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Think Butt-Kicking. (4/18/98)
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The progression of harder-hitting Apple ads may continue. First, we had the Snail ad, which likened the speed of Intel's Pentium II to that of everyone's favorite shell-lugging gastropod, while claiming that the G3 chip is "up to twice as fast" according to Bytemarks. Then Apple turned up the heat, letting us see (with no small sense of personal satisfaction) a smouldering lamé-clad Bunnyman, as Apple "apologized" for "toasting" the Pentium II in public. What's next? According to Mac OS Rumors, we should expect the next wave of product-centric commercials to debut with the launch of the Wall Street and Main Street Powerbooks.
Rumors claims that the new ad will compare the high-end Wall Street system (with its 292 MHz G3 processor) with a 266 MHz Pentium II-based Wintel laptop. Given that a mobile Pentium II is slower than a desktop model, and that the 292 MHz Wall Street reportedly performs up to 50% faster than a current desktop G3 Powermac, it's going to be a slaying. One Rumors source confirms what we've long suspected: that the new Powerbooks will be able to emulate Windows nearly as fast as (possibly faster than?) a similarly-priced Wintel laptop can run it natively. We expect that may be a focus of the ad.
It's unclear whether this ad will be a print ad or a television commercial, but for a message this strong, we're guessing that it's destined for the TV screen. We'd love to see a series of side-by-side speed demos, each showing the Powerbook winning in emulation, then with native software. Picture this: Word 97 on the Wintel, Word 97 in VirtualPC on the Powerbook. In a word count test, the Powerbook wins by a small margin. Then Word 97 on the Wintel, and the native Word98 on the Powerbook-- which would win a word count test by a huge margin, most likely. "With a new Macintosh Powerbook, you can run Office 97 for Windows faster than ever. Of course, you could also run Office 98 for Macintosh instead-- and set a new speed record." Could be neat.
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 | | The above scene was taken from the 4/18/98 episode: April 18, 1998: Apple prepares its next hard-hitting commercial, touting the incredible speed of the upcoming Wall Street Powerbooks. Meanwhile, those selfsame Powerbooks may debut at a slightly higher price than most of us have been expecting, and rumors persist that Apple will unveil the Mac OS' little brother at next month's WWDC...
Other scenes from that episode: 639: Powerbook Price Creep? (4/18/98) We're noticing an irksome trend for newly-released Apple computers to emerge with pricing significantly higher than expected. The most recent and obvious example of this phenomenon is the Powermac G3 All-in-One (née Artemis), which had been widely reported both in the Mac-centric world, as well as in the more general computer press, as being Apple's sub-$1000 consumer Mac... 640: Mac OS' Little Brother (4/18/98) While no one else we've discussed this with thinks it's very likely to happen, Mac the Knife continues to forecast that Apple will introduce the Newton-replacing Mac OS Lite (also known as Allegro Lite) at the Worldwide Developer Conference in a few weeks...
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