Justin Long leaving Mac commercials

This is welcome news. I've always balked at the personification of the Mac being a slacker doofus digikid. The article is right, the PC guy was infinitely more lovable in the ads than the Mac guy. So it ain't just me. Smug doesn't sell.

I've always said, those ads just proved how Apple downlooks at the userbase. Considers them non-productive casual use retards. The next "Mac" should probably be a hottie bimbo. Same problem, but at least we could all look at a hot chick, and that would at least say that the design of Macs is attractive. But Justin Long? A guy who even Drew Barrymore dumped? The kid from "Jeepers Creepers" who gets his eyes sucked out of his head? (or did they ROLL out?)

The article is right, the PC guy was infinitely more lovable in the ads than the Mac guy. So it ain't just me. Smug doesn't sell. I've always said, those ads just proved how Apple downlooks at the userbase.

I totally agree with that. And yet that article said the ads had been incredibly successful. And if Apple advertises to attract the small-dicked, ego-impaired, cult-minded, faux high-status, arrogant, look-down-their-noses crowd, then that's what the Mac community tends to become. As I've said before, I think it's becoming a bit embarrassing to be connected to Apple. We don't laugh so much as hipster-doofus geeks anymore. They're running the world. They're the Bill Gateses of the world. But Apple with Jobs at the helm knows only one approach. And that approach is to skim off the rubes, no offense intended for any currently resident thalo.net rubes. I'm sure yuze guys are the only ones who buy Apple products because they work better, not because you're trying to be huckster-doofus cool.

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And that approach is to skim off the rubes, no offense intended for any currently resident thalo.net rubes. I'm sure yuze guys are the only ones who buy Apple products because they work better, not because you're trying to be huckster-doofus cool.

Actually, I'd be FINE with a marketing image that was Mac people as trendy, artsy-cool... like nosering graphic designers or metrosexual gallery types, prepress jocks, black-clad 80's art fags, even geek-chic game designers or film editors. As long as they were people who worked for a living.

The Mac guy looked like he couldn't double-click his way out of a paper bag. Like he lived with his parents and played PSP all day.

The thing I hate about the Mac's image now, is that it's a weird mix of not being able to DO anything, along with the idea that Mac users are retards and have to use the Mac because of all the pre-fab boilerplate design. In other words, we buy a mac and sign up for dot-mac--'scuse me, I mean MOBILE ME (eye-pop-out-roll)--because we couldn't design our web-sites, or home movies, or photo albums OURSELVES.

The reason I always loved the Mac was the professional results. For newbies AND pros. Power users could easily take things to the next level BECAUSE the interface was so good, the Mac was such a good pro tool. Now, pros really have to jump through hoops to try and make their casual use machines produce pro results. Or wade through all the marketing BS and waste tons of time first, to get them.

Actually, I'd be FINE with a marketing image that was Mac people as trendy, artsy-cool... like nosering graphic designers or metrosexual gallery types, prepress jocks, black-clad 80's art fags, even geek-chic game designers or film editors. As long as they were people who worked for a living.

The Mac guy looked like he couldn't double-click his way out of a paper bag. Like he lived with his parents and played PSP all day.

LOL. Well, perhaps it's a fine line between metrosexual and spazzoid. But "creative types" can't just be creative types. They have to have nose rings, tattoos, blue hair, and whatever, to set themselves apart, to show who they are. It's just a different type of business suit, but a business suit all the same. A lot of these ring-nose people in real life, of course, are amazingly talented. But I think a lot of those people portraying the nose-ringers on TV in an Apple ad just come off looking goofy, pretentious, and vacuous. They may look the part, but is there anything more to them then being a poser? I think this vacuousness shows.

Me, I'd be much happier with some non-chic guy or girl in an Apple ad in a t-shirt and jeans, no hardware in the nose, who just said something like "I work hard. I don't have time for nonsense. I use OS X." But then, of course, we'd snicker and laugh at that as well because so much about OS X is about visual nonsense. So when some visually nonsensical (or personally spazzoidal) person comes on TV hawking Apple products, it's a much better and more honest fit. That other hipster doofus PC guy has little need for the nose-rings. He's squirreling away his millions by fleecing the nose-ring poser rubes.

Yes, I think we can definitely spot posers a mile away. If nellie nose-ring became the next Mac, she'd have to be BRIGHT. Ooze intelligence as well as sex appeal.

Justin Long would go, uh, I'm a Mac? And it sounded like a friggin' QUESTION. The article puts it perfectly: hipster doofus.

Even the Dell surfer dude was more charming.

Apple is notorious for personifying the Mac with freakin' MORONS. Remember their switcher campaign? Holy god. It was as if they tried to get people to come off as pretentious as possible. I didn't believe anyone did any work with a Mac. or could do.

I guess all I want to see is some intelligent people using the computer well. Making money, saving time, doing work. Not CHEATING the system, but being creative.

The Mac used to spawn businesses right and left. Including mine. The Mac used to be a business waiting to happen. That's how I'd sell it. My ad would be somebody opening up a box with a Mac in it. Plugging it in. Turning it on. I'd change the startup screen to go back to some kind of welcome message like "Hello"... wouldn't have to be a smiley mac. Maybe just small dark type "Hello" under the apple logo... then a montage of going here, doing that... a few apps, photoshop, whatever... ending with a web site, and then a shot of somebody surfing that web site and clicking "BUY ME." Then a cut back to the creator of the site, who smiles.

Then you could have one with a musician... same deal, opening the box through getting a recording contract and having their song appear on iTunes.

One with a filmmaker, same thing... ending in a trailer, or showing his or her movie now showing in theaters.

One with a business person, getting a promotion, whatever.

And I wouldn't even have to forget casual use. A grandparent video i-chatting with their grandchild? That would be money. A kid playing some rollicking first person shooter? Well, if that wasn't a lie it would be GREAT. Fine by me.

The thing I hate about the Mac's image now, is that it's a weird mix of not being able to DO anything, along with the idea that Mac users are retards and have to use the Mac because of all the pre-fab boilerplate design.

That is so absolutely true. One of the Munchkins brought over a box full of his assorted Lego parts the other day. They're what you have left when those parts are not perfectly arranged in the way just like shown on the cover of the "Star Wars X-Wing Fighter" Lego box. But most of the pieces, outside of those specialized, pre-fabbed uses, are near useless. In my day, we had all-purpose Legos made of blocks, large and small, beams, large and small, and generic foundations and roof tiles. You could make damn near anything with them. Rather than looking at box-top cover art and trying to follow their one pre-fabbed design, we instead used our I-word. Yes, it's that most dreaded of all the eleven-letter words: Imagination. What the heck am I supposed to do with the nose-section of the X-Wing Fighter when it really doesn't fit any other piece but the other pieces that make up the X-Wing Fighter? Most of the parts in the box were useless for actually doing anything other than matching the manufacturer's pre-fabricated design.

The reason I always loved the Mac was the professional results. For newbies AND pros. Power users could easily take things to the next level BECAUSE the interface was so good, the Mac was such a good pro tool.

I'm absolute living proof of that. I have squat talent for drawing, and barely enough to do the occasional design. And computers are no substitute for natural talent, and yet the right computer does indeed allow you to maximize that talent. The early Macs did just that. And those early Macs certainly gained all the advantages of having been first to cross the threshold of user-friendliness. We must be careful not to over-mythologize. But a threshold they did indeed cross and it wasn't necessarily a given when or if anyone would cross that threshold. But what has OS X given us? Really. Seriously. I'd have to say the search function in Finder windows. Maybe Column View. In particular, the search function is incredibly useful and fairly well implemented. But after that, I really have to think. And no fair saying crash-proofness, because geeky Unix machines had this years before the modern graphical user interface was ever invented. So we're basically stagnating in eye candy and whiz-bang features that are easy for the chess club brains to crank out but that hardly make anyone more creative. It's just more layers of the same sort of stuff. No one at Apple is stretching the paradigm anymore, at least when it comes to the OS. What they're doing is flooding the current one. I'm just not at all persuaded that paying more for a Mac gets you anything worth the added costs other than the Alligator-shirt cheap status among the types who get excited over shining things. It's funny, really. Mac users are over-sold and respond to shiny things much like the early Indians in Manhatten were over-sold and responded to cheap beads and trinkets.

Apple is notorious for personifying the Mac with freakin' MORONS. Remember their switcher campaign? Holy god. It was as if they tried to get people to come off as pretentious as possible. I didn't believe anyone did any work with a Mac. or could do.

The greatest irony of all is that it was Steve Jobs who threw into the face of John Scully the line "Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life?" when he was trying to recruit him to Apple. What does Steve Jobs end up doing himself? Selling sugar water, of the digital kind. There is a specific market (yute culture) and a specific marketing tactic to grab them. Really, I'm pretty sure the nose-picker advertising execs have their own Klink-like principle: If it doesn't look stupid to anyone over the age of 25, you're probably swinging and missing in your appeal to young tastes. Nothing wrong, of course, with appealing to one market or the other. It just so happens that (and I agree with you on this point) the vibe or persona of today's yute culture is the idiot culture. And, really, surely there must be yutes who are embarrassed to be thought of as stupid, vapid, and easily impressed with trinkets and shiny things. There are yutes right now who are either flying in the space shuttle or fighting for freedom in Iraq, and I doubt that either is stupid, vapid, or easily impressed by only stupid stuff. They are, instead, an inspiration and a tangible culmination of anti-stupid. But advertisements featuring morons is the reverse. You're right. It's just down-talking by Apple. And I would say that it's more of a cynical message. It sort of disguises itself as "be all you can be," while instead actually glorifying nose-pickers and morons.

I guess all I want to see is some intelligent people using the computer well. Making money, saving time, doing work. Not CHEATING the system, but being creative.

What, are you a friggin' PC user? You want practical results instead of cheap imagery?

The Mac used to spawn businesses right and left. Including mine. The Mac used to be a business waiting to happen. That's how I'd sell it.

Consider how the Mac and some of the great early Mac software (MacWrite, PageMaker, Illustrator, etc.) unleashed the power of creativity, you'd think that over 20 years later, there would be at least a second or third generation of set-free-ness going on. Indeed, Photoshop could be thought of as the second tier, and maybe some of the rendering and modeling software is third tier. But a lot of that is pretty highly specialized, to say the least. Granted, I cheer such efforts as at least the idea of iPhoto or Garage Band. It's the idea of using a computer to take care of the geeky drudgery that used to be pretty much part and parcel of a craft. Being a photographer was like that. It used to be that half the art (still is, really, in Photoshop perhaps) was developing the film and just otherwise fooling with the technology. This stuff has no doubt not changed regarding various crafts that are 2 parts inspiration and 10 parts perspiration. And like I said, there's no substitute for natural talent (or drive). But the Mac used to be about at least making everyone a budding apprentice. That was very powerful. And it did so by raising the value of creativity itself rather than the Geek Aristocracy stuff. Instead of there being honor and mojo in the arcane for arcane's sake, the Mac had a different priority. Apprenticeship, not geekship, was the point. To be a master why, yes, you might move onto some of the high-priced products like Photoshop, etc, and that could get quite arcane. But the point was that to unleash one's talent it was determined (and correctly so) that it is best to dispense with the needlessly arcane from the get-go, at the ground floor. And because of this, the ground floor was higher up to begin with. Again, I think iMovie is a nice attempt at trying to simplify something that used to be horribly complicated. People can now make their own movies. That's amazing power. All of that is to be commended and not forgotten. But the big but is that ease-of-use itself in regards to interaction with the computer has advanced very little. As a platform for making a lot of other stuff Mac-like and accessible, it's not advancing much at all.

Then you could have one with a musician... same deal, opening the box through getting a recording contract and having their song appear on iTunes.

One with a filmmaker, same thing... ending in a trailer, or showing his or her movie now showing in theaters.

One with a business person, getting a promotion, whatever.

I like that. I shows the point is more than just sticking your finger in your nose. More than your so-called passive use. But there *is* indeed a difference between passive use and a more active use. There is a clearly a difference between TV and books, for example. There's a difference, obviously, between going to the art museum and actually painting something, horrible as that first effort may be. Same thing with writing. I totally agree with your "Better to get an honest F then do nothing at all" principle, although I don't often follow it myself. But it's the vibe that should be part and parcel of the Mac, not this stupid, yute, nose-ring, nose-picking stuff and image.