Microsoft attacks Apple for being all about the brand

by Stevie Smith - Apr 6 2009, 15:45

Microsoft’s most recent ad campaign designed to bolster the position of Windows on generic PC platforms has already birthed the “Lauren” commercial blasting Apple-branded alternatives for being too expensive. Now Apple finds itself back in Microsoft’s crosshairs with a new “Giampaolo” commercial looking to find fault with Apple’s penchant for aesthetics over performance.

Supposedly armed with a set amount of spending money and a specific list of hardware bullet points, Giampaolo – much like Lauren before him – is tasked with finding a computer that comes in below the financial ceiling and checks all of the spec boxes. Should he succeed, he gets to keep the computer.

Claiming to be “technically savvy,” and looking for a balance of portability, battery life and power, Giampaolo instants tries his luck with a unibody MacBook at Fry’s Electronics, lovingly describing Apple’s computer as “so sexy!” However, savvy Giampaolo soon backs away from the Apple platform.

“Macs to me are all about aesthetics more than they are about computing power,” he claims. “I don’t want to pay for the brand, I want to pay for the computer.”

So, with the MacBook swiftly banished from his thoughts, savvy Giampaolo instead throws his $1,500 USD budget in the direction of the HP Pavilion HDX 16t (strange, Lauren also bought a HP Pavilion), which he says comes equipped with everything he’s looking for.

Enter the keen-eyed Apple fans at Apple Insider, who are only too willing to point out the gaping holes in Giampaolo’s seemingly genuine tech-savvy satisfaction.

Concentrating first on the stated need for portability, Apple Insider’s Prince McLean notes that the winning 16-inch HP notebook weighs in at more than 7.3 pounds (3.31kg), equating to almost twice the shoulder strain on offer with the strictly sexy and aesthetically pleasing MacBook. He also points out that the HP has almost twice the thickness of the MacBook. 

McLean then goes on to focus on Giampaolo’s other purchase prerequisites, commenting that disappointment awaits regarding operational longevity, with the HP computer expected to provide between two and three hours of battery life, while the aesthetically pleasing MacBook can deliver around five hours on a single charge.

Focusing on processing performance, which is a point of import where savvy Giampaolo surely couldn’t go wrong, Apple Insider highlights the HP’s 2.13GHz Core 2 Duo P7450 and 4GBs of PC2-5300 DDR2 RAM, which “is a slower memory architecture than Apple was shipping in early 2006 MacBooks…”

By way of comparison, the all style and no substance MacBook turned down by Giampaolo offers a Core 2 Duo P7350 or P8600 alongside PC3-8500 DDR3 RAM, which delivers “a peak transfer rate that’s twice as fast as the HP machine…”

“And while Giampaolo can upgrade to even more RAM, he can’t upgrade his new system to use the faster DDR3 RAM specification in the MacBook,” notes McLean.

“That would make his system faster overall and allow it to take full advantage of the installed CPU’s 1066MHz front side bus,” he adds, “which HP chose to cripple by pairing it with a 533MHz memory architecture to save money and deliver a cheap system for people who don’t know that they’re really buying...”

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