As usual, Apple's ads are turning heads-- even if most of those heads belong to existing Mac fans and people in the advertising business. Over at AdReview, columnist Bob Garfield gives Apple's current TV spots three stars for "perfectly, charmingly" conveying the Mac's capabilities. Want to tout the fact that Macs excel at burning custom audio CDs, or highlight how the new iBook can edit digital video on the go? Evidently Garfield thinks Apple and TBWA/Chiat/Day are right on the money by sticking Gen-Xers in an empty theater and in a middle seat on a plane, respectively. Hey, we're not going to argue with him; we're big fans of both "Concert" and "Middle Seat." Kudos to Apple for winning the approval of the ad industry as well as the Mac community.

What's interesting, though, is that Garfield calls Apple's new ads a "180° turn" from the original "1984" ad that introduced the first Mac, because instead of evoking "the essence of a new machine," this latest campaign "hammers at the products' physical features." Well, okay, he's not wrong-- certainly a guy editing a movie on a plane says a lot more about Apple's product than a blond woman in running shorts tossing a hammer through a video screen. But the biggest criticism we continue to hear about Apple's ads is that they still aren't feature-centric enough. "Concert," while brilliant, is admittedly pretty oblique; there's no mention of iTunes or how its integrated CD-RW support makes burning custom music CDs a simple prospect. And we wouldn't be terribly surprised if some people watch "Middle Seat" and come away thinking that they don't want a laptop which requires three airplane tray tables to get any work done.

The bottom line, though, is this: no matter how hard some Mac fans may wish, we're not likely to see hard-hitting Apple ads that compare Apple's price-performance ratios to those of the competition in our lifetime. Apple isn't about numbers and components, remember? Apple makes the "whole widget." Given that reality, Apple can't entirely separate its products from its corporate image, but we agree with Garfield that the company's on the right track in the way it's "selling the product on its merits, and not as a conscientious objection." In other words, the latest message isn't "buy a Mac to strike a blow against the status quo," but rather "buy a Mac because it's a killer widget that works." And when all's said and done, that's going to say a lot more about Apple than any list of specs and prices.