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Back on Friday, I wondered if we’d ever see Apple’s “Get a Mac” guys again, and speculated that they’d either come back with a direct response to Microsoft’s Laptop Hunters spots or stay away for good. Which just goes to show that even the most innocuous speculating about Apple is likely to be wrong. The company’s released four new “Get a Mac” spots, and none of them take on “Laptop Hunters” directly.

Here they be:

The only one that feels like it tiptoes into “Laptop Hunters” territory is the third one, “Stacks,” since it points out a feature of iLife 09 which PC says sounds expensive, then explains that iLife comes with all Macs. Maybe that’s a subtle response to the Microsoft ads’ painting of the cost of Macs as including a large premium for meaningless cool factor. Or maybe not–a pretty high percentage of all “Get a Mac” commercials have touted iLife as a principal reason to buy an Apple computer.

I’m not sure if the second ad, “Legal Copy,” is referring to something specific with its conceit that an ad claiming that Windows PCs are more simple and intuitive than Macs must carry a lot of fine print. As I’ve written, one of the striking things about the “Laptop Hunters” series is that it makes no claims about Windows. The message is all about the specs and features you can get at a particular price point, and anything relating to software seems to beside the point.

(Side note: I’m not a fan of fine print, but it’s better than not using it when an advertising claim badly needs clarification–as I wrote in this post about Apple’s iPhone 3G advertising.)

Then again, maybe ignoring “Laptop Hunters” is Apple’s way of responding to it. While Microsoft keeps doing its price comparisons and saying that Macs provide no added value for the price you pay, Apple is returning to the basic mantra that “Get a Mac” has repeated all along–that Macs deliver fewer hassles and more powerful included software than Windows PCs.  The implied message is that you should be including those factors when you do the math on a computer purchase. It’s a far more reasonable point than the one that Microsoft has busily hammered away.

And maybe the fact that Mac and PC are back at all is an oblique acknowledgment that Microsoft’s ads are attracting attention, and Apple needs to reinforce the pro-Mac, anti-PC case it had already been making.

One other thought about the new commercials: Poor PC seems to have drunk the Mac Kool-Aid himself somewhere along the way–in “Time Traveler” he actively argues that PCs don’t work the way they should and are inferior to Macs. The early ads in which he touted his own virtues and disparaged the Mac were at least as effective, and a lot funnier…

As I said in my post last Sunday on Microsoft’s “Laptop Hunter” ads, it’s unrealistic to expect TV commercials to contribute to a thoughtful discussion of anything. An exercise in comparison shopping between Windows and PCs that takes place in a sixty-second Microsoft commercial just isn’t going to be fair and balanced, any more than an Apple commercial is going to explain that it’s possible to get respectable Windows laptops for a whole lot less than the cheapest Macs.

But Microsoft’s latest salvo in the Windows-vs.-Mac war isn’t a commercial–it’s a ten-page white paper by veteran analyst Roger Kay (a friendly acquaintance of mine, and, like me, a former IDG employee). Roger is independent and knows the personal computer market as well as anyone on the planet, but his paper was sponsored by Microsoft, which means that even if it’s a third-party take on things, it’s going to be one that the company is comfortable with. But the whole point of vendor-sponsored white papers is bring an independent expert’s analysis and data into a discussion in hopes that it’ll be taken more seriously than mere marketing materials.

Roger’s paper includes a bunch of tables that compare Windows PCs and Macs–sort of like what I’ve been doing, although in less excruciating detail–and an analysis of the cost of ownership of the two platforms that concludes that a family than buys two Macs instead of two Windows machines will pay a cumulative Apple tax of $3,367 over five years.

In his laptop section, Roger compares the white MacBook, new MacBook, and 15-inch MacBook Pro against various notebooks from Dell, HP, and Sony, and finds, unsurprisingly, that the Macs cost more. He shows, for instance, that the $999 MacBook comes with a skimpy 1GB of RAM, a bare-bones 120GB of hard disk space, and Intel’s uninspiring x3100 integrated graphics. For hundreds of dollars less, the chart proves, you can buy a Windows laptop with double the RAM, more than twice the disk space, and better graphics.

Pretty compelling. Except that the $999 MacBook doesn’t come with 1GB of RAM. (It has 2GB.) It doesn’t have a 120GB hard disk. (It’s 160GB.) And it doesn’t have X3100 graphics. (It has the considerably more potent NVIDIA GeForce 9400M.) Here, look for yourself. The analysis is based on the old MacBook configuration that Apple refreshed more than two months ago, but the white paper talks about it in the present tense.

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