I'm a Mac. I'm a PC.
December 18, 2016 12:45 PM   Subscribe

"Obviously I read for the PC, which I found to be a little bit surprising, because at that point I was about to turn 35—I still considered myself to be a 24-year-old thin, cool person." An oral history of "Get A Mac." (via kottke.org).
posted by capnsue (42 comments total) 21 users marked this as a favorite
 
They've somehow got a picture of old Gordon Freeman with a cowboy hat in place of John Hodgman.
posted by rodlymight at 1:12 PM on December 18, 2016 [5 favorites]


One of my favorite Hodgman-told stories is about how everything he has done since those ads has been for fun. They freed him from ever having to take a job just to put food on the table.
posted by Etrigan at 1:28 PM on December 18, 2016 [48 favorites]


Wow, I just binged through a bunch of them on youtube, they are so spot on. Funny, yet not really mocking, getting their point through without being pedantic. If TV advertising is an art form, this is its Sistine Chapel.
posted by signal at 1:45 PM on December 18, 2016 [2 favorites]


I was about to turn 35—I still considered myself to be a 24-year-old thin, cool person. It's a perfect example of how we have a delusional image of ourselves.

It's crazy, right? Because I'm 35, and I DON'T have delusions that I'm somehow a 24-year-old cool person, but I also don't feel I'm John Hodgman in the Get a Mac, ad, either. I'm young, and single, and active, and I try to take care of myself. This hit me hard when Ken Bone got his 15 minutes of fame. Another 35 year old, that looks like my DAD if he shaved his beard.

Other than my hairline (what can you do), I look and feel fit/fitter than I was 24. I certainly treat my body better. Is the reverse the norm for my age group? Do we all just get fat, lazy, and a drinking problem? Do Adult Responsibilities really just start killing you inside?
posted by alex_skazat at 2:00 PM on December 18, 2016 [4 favorites]


I didn't understand the UK ones - why would anyone allow the computer version of Jez into their house?
posted by betweenthebars at 2:04 PM on December 18, 2016 [5 favorites]


That's MetaFilter's own John Hodgman, of course. Though I still prefer Errol Morris's Switch campaign, there's no gainsaying how good the I'm a Mac/I'm a PC one is.
posted by Doktor Zed at 2:06 PM on December 18, 2016 [2 favorites]


Funnily, I hated that campaign. It felt to be incredibly mean-spirited and yet surprisingly fake at the same time. It really put me off Apple products - I have a Mac laptop because it was the lightest-weight available when I needed to buy and biking my other one around was making things hard, but I won't buy other Apple products, and a lot of that is pure irrational prejudice inspired by that campaign. If anything, it made me like PCs better out of sheer hatred for the obviousness of the pitch, also because even when I was in my twenties I grasped that dull-looking, plain people can be interesting and hip-looking ones are too often dull and predictable.
posted by Frowner at 2:08 PM on December 18, 2016 [49 favorites]


Oh wow, I'd always just assumed that Rahmens had simply had the best audition, rather than actively being selected for the Japanese version. Great choice, too.
posted by DoctorFedora at 2:43 PM on December 18, 2016


An ancient rant by Charlie Brooker (currently of Black Mirror fame) nicely summed up the confusing casting in the UK version of the campaign:

The ads are adapted from a near-identical American campaign - the only difference is the use of Mitchell and Webb. They are a logical choice in one sense (everyone likes them), but a curious choice in another, since they are best known for the television series Peep Show - probably the best sitcom of the past five years - in which Mitchell plays a repressed, neurotic underdog, and Webb plays a selfish, self-regarding poseur. So when you see the ads, you think, "PCs are a bit rubbish yet ultimately lovable, whereas Macs are just smug, preening tossers." In other words, it is a devastatingly accurate campaign.

posted by incomple at 3:21 PM on December 18, 2016 [48 favorites]


John Hodgman's experience of finding out he was not the cool, 24-year-old thin person and that the glasses he'd just bought were perfect for playing the schlubby nerd feels like the story of my life.

If anything, it made me like PCs better out of sheer hatred for the obviousness of the pitch, also because even when I was in my twenties I grasped that dull-looking, plain people can be interesting and hip-looking ones are too often dull and predictable.

I had the same experience. I identified much more closely with the PC character than the Mac one, and this campaign really sent me from feeling neutral about Apple products to actively hating them. They reinforced this idea that Macs were for people who liked things that looked cool, but were overpriced and had nothing going on beneath the suface.
posted by Anonymous at 3:43 PM on December 18, 2016


I hated that campaign, too. It started a good decade or so of smug, condescending jokes at my expense for preferring PCs to Macs--up to and including wondering to my face when I was going to learn how to use a "real" computer and acting like I was just too stupid to figure it out. Ho-lee shit. At this point, I still go from 0 to insta-punch when someone gets all smug about having a Mac. Not that there are many reasons to do that these days.
posted by Autumnheart at 4:38 PM on December 18, 2016 [6 favorites]


Forgot to add that dealing with Apple representatives is just as rage-inducing, for largely the same reason. They're the retail equivalent of a celebrity that flips their shit when you don't pick out all the green M&Ms. Totally bought into their own hype.
posted by Autumnheart at 4:45 PM on December 18, 2016 [1 favorite]


I like my Mac. I suppose that ad might have put me off them, but I don't own a tv.
posted by ryanrs at 4:48 PM on December 18, 2016 [6 favorites]


Oh good I too am looking forward to a thread consisting of complaints directed at nebulous Mac People
posted by DoctorFedora at 5:12 PM on December 18, 2016 [25 favorites]


Much like Bahro, I was hoping that this piece would devolve into one of those parody oral histories that have been making the rounds. But in a way, the full-on marketing sincerity sort of did turn it into a self-parody anyway.
posted by glonous keming at 5:49 PM on December 18, 2016 [3 favorites]


"Funnily, I hated that campaign. It felt to be incredibly mean-spirited and yet surprisingly fake at the same time. "

Me too! John Hodgman is so charming and the Justin Long character was so pointlessly mean to him! They were often kind-of cute little commercials, but they often gave me more warm fuzzies towards PCs than Macs. (At the time I was actually using Macs at work and PCs at home.)

From the article: "I was more worried about who was going to play the PC, because we didn't want to set up a paradigm that made people who had bought that platform for years feel dumb. It was very important that that character was very bright, empowered, charming, lovable."

I think that was the problem for me ... he was too charming and lovable. Plus I'm a Cubs fan so I'm always a fan of the schlub. :)

They were often cute little stories and often amusing, the actors had good chemistry and good comic timing. I just don't know that they sold me on Macs at all!
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 6:01 PM on December 18, 2016 [3 favorites]


Alicia Dotter (copywriter): You’d shoot 20 to get three. That was always a tough thing to do. Sometimes you get three and sometimes you wouldn’t get any. Sometimes they would just be like, “No. None of them.”

Phil Morrison [director]: That’s never how it works on a commercial shoot. Usually if a spot doesn’t air, something went horribly wrong.
Obviously a higher bar than "did something go horribly wrong?" over in Cupertino.
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 6:03 PM on December 18, 2016


They felt so mean at the time. Going back and watching them today I can't believe how mild most of them are.
posted by not_the_water at 6:07 PM on December 18, 2016 [2 favorites]


It was a useful ad campaign for me too, since up until that point I still had genuine affection for the Apple comeback and hated Microsoft products with a passion that was only possible growing up forced to use them for a decade. By the time of those ads I had already largely left the world of TV advertising behind, but when I did catch them, I of course hated the soulless dude-you're-getting-a-Mac dude, and was baffled that we weren't supposed prefer Hodgman. And of course since then my disgust at Apple has been confirmed many times over. But the useful lesson was that Microsoft didn't suck any less for that -- when dealing with a menu of billion-dollar corporations (or politicians), they will almost all necessarily suck. I still use Apple, antipathy and all, because it sucks a little less for me. And thus another lesson was learned about never falling for anything that spends a billion dollars to ensure that affection.
posted by chortly at 6:23 PM on December 18, 2016 [1 favorite]


It's really weird, just this morning I was mulling it over with my neighbour about going back to work. That description of the creative team working months on end, night and day trying to crack the campaign and their interactions with Jobs, was so similar to my last role that I'm kinda hyperventilating just thinking about it. So thanks for the reminder to not dip my toe back in the advertising pool right now. I needed that.
posted by Jubey at 6:42 PM on December 18, 2016 [10 favorites]


Came for the Hodgman anecdotes, was surprised to feel a bit of empathy for Justin Long. He obviously got the crap character in that job. Weird to see an oral history of an ad campaign, though. Most of the non-Hodgman stuff felt like pointless rehashing of office politics, which I can get at work if I really want to.
posted by Existential Dread at 6:46 PM on December 18, 2016 [5 favorites]


I think a lot of the nasty vibes from the campaign came from the Vista era when they were really ragging on the Vista failures. It was kind of cheap because, precisely because of the problems, most PC's were still running XP, which was a very mature product at the time. (I actually had a couple of machines that were still running Windows 2000, which was absolutely rock-stable but didn't support much in the way of consumer device drivers.)
posted by Bringer Tom at 7:10 PM on December 18, 2016


Phil Morrison: Any conversations about, "Hey, are they necessarily guys?" didn't get very far.

Mmhm. Do tell.
posted by soren_lorensen at 7:43 PM on December 18, 2016 [8 favorites]


My current mac:

Gigabyte Z97 UD3H-BK, i5-4690K, 2 X 8GB Mushkin STEALTH DDR3, 750GB SSD, NVIDIA 950 driving 2 24" 4K monitors. Total investment, ~$1500 and that includes the $150 Lian Li aluminum ATX case I got in 2008 . . .

I can be both a Mac and a PC. While Windows 10 is almost usable these days, macOS 10.12 is still streets ahead.

But now that Apple has gone x64, and deprioritized desktop hardware to a quite shocking extent -- and their "laptop" story isn't all that either -- I feel precious little attraction to Apple PC hardware, which is overpriced to start, and the upgrades are priced comically, while serviceability and down-the-road upgradeability are now next to nil.

My mom's 2006 iMac is on its last legs so I just put together a Skylake i5 hackintosh for her this week, using Intel's ~$400 i5-6260U "NUC" with HD 540 graphics -- it's basically a headless late 2016 MacBook Pro (base model). Works great with my unused 2008 Apple 24" Cinema Display!

I could have paid 3X for a Mac mini last updated 2 years ago, or wait however many months for new desktop offerings, but I'm tired of waiting, and tired of Apple having their thumbs up their ass wrt the Mac.

If hackintoshing somehow becomes unviable, I'll just stay on the last compatible version of macOS until Windows or Linux or whatever surpasses it.

At this point I kinda wish Apple would just give the macOS division to NVIDIA to run. Together they could make awesome machines.
posted by Heywood Mogroot III at 8:57 PM on December 18, 2016 [5 favorites]


The only thing that made me feel even a little positive about Apple from that ad campaign was that John Hodgman comes across so sweet and charismatic. I liked that they picked someone charming to play the opposition. Was he a little too charming? Perhaps! They did an amazing tightrope act of ribbing Microsoft and their failures while never actually making them look bad enough that you felt really sorry for them.

I mean, they could have been savage, you know? The ammo was there, the press around Vista was terrible and they absolutely had room to go for the jugular. But Hodgman and Long always read as pals who might be rivals during the day but go out for beers when they're off the clock. That's why the ads work. There's no heat.

I just never really liked Justin Long, though. I'm not sure who I would have picked instead, but I wanted someone a bit nerdier to play my computer. I get what they were going for, but I switched to Mac OS X in the PPC days because I liked that it had shiny UI features while still being Unix under the hood so maybe I wasn't the target audience.
posted by potrzebie at 10:11 PM on December 18, 2016 [1 favorite]


Interesting detail about the designer hoodies. I disliked Long from the ads much more than I should have based on the dialogue, which was pretty mild. I had this impression of Long as a spoiled hispter trust fund kid, which perhaps the clothes subconsciously nudged me towards.
posted by benzenedream at 10:21 PM on December 18, 2016


The interviews here actually address the issue of Hodgman's character being more sympathetic/having better lines, and the problem of not coming off too mean. Long is given a lot of credit for making that a personal priority.
posted by atoxyl at 10:23 PM on December 18, 2016 [3 favorites]


Did a lot for for the agency, the actors, and I guess American culture, but it's hard to say how much of the small change over time was attributable to the campaign. The stars were as closely aligned as they ever would be with Vista, and the outcome was still no strong OSX uptick. Everyone knew Vista sucked, and the result is more or less that people stuck with XP till 7 came out.

Apple has no 'this is what we do right' in their messaging. Even their switch campaign's famously drugged out / antihistamined college student Switch ad had nothing to say other than MS Word sucks. Which is unfortunate, because it sucked more on OS X. One such opinion at the time randomly found via Googling. Google apps, of all things, has basically made losing your term paper to a computer crash a non-issue, but Sheets is a very long ways from replacing Excel.

And man, for a company absolutely willing to make technology choice one of identity, kinda sad for Hodgeman -- as a long time Apple user, Hodgeman was, with no apparent effort, a walking embodiment of exact opposite of the customer Jobs wanted.
posted by pwnguin at 10:55 PM on December 18, 2016 [1 favorite]


In retrospect, I think Justin Long's contribution was significant, subtle, and completely intentional: he resisted mean, smug readings of the lines, and evoked genuine affection for his friend, sympathizing with his impotent floundering, brittle ego, and feelings of inadequacy. Hodgman got all the funny lines, of course, but Long was the perfect foil for him.

I imagine the two of them doing one of the classic Abbott and Costello bits, and can see it working just as well, but in a completely different way.

I've met John Hodgman many times since. He's a genuinely nice guy and a brilliant raconteur, only a hair removed from his Daily Show "Areas of My Expertise" persona. In his comic monologues, he's often talked about Justin Long and how funny he is in person, and how that was largely wasted in the "Mac vs. PC" bits. Since a lot of Hodgman's humor turns on deadpan insincerity, elaborate justifications of the utterly absurd, I'd be tempted to believe this is a deliberate swap of their ad personas, but I think he's on the level.
posted by panglos at 4:52 AM on December 19, 2016 [5 favorites]


The future mrFeet was watching one of those annoying Microsoft ads just the other day- "oh, my mac doesn't have a touch screen" "oh, my mac can't do that" and I said that the original "I'm a mac, I'm a PC" ads were way better, and he watched and enjoyed them. He's an 'IT guy' and prefers to work with Windows, but grudgingly accepts my mac.

I'm a mac person because of the unix under the hood and my ineptness with maintaining a linux box without breaking it.

I looked at him lovingly and said "I'm a mac, you're a PC, but both of us would probably be happy running linux."
posted by freethefeet at 5:16 AM on December 19, 2016 [1 favorite]


I actually have a Mac for the first time ever this year and I'm mostly surprised at how not different it is from Windows 10. I mostly run all the same applications and they run the same on either system. Chrome is Chrome, Slack is Slack and Photoshop is Photoshop. I have the Mac for work and a PC at home and switching back and forth doesn't bother me much other than the idiotic CMD-tab behavior on the Mac.

The sad thing is that the one thing that I like much better on the Mac is the hardware and they're now screwing that up.
posted by octothorpe at 6:04 AM on December 19, 2016


I mostly run all the same applications and they run the same on either system.

You don't use Excel much, I assume? Because Excel for Mac is garbage unless something has changed very, very recently.

When I worked in psych research, our whole lab was Mac because... idek why. The PI was a Mac and just assumed everyone wanted Macs. Then we hired a research programmer and then I had to start using XML mapping in Excel to deal with some of our data and there was a rebellion.

I was a very, very early Mac (our first family computer was an original Macintosh 512k desktop, back when you didn't have to say "desktop" because that's the only type of personal computer there was) but I think my antipathy towards Macs is largely driven by my parents who are total Apple ecosystem ride-or-die and they drive me insane with their demands for tech support which I can't give them because I stopped using Apple products in the 90s.
posted by soren_lorensen at 6:23 AM on December 19, 2016 [2 favorites]


It was everything I despise about marketing. Exploiting insecurities of whether you're cool enough or part of the in crowd, and suggesting your choice of computer somehow defines your personality and social status.
I already disliked apple for their stubborn rejection of interoperability and industry standards, mainly because my job involved creating and maintaining some of those standards, but their identity marketing always grated at me, and the fact that it worked so well even more so.
posted by rocket88 at 6:45 AM on December 19, 2016 [2 favorites]


You don't use Excel much, I assume?

Occasionally and I've never really noticed a difference but I'm far from a power user.
posted by octothorpe at 6:47 AM on December 19, 2016


Mostly if I need a spreadsheet, I just use Google Docs. Office is installed on both my Mac and PC at work but I seldom use it. We do most of our office stuff at work on a wiki and in Slack.
posted by octothorpe at 6:51 AM on December 19, 2016


It was everything I despise about marketing. Exploiting insecurities of whether you're cool enough or part of the in crowd, and suggesting your choice of computer somehow defines your personality and social status.

There are the things people do because they want to do them, and then there are the things people do because they want to be the sort of person who does them.
posted by acb at 8:07 AM on December 19, 2016 [3 favorites]


It started a good decade or so of smug, condescending jokes at my expense for preferring PCs to Macs--up to and including wondering to my face when I was going to learn how to use a "real" computer and acting like I was just too stupid to figure it out

Ok this confuses me. Mac users are the ones who get dissed by PC users for using a "toy" and not a "real computer." This is the way it's been since time immemorial. (Even though Windows is the one with big candy coated buttons now.) Get your flame wars straight!

The genius of the ads, as said before, is that they weren't fighting, they were friends. If you watched the ads and they pissed you off because Mac was so meeeeean, it was probably confirmation bias at work.

Ah, to pine for the good old days when internet arguments were over silly little shit like this.
posted by fungible at 8:33 AM on December 19, 2016 [2 favorites]



Ok this confuses me. Mac users are the ones who get dissed by PC users for using a "toy" and not a "real computer." This is the way it's been since time immemorial. (Even though Windows is the one with big candy coated buttons now.) Get your flame wars straight!


This. Most Mac user in the mid-late 90s have experienced at least one person smugly talking about how Apple's going out of business and asking us why we're still using a dying platform.
posted by gyc at 10:12 AM on December 19, 2016


Honestly people are (absolutely pointlessly) obnoxious in all directions about OS choice. I have no fucking idea why some people care so much.
posted by atoxyl at 12:44 PM on December 19, 2016 [2 favorites]


I liked the commercials but my favorite version was actually a parody where Long's character talked about making videos and other fun stuff while Hodgman's was like "um I have to work for a living". Can't remember if it was an SNL parody or someone else though and no luck with a quick search on you tube.
posted by LizBoBiz at 12:44 PM on December 19, 2016


The mean-spiritedness of the ads lay in the use of the bodies of the actors more than anything else - the idea that if you want to say something negative about a product, you represent it by showing a fatter, older body that wears glasses and if you want to say something positive, well, all that is good is represented by a thin young body with no visible disability. Also, the young body should be conventionally handsome and the old not; also, the young body should fit norms of masculinity while the old fits only the deprecated "male but the wrong kind of male" norms. That was what disgusted and angered me about those ads, particularly that it was the whole fucking point of the ads - it wasn't even boring marketing background. It was "look at this less desirable, less masculine body - this represents your product. Why not switch?"
posted by Frowner at 12:49 PM on December 19, 2016 [4 favorites]


I'm not sure I'd classify Justin Long as any particular norm of masculinity that trumps Hodgman's, but I agree with the thinner and younger parts being obvious signals.
posted by Etrigan at 1:25 PM on December 19, 2016


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