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Advertising Windows

Qualcomm Spoofs 'I'm a Mac' Ads To Promote Windows On ARM PCs (pcmag.com) 66

Posted by BeauHD from the never-gets-old dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from PCMag: Justin Long, the actor known for playing the Mac guy in Apple's mid-2000s ad campaign is once again switching sides -- this time to promote new Windows laptops from Qualcomm. Long appeared in a video that Qualcomm showed during its Computex keynote. To introduce the segment, CEO Cristiano Amon said Qualcomm captured video of a "very special person" preordering a Windows Copilot+ laptop built with a Snapdragon X Elite chip.

In the clip, we see Long typing on an Apple MacBook at home and getting annoyed by all the incoming notifications, which include warnings that his laptop only has a 1% battery life and is running out of disk space. Long types in a search for "Where can I find a Snapdragon-powered PC?" and then stares at the camera, looking a bit ashamed, before saying: "What? Things change." Amon then returned to the stage to tell the Computex audience: "Yes, things change." In 2021, Long starred in an Intel ad campaign to promote the company's Windows PCs.

Further reading: Arm Targets 50% of Windows PC Market Share in Five Years, CEO Says
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Qualcomm Spoofs 'I'm a Mac' Ads To Promote Windows On ARM PCs More

Qualcomm Spoofs 'I'm a Mac' Ads To Promote Windows On ARM PCs

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  • The ad is lame because nobody search for a Snapdragon powered PC. People may search for Arm CPU, but not as precise as Snapdragon. Also, that Snapdragon powered PC, what software does it uses? And more importantly... Windows, Chrome, Android, Linux?

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by thegarbz ( 1787294 )

      The ad is lame because nobody search for a Snapdragon powered PC.

      Which is why there's an ad. It's called marketing, and it is the well known solution to the problem of people not searching for a product.

      Also, that Snapdragon powered PC, what software does it uses? And more importantly... Windows, Chrome, Android, Linux?

      That depends. Choose your answer:
      You were living under a rock: - Windows software.
      You just came out of a 10 year coma from a hospital under a rock: - It's the flagship CPU in Microsoft's new Surface laptop and not only does it run ARM version of Windows, but there's a newer higher performing x86 emulator called Prism for all your traditional software, and there's this awe

      • Yeah, its a very bad Advertisement. OP is right. Its lame, and fails its very important function to educate the audience on the new product. You seem to think its great because it tells people something they don't know, but also great because it assumes they've been following industry news and already knows about said product. Its bad, and you should feel bad for liking it.

        • Yeah, its a very bad Advertisement. OP is right. Its lame, and fails its very important function to educate the audience on the new product.

          I think it's a GOOD ad. It puts some money in the pocket of an actor whose work I enjoy, while doing SFA to promote Qualcomm and Microsoft, two companies which I despise.

        • Honestly, I kinda liked it. It's a good reminder to me that Apple is no longer the plucky little underdog that it was 25 years ago, and that it's of more the source of many modern day computing problems than the solution to them.

          That said, I'm not naive enough to think that ARM based laptops won't be as nonrepairable and nonupgradable as most Apple products.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by kriston ( 7886 )

        I'm excited about the x86 emulator Prism. Is this a new, blue-sky implementation or an evolution of the older Windows RT emulator?

        As an aside, I like how Apple fans say Microsoft is copying Apple in offering ARM devices when it was Microsoft who started the ARM trend 'way back in 2011 with Windows RT.

        • Interesting. I had not heard about this. If there aren't any weirdnesses so I can just slap in my favorite Linux distro, I want a new laptop with one. I am completely over Apple. They jumped the shark again, just like they did in 1995.

        • The difference of course is that Microsoft predictably failed, while Apple released a product that actually works.
        • And Acorn build ARM computers more than 2 decades earlier. And then they formed the company ARM together with Apple and VLSI Technology, the reason why Microsoft can even build computers with an ARM chip, or why Qualcomm can build one. And then Apple build the Newton using the ARM chip from ARM the company. So yes, Microsoft was copying Apple. And Apple started the ARM trend.

        • Details are light. I'm not sure if it's a ground up re-write or an evolution of their previous emulator. https://www.windowscentral.com... [windowscentral.com]

    • Re:lame (Score:5, Insightful)

      by larwe ( 858929 ) on Tuesday June 04, 2024 @08:29AM (#64522079)
      This isn't an ad aimed at the general consumer. It is not even really an ad; it's a video bite designed to appeal to a group of relatively nerdy conference attendees, and it was crafted to evoke a chuckle while hinting "we've got something better here". The average person on the street wouldn't get the reference at all - they'd just be "huh?". You will never see this ad playing on TV or other mass-market channels. For the purpose it was designed, it's fine.
      • Assuming what you're saying is correct, Its really, really lame. I'm second hand embarrassed for those that made it. I kind of hope it was generated by Chat GPT, it seems like it was AI generated. But more likely Qualcomm is just really lame, and very very anxious about the release, to the point of enforcing their bad in house marketing to triumph in a commercial over any sense of humor. Who cares if its funny, IT MUST HAVE OUR NAME IN IT. Or else these people in attendance in our conference where the name

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by larwe ( 858929 )
          To summarize what you said: "This was a piece of corporate generated content". Cringe was built in from day 0. :D
      • If it's "not an ad", why is there a version that is almost exactly 30 seconds long? You know, the length of a TV ad?

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by larwe ( 858929 )
          Perhaps because that is about the length of time a casual viewer can keep a piece of content in short-term memory? Don't mix cause and effect. I will eat a stewed iPhone live on camera if this piece of content appears on mainstream advertising channels.

    • It's lame mostly because it's not original at all. With all the $$ that Qualcomm has, you think they could hire an ad agency that could come up with something new. (We expect lame advertising from Microsoft.)

      • Is this some national campaign?

        From the article this is just a "funny video" in a company meeting / conference - this type of one-off inside joke is pretty common in the tech corp world, but by itself its not really advertising.

        Sometimes they'll hire a celebrity to DJ a big corp event, or roast the CEO, or show up in character to roast the competition - its the corporate equivalent of doing birthday parties.

      • Who says advertising has to be original! It just has to catch attention and result in (usually) sales. Whether or not it's original, it is...effective.

        • So you must be a fan of the iPad hydraulic press video.

          • The hydraulic press video was extremely effective. It got all kinds of attention in the news and on social media, attention that Apple didn't have pay for. In marketing, bad publicity (which was way overblown IMO) is still publicity.

            Would I personally buy Apple's products as a result? Not at all, I'm an Android guy. But there certainly is a segment of the population that watched that commercial and thought, "That's really cool!" and some of them probably went and bought the products as a result.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Misagon ( 1135 )

      I would search for a laptop without a Copilot key.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Holi ( 250190 )

      I have, I have interest in the Snapdragon and Qualcomm's support for Linux.

    • Re:lame (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Junta ( 36770 ) on Tuesday June 04, 2024 @10:37AM (#64522265)

      Realistically speaking, practically no one would search for an 'ARM powered PC' either. The fundamental problem is that no one has identified a large scale target market for this concept. It doesn't really bring anything to the table that can't be achieved with x86, and the x86 option is the 'safer bet' with Windows.

      For Apple, it was a natural evolution from their phone platform taking off. At one point they realized they had the scale where it made sense to just bring the phone in-house. With an in-house CPU team and a phone market that blows away their desktop concerns, it just made sense for them to change their desktop products to be more in line with their more popular phones. For their market segment, it can work too because Apple gets to decide everything and so they can unilaterally tell their customer base "ok, things are changing, and you just have to move because we decided and we can do that". The mass market didn't demand an ARM based Mac, they just wanted a Mac and the processor architecture detail was just something they went along with, and so off to ARM it was because it was convenient for Apple's business interests and the end users were mostly unaffected.

      With the Windows on ARM, it's messier. For Qualcomm, they want to expand into the still viable laptop market, to show some sort of growth. They can't get Apple, so off to Microsoft. So Microsoft does see that Apple has a decent market share, and the options are:

      * Apple customers want MacOS. Which seems obvious, but is a useless reality for Microsoft
      * Apple customers want ARM, but just have to put up with MacOS. Which is a ridiculous conclusion, but the only one that leaves Microsoft an 'in' for that 15% or so of the market they don't control.

      So Microsoft, driven by entertaining a self-delusion that people want Windows but tolerate macOS for sake of ARM, decides to try, again, to make Windows on ARM a thing. Now the thing is Microsoft has no motivation to obsolete x86, so it's a half-hearted endeavor that can only work if customers magically start demanding it over x86 options, but Microsoft doesn't really care who "wins". So it's left to Qualcomm as the only one that actually cares about this, and they also have nearly zero end-user clout nor clear path to suddenly generate that clout. So.... here we are, Qualcomm trying to imply that people are annoyed by MacOS notifications and... wouldn't be annoyed by the same notifications in Windows? And that they would need to keep to ARM while moving to Windows? They can't trumpet some affinity with Android devices, because the software is a much bigger part of that and there's no compelling story bridging Windows to Android, certainly no story that has anything to do with the happenstance of processor architecture.

      Back in the Windows 8 day, it might have made more sense as part of trying to prop up Windows Phone (Windows 8 was happy to try to throw the desktop experience under the bus in *hopes* of making their desktop ecosystem develop Windows Phone friendly apps). Now it's especially pointless because Windows has zero share in a non-x86 ecosystem and has zero ambitions of even trying.

      So we have a "let's see what happens" publicity stunt with Microsoft without an identified customer demand and honestly without even a strong business case for Microsoft to particularly want it to happen.

  • He's not "switching sides" (Score:5, Informative)

    by Rosco P. Coltrane ( 209368 ) on Tuesday June 04, 2024 @08:09AM (#64522033)

    He's an actor. He plays a character.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by slaker ( 53818 )

      This would have been a more effective ad from a more effective communicator if they'd hired John Hodgman (the PC from the ads) instead of or in addition to Justin Long.

      By all reports, the Elite X brings fantastic battery life and increased performance for content creation tools - the two things that Macs are in theory good for - to Windows. PC users can appreciate that a lot more than iThing users (who, in my observation, generally ignore Apple's one at a time notification system anyway) would having reduce

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Holi ( 250190 )

        I think the fact Long has done ads for Apple and Intel (in the same "character") makes him kinda the perfect choice, but it would have been nice to see Hodgeman.

        • Re:He's not "switching sides" (Score:4, Interesting)

          by quantaman ( 517394 ) on Tuesday June 04, 2024 @10:42AM (#64522277)

          I think the fact Long has done ads for Apple and Intel (in the same "character") makes him kinda the perfect choice, but it would have been nice to see Hodgeman.

          It's fascinating since I can't think of another time that a company poached a major character from a competitors ad campaign.

          There's probably a good reason, I'm sure there's some kind of time limited clause to stop them from taking on certain roles, and after that no one really cares. But Apple's campaign was so uniquely successful that people still remember the character well over a decade later, which made the poaching kinda newsworthy.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by slaker ( 53818 )

            The "Can you hear me now"-guy worked for both Verizon and T-mobile.

            And Jim Varney's "Earnest" character was a pitch man for a bunch of completely unrelated products before he was given movie roles. I think some of those were competing (local) car dealerships.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by ip_vjl ( 410654 )

            Not a human character, but Duracell and Energizer have fought over the pink bunny since the 80s (which started with Duracell in the 70s, and was picked up by Energizer to directly mock the original Duracell ad when Duracell let the trademark lapse).

            https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

            Now, depending on where you live in the world, you may see the character associated with one or the other company.

            • I'm glad that you mentioned that. I'd imagine that only a small minority remember the origin of the battery bunny.

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by hawk ( 1151 )

                And how many remember the brief-lived Leslie Nelson spoof for coors light?

                One of the funniest things ever, but they wimped out when threatened by energizer, rather than lawyering up. I thought that it would likely qualify as protected parody, but . . .

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Junta ( 36770 )

        I still say the fundamental problem is they have nothing really compelling to communicate.

        Assuming the battery life claim holds up, the "inferior" battery life in the XPS 13 was still pretty much a full day. Whether it's a full day and 2 hours or a full day and 6 hours, you've crossed a threshold where it hardly matters. We get to see however if this holds up when the crapware comes into play, which is the biggest enemy of Windows PC battery life, people installing all sorts of poorly written garbage that

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by hawk ( 1151 )

          >Whether it's a full day and 2 hours or a full day and 6 hours, you've
          >crossed a threshold where it hardly matters

          I was kind of surprised to find that I really *do* get 20 hours on this new m3 laptop.

          Anyway, 20 hours is easily more than any use case that I have. But it's odd not to be charging every day.

          These things have come a long way since the 100 minutes on my powerbook 180--and the need to reboot when changing, as they didn't have a capacitor or battery to keep the memory for a minute. [yes, yo

    • He's an actor. He plays a character.

      For some reason, people really seemed to assume Long's role in those commercials made him an ally of the Apple fanboy brigade. No idea why. It's a job to him. And while I'm sure he had plenty of Macs shoved at him in movie roles over the years, I doubt the connection went any deeper than that to him.

      But I'm sure somebody will get bent about this. "HOW DARE HE?" What? Do a job? Meh.

      • It's an ad strategy.

        Remember when the Verizon guy walked around saying "Can you hear me now?" Later, T-Mobile used him for their ads, because they knew people would recognize him and take notice. It doesn't matter if people thought he really was *for* Verizon.

        It's a strategy that works.

    • He's an actor. He plays a character.

      And a national campaign is money in the bank.

  • just need to show an user m.2 slot to beat apple.

    apple locks in storage at X3-4 the cost of other m.2 disks.

    • Qualcomm's offerings are using UFS4 storage if I recall correctly. Though that may vary by vendor.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Holi ( 250190 )

        Snapdragon X Elite has full PCIE support, so it works with NVME and GPU.

        • That may well be the case, but if you look at the advertised offerings, you won't find dGPUs or NVMe drives on most WARM devices. Neither NV nor AMD have aarch64 drivers for their mobile dGPUs.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by kriston ( 7886 )

      The current-generation Surface Pro and Surface Laptop are ARM exclusively and they feature a user-accessible m.2 slot for removable storage.

  • Qualcomm is actually copying Intel's ads from 2021. Innovation.
    • Given Qulacomm's history, that means if someone follows Qualcomm and does another "I'm a Mac" ad, Qualcomm will sue them for IP infringement.

  • Umm... (Score:4, Funny)

    by fropenn ( 1116699 ) on Tuesday June 04, 2024 @08:59AM (#64522131)
    the only notifications I get on my Macbook are from: Microsoft, Google Chrome, and Adobe...

  • Notifications? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by nightflameauto ( 6607976 ) on Tuesday June 04, 2024 @09:19AM (#64522153)

    I don't think picking on Apple about notifications is the way to go if you're trying to promote Windows anything. The notifications on Windows are pretty egregious if you don't turn off the service. And most of them are nonsense all based around trying to drive you to Onedrive, your Microsoft account, your $cloud_feature you don't give a toss about. Maybe they should have picked some other reason to pick on Apple? It's not like you lack options.

    • Re:Notifications? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by UnknowingFool ( 672806 ) on Tuesday June 04, 2024 @09:46AM (#64522191)
      The best analogy I have heard about Windows notifications vs Mac notifications is Windows is an over-caffeinated Boy Scout and Mac is more like a butler. Both tell you things but the Mac curates the notifications while Windows tells you about every little thing with equal importance. "OMG, you moved a file. OMG, you connected to the Internet. OMG, your drive is reporting catastrophic errors."
    • Especially if, according to the summary, two of the notifications were both major AND ones that would also appear in Windows.

      What hodgepodge combination of Luddite and techie would search for a specific CPU, despite being CPU throttled by power management features as they are at 1% battery life? Like this Venn Diagram overlap doesn't exist.

      Mac really doesn't have many notifications, but I'd rather have 100 notifications a day than the spyware screenshot feature that Microsoft has in the pipeline.

      • Re:Notifications? (Score:4, Insightful)

        by nightflameauto ( 6607976 ) on Tuesday June 04, 2024 @11:43AM (#64522433)

        Especially if, according to the summary, two of the notifications were both major AND ones that would also appear in Windows. What hodgepodge combination of Luddite and techie would search for a specific CPU, despite being CPU throttled by power management features as they are at 1% battery life? Like this Venn Diagram overlap doesn't exist. Mac really doesn't have many notifications, but I'd rather have 100 notifications a day than the spyware screenshot feature that Microsoft has in the pipeline.

        That Recall feature is the one that has me scrambling with WINE and its variants trying to find some way to get my Windows plugins to work in my Linux DAW. If not for that? I'd be Windows free at this point.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by zlives ( 2009072 )

        how else will you keep your passwords safe, safe.

    • Can't say I've ever had a Onedrive notification on my Windows machine. There is plenty of control over what is and isn't allowed to generate a notification. You just need to go into the settings. Currently have 3 notifications, two from chat apps, and one from the snipping tool which drops a notification about your clipboard contents (or not, you are in control over what is and isn't allowed to generate a notification, you can turn that off too).

      No need to turn off the entire service. Simply knowing how to

      • Can't say I've ever had a Onedrive notification on my Windows machine. There is plenty of control over what is and isn't allowed to generate a notification. You just need to go into the settings. Currently have 3 notifications, two from chat apps, and one from the snipping tool which drops a notification about your clipboard contents (or not, you are in control over what is and isn't allowed to generate a notification, you can turn that off too).

        No need to turn off the entire service. Simply knowing how to use your computer should suffice.

        That has not, at all, been my experience. I've turned off every notification I can find, but every "security" update brings them all back. Turning off the entire service was literally the only way to get it to stop. And it was essential to get it to stop on my DAW (recording) system. I'm not going to tolerate the whole system grinding to a halt in the middle of a take just to be reminded that I should really switch to Edge so Microsoft can collect all my browsing habits too.

        Thanks for the condescension, th

    • Remember, they aren't trying to convince Apple users to switch to Windows. They are trying to make Windows users feel good about themselves (superior, etc). They are trying to convince Windows users (actually manufacturers) to use ARM.
      • Sure, if a Windows user took that ad at face value, and thought that a Mac user at all times had several notification move across the screen, that would make them feel even more superior to Mac users. But how does this make them buy an ARM notebook?
        • Good question, I haven't figured that one out, either. Worth mentioning the ad is still aimed more at manufacturers.

  • I need to switch my operating system and ecosystem and processor. /s

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