After years of  being belittled by the amusing (though quickly tiresome) Apple Mac Ads, Microsoft announced last year they would launch a $300 million dollar campaign to air commercials of their own.

If you are unfamiliar with the ad wars between Microsoft and Apple, we suggest hopping out from your rock and popping over to Youtube for a quick search of “Get a Mac” or “Laptop Hunter” before continuing.

It started off with Jerry Seinfeld being paid enormous dollars to confuse and mystify the viewers with topics completely unrelated to Microsoft or its Windows products at all – apparently an ineffective strategy. However, the Redmond company seems to have hit their stride with the recent “Laptop Hunter” campaign that take seemingly ordinary folks off the street (read as: paid actors) looking for a good deal on a laptop to meet their needs.

“You Find It, You Keep It” is the theme, which has the “hunters” combing shelves looking at multiple laptops in their budget with a variety of different options. They inevitably end up in the Mac section only to discover, that while the Mac’s look pretty, they costs much more than their already size-able budget will allow, and specs lower than many of the comparable PC’s.

While Apple’s ads directly attack Microsoft’s operating system with the usual 6 basic stereotypes; virus’s, not meant for creative people, slow and restricting, virus’s, confusing to operate, more virus’s, Microsoft has taken a more tactful approach and attempted to show consumers the true value of a computer with stigma, labels and shiny metal. 

At its Worldwide Partner Conference 2009, Microsoft CFO, Kevin Turner, reportedly receive a call recently from Apple’s legal department, apparently upset about the “Laptop Hunter” ads.

An excerpt from notes on Turner’s speech read:

And so we’ve been running these PC value ads. Just giving people saying, hey, what are you looking to spend? “Oh, I’m looking to spend less than $1,000.” Well we’ll give you $1,000. Go in and look and see what you can buy. And they come out and they just show them. Those are completely unscripted commercials. 

 

And you know why I know they’re working? Because two weeks ago we got a call from the Apple legal department saying, hey — this is a true story — saying, “Hey, you need to stop running those ads, we lowered our prices.” They took like $100 off or something. It was the greatest single phone call in the history that I’ve ever taken in business. 

I did cartwheels down the hallway. At first I said, “Is this a joke? Who are you?” Not understanding what an opportunity. And so we’re just going to keep running them and running them and running them. 

Apple’s claims are not without merit – they have in fact lowered the price of some models, so that their most basic and cheapest MacBook with 13″ LCD, 2.13GHz CPU with 2GB Memory now starts at $999 – we just don’t know if having the cheapest option a dollar under one grand  really qualifies as “good value” or a “budget system”.

With any luck, further pursuit of the matter could make for some very entertaining war ads to fill up the spots between TV  segments and may encourage some viewers to put down the PVR remote for a few seconds

The views expressed or implied in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions HardwareCanucks or its staff