Microsoft's Laptop Hunters Ads: When Will They Stop?

If you haven't caught wind of Microsoft's Laptop Hunters advertisements by now, well you're lucky. They're a series of (hopefully only) six ads meant to take a jab at Apple's successful "Get A Mac" commercials. So far four of these ads are out and they are based on the premise that some person is looking for a particular computer for their needs within a certain budget. If they find what they're looking for, Microsoft pays for the computer. True in Microsoft spirit, these commercials are all full of issues. The first ad was filled with controversy after people discovered an actress was used instead of a regular person looking to go computer shopping. Also, while the ads are supposed to be "fair" and have the regular people consider Apple products as well, it was discovered in the first ad that the actress never even went into the Apple store. Looking at the clip shows the same person walking by as she enters and exits, and that's just the first ad.

So what's the point of this post? Nothing really. This is just a rant. As with any diehard computer geek like myself, the errors in these advertisements are just so irksome that I must voice my opinions. For example, in the video (the fourth ad) posted above, "Sheila" is a filmmaker looking for a laptop "that's going to be able to cut video." She ended up with an HP HDX laptop. For one, you don't get a laptop with the intention of doing intense video work and you certainly don't get a PC for video work (Final Cut Pro for OS X has the majority market share for video production and is the de facto standard). You get some ridiculous dual quad-core processor Mac Pro with loads of RAM.

Sheila does briefly consider the Apple MacBook Pro but quickly ignores it saying that it only has 2GB of RAM. I'm assuming she also ignored how Macs are ever so slightly more efficient with their RAM usage than Vista. And then there's the fact that regular Vista can't handle more than ~3.2GB of RAM regardless of how much physical RAM is installed in the computer. Let's not mention either that RAM is ridiculously cheap so that MacBook Pro could have 4GB for 40 and actually be able to use it unlike the Vista box.

This video criticism wouldn't be complete without highlighting some spot-on YouTube comments:

You are a professional film maker and you are at Fry's getting advice about video editing, really?
"it's got a widescreen" -- which laptops these days don't have widescreens?
So, the computer she settles on is crap. I own a Mac, I'll go ahead and throw that out there, so I am biased... But here are the specs: She settled for this: HP 16-inch HP HDX 16t 4 GB of DDR2 RAM (600-1066MHz) 2.13 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo GE Force 9600M GT 512 Graphics and a 1366 x 768 max resolution display.

My MacBook Pro has: 2 GB of DDR3 RAM (800-1600MHz) (Faster+lower voltage) 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo Identical discreet card+optional integrated graphics and a 1440x900 resolution display

PWN

Idiots! 15' macbook is better for video editing! New macbooks haves DDR3!! HP HDX has DDR2..... wtf??

iMovie, Final Cut are best videoeditingsoft ever! And only for MAC-users! )))

Microsoft sucks!

Okay, that's my rant for the month. Carry on.

What do you think of Microsoft's Laptop Hunters ad series? At least they're better than the odd Seinfeld-Gates ads..