? Although I’m noticing now that Monn Credit Union’s rates are bizarrely uncompetitive–maybe Apple’s trying to ensure that nobody who actually knows anything about getting a mortgage will bother to click…
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April 29th, 2009 at 12:31 pm
“It involves a list of PC-related woes that captures the spirit of Windows irritations, although you can certainly quibble with the specifics.”
Oh please. “Quibble?” How about whittling that list down to just two unavoidable items? Everything else is optional, unnecessary, or your own durned fault.
Is Apple, the company, really endorsing lying? How is THAT going to convince a PC owner to buy an Apple product? Or are these ads really just a fan-boy circle-jerk?
May 5th, 2009 at 11:38 am
I’m a mac and I’m smart enough to work across both platforms, but this is over the top. Hasn’t America been through enough economic turmoil without mac making a fraudulent ad displaying outlandish interest rates? These fake ads have nothing to do with mac or pc performance. Windows should do an ad about how Apple has never managed to fix all the keyboard problems making me mistype the first letter of any work I type after my machine has been idle for a while! Or one where mac falls asleep and won’t wake up without a hard reset, another common mac problem.