Apple Kills “Get a Mac”; Pitches “Why You’ll Love a Mac”

The award-winning “Get a Mac” series of commercials, created by TBWAMedia Arts Lab ran between 2006 and 2009.  The commercials angered some Windows users, but convinced others to embrace Apple’s slickly packaged hardware.  They also helped turn Justin Long and John Hodgman, the leads in the U.S. version of the commercials, into stars.

Back in April, Justin Long warned Apple’s fans in an interview that the commercials might be dead.  Now it appears Apple has indeed pulled the plug on the popular commercials, replacing them with a new campaign.

Apple’s new attempt at advertising will be a campaign called “Why you’ll love a Mac.”  On Apple’s website the “Get a Mac” section has been pulled and now redirects to the new campaign.

“Why you love a Mac” features Apple claiming that it has “Better Hardware, Better Software, Better OS, Better Support, and It’s [more] Compatible” than PCs.  If “Get a Mac” rubbed PC lovers the wrong way, the new campaign will likely be more of the same.

It’s accuracy seems pretty subjective.  If you compare Macs against cherry-picked PCs, some of the claims become plausible.  However against high end PC laptops, Apple’s graphics offerings even in its latest MacBook Pros come up a bit short.  And Windows 7 currently has many features that OS X Snow Leopard lacks (though the reverse is true as well in a handful of cases) and supports a great deal more peripherals. 

The strangest claim, perhaps, though is “better software.”  While Apple has done much to expand it’s software lineup — including getting some game love, at long last — most Apple titles are available for Windows.  And the majority of Windows software is not OS X compatible.  Oh, and the campaign claims it “doesn’t get PC viruses” (in most cases technically true, rather it gets Mac viruses).

In memory of “Get a Mac” here’s some of the campaign’s greatest hits preserved on YouTube for all you Apple lovers out there [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10].