New Apple ad catches Intel by surprise - Page 2  

Soooo......Roz Ho (sp?) makes MS steves bitch?!?!?!? I DONT THINK SO!

Jobs should thank his lucky stars for Intel, and I'm absolutely certain he's not as ungrateful as a number of the posters have made him out to be.

He's a businessman, #1.

I love this!

i agree. the macheads at the conference were pleased -- though apple already has their business.

i have to say also that intel is really being a very good sport, esspecially since apple makes up less than 10% of their current business.

haha great point. i just wish the ad was better -- im not sure if all the people who own PC's and are watching the superbowl will be energized to look into a mac after being told their PCs are boring. I mean i talked to "computer people" in Florida who didnt know what a registry or linux are -- i dont think the stick will work with an idiot.

Looked like stock film ! ? !

Are you a DP? Do you know what a DP is?

Jeez...

Do you have an argument?

i have doubts that intel stock footage would:

A) be so clean
B) have the people in bunny suits watch the wafer go up like it was going somewhere speacial
C) would have any stock footage made within the last 3 years -- why bother, people know what intel is and what they do

if i was a stockholder id dump their stock if thats footage they show me of their internal operations... sitting around staring at wafers -- man their employees are lazy, get back to freaking work slaves.

Thanks


This is where I disagree. I didn´t feel that the footage was made to correspond to the script. If the theme was "to set it free" they could have much better clips.

oh I didnt make the original post.

and i dont know what a dp is, but ill head over to acronym finder in a sec.

update: its either Dew Point or Double Penetration

Perhaps Director of Photography?

BTW: http://www.popzoot.tv/streamframe.php3?id=850

Guys, Intel owns Apple when it comes to the company size etc, not vice-versa. I agree, the Apple ad sucks and makes Intel look bad.

no the commercial makes apple look bad. benchmarks make intel look bad.

Come on.... They didn't set him on fire too.

I didn't get that at all.

The message was 'Intel chips are great but they've been held back by dull hardware and dull software - now they aren't'.

It was certainly cheeky indirectly bashing both PC's and their software (ie Microsoft) and Apple claiming to be Intel's saviour from their other customers. It was intended to make Dell, HP, Compaq etc look bad, not Intel.

I can't imagine Michael Dell losing much sleep over the mild ribbing Apple gave though.

In what way? There's nothing as fast as the Core Duo available for laptops and low power desktops like the iMac that can touch it. Sure, a top end G5, Opteron or X2 are faster than a Core Duo but you can't stick those in a laptop or iMac.

My comment was mostly concerning desktops, i concede that currently intel are ahead in mobile. However consider that the centrino has been out for years and AMD has really only been focusing on the desktop market until recently, so i believe they have catch up room/time as they shift focus.

With regard to Desktops though, Even Intel's just released chips came in short against the unrevamped Q3 line of AMD 64 Dual Cores (esspecially in preformance/watt).

I would surely put my faith in AMD over Intel as far as desktops are concerned for the next year and *cough cough* powermacs are also scheduled this year.

edit: or was it next year? ops ^.^

That sounds like AMD have suddenly realized that Laptop sales are eclipsing desktop sales, which doesn't bode well for their business nowse. I'm sure they aren't that stupid but you don't build a new platform like Centrino overnight. Intel will continue to push ahead. AMD are in catchup there.


No debate there. I've three Opteron 244 servers and a dual Xeon. I know which ones are the best.

Intel's desktop chips are still the old technology. When we get a new 'PowerMac' it'll be new technology. The question therefore is, Can Intel produce faster desktop chips than AMD at the end of this year?

I suspect they can. The one fly in the ointment is Intel's FSB technology which is way behind AMD and the G5 for that matter.


I think it'll be a close run race. But will they be faster than the Quad G5 - that's the question bearing in mind that's faster than almost everything but the fastest Opteron Quads.

cooling might be an issue though if intel doesnt really break from their current cores and come up with something much improved. I mean the high end dual cores were hitting 55-70C (idle to full load) on their dual cores in a THG benchtest about 2 months ago. Like you said, you cant make a great platform overnight.

If you knew how incredibly hard it is to light the scenes used in that ad, you wouldn't think it was stock footage. White, white on white, black, metals, mirrored surfaces, highlights....

It's some nice photography...

I'll dig up the credits.

Something about it made me think of Director Chris Cunningham's music video for Bjork's "All Is Full of Love" although that is CG based (It'll fool you). Again, white, black, metal, etc. A still from it is on the cover of a DVD compilation of his work. Stills from the video are here.

Anyway... ending your post by taking a stab at the quality of the photography in their commercial comes off as a cheap shot.

gc

Today's Core Duo chips are merely a preview for Intel in 2006.

I'm an AMD fan myself, but the benchmarks and power consumption details for Yonah seem pretty clear. They're roughly competitive with AMD's top of the line (slightly under in most tests), but Core Duo clearly has more juice per watt.

It'll get more interesting with the Conroe and Merom revisions to come. AMD has no specific answer on tap. They'll continue to be performance competitive and possible the leader, but the power/heat gap may widen.

AMD makes their bread in the cycles/$ ratio, servers, PC media and gaming, and hell, even low end PCs can get the proformance from a $400 intel chip for ~$150-200 for an AMD.

dude, i'm with you. the ad was beatifully shot. they may even have recreated some the machinery (as props and/or sets) in addition to shooting in an actual fabrication plant. and i SWEAR the bunny suits the actors were in were specially costume-designed too. they look more like spacesuits. beatiful photography. stock footage, i doubt it. beautifully shot ad...

"All Is Full of Love" is a fucking brilliant music video. the quality of CG is absolutely spectacular. For the 3D people, IIRC glassworks has mentioned how they used a lot of simulated global illumination to get that level of photorealism... 10-20/50? lights set up in the scene as a "virutal lighting rig"... back in the day when actual radiosity and "baking" and stuff was very computationally intensive. (don't trash me too badly if i got terms and stuff wrong, i'm not in the 3d scene at the moment okay...)

here though i have to agree with Anders, if it's being "set free", the last seen shows it INSIDE a computer (the iMac). so conceptually the ad is not perfect. personally i love the visual and music quality of the ad, but conceptually it bugs me a little... still, the references to Dull (the derogatory slang word for "Dell") is bloody awesome

edit: also, conceptually, why would you market a chip showing so much how it is made? you would want to market it showing what it can do.

Again: I have no idea what you mean. I have not edited anything in my post regarding the commercial.

By stock film I meant the actual shots did not correspond with the text, like when the shots were made they did not know what to use it for. Generic clips of a fab. When I see the shots I see people in love with wafers. I don´t see anyone who wants to set chips free. And I will give you that the quality of shots are great, but I think if you reread my post again you will see I was referring to the story (with grammatical errors and all):


And lastly: Look at the link I provided above. It seems like there is a lot of music videos out there with the same aesthetics

This is what I'm talking about when I'm concerned about the ad's snottiness. When I was a Windows user, the toasted pentium ads and their "We're so freaking great, they suck so hard" tone pissed me off. It was another four years after seeing those ads before I seriously looked at a Mac. I want NEW users of my favorite platform and I don't see how this ad will do that. Why does Apple insist on continuing to make commercials that don't really appeal to anyone but the already devoted? It drives me nuts.

Please return your Mac at the exit. You've obviously no sense of humour.

Come on, Apple HAVE to make their new Macs sound more exciting than the old Intel boxes people have been suffering for so many years. What do you want them to do...? Run an advert saying...

"For years you've toiled at work in front of a dull beige Intel box.... Now we're that dull too and you can be that dull at home starting today. Enslave yourself to dull work like monotony and being Mr. Average. The new just as dull as a Dell Intel Mac"

Understood (now).

Previously you said: "looked [italics mine] more or less like stock film" which could very easily be considered a slam in the ad biz where "look" and "art direction" for high end spots such as this are king.

IOW, it could be construed in the same way "clip art" might be taken poorly by a graphic artist if used in a comment on their design.

gc

What are you talking about? AMD has had Turion64 since 2003, when they saw the success of Centrino and developed their own version of Centrino, low-power, high clock, all-in-one wireless, chipset, chip.

And they sell pretty good too.

Dell is on the way out, and Intel knows it. Apple is all they have to help bring Intel's new technology to market, and by the way - Apple is now the largest P.C. vendor in the world by market cap.

If they had it working for so long, then why wasn't it introduced until CES 2005?

Apple made Intel CEO dress up in bunny suit. What, with a gun to his head. Please. Sensationalistic journalism at it's finest.

I'm not so sure that's correct any more. I think Apple is losing devotees as we speak.

About the advertising. Your assessment may have been correct when they had the G3 commercials that were 'smoking off' Pentiums (or something like that), but these days, it's different. OS X is outstanding - but not by that much any more. The "set free" advertising probably is for the more delusional devotees, while less delusional devotees like me wonder why Monarch Computer lets you configure your computer from scratch while Apple doesn't.

After being a Mac evangelist since 1986, since two years I am considering serious alternatives. This also has to do with still not being able to run full 64-bit on G5 powermacs, having had two DOA deliveries of G5 powermacs, and not getting any 1-year-ahead roadmaps by Apple that allow me to do serious hardware planning. And if you're honest about it, Macs are simply too slow. Not according to their own statistics, but Dr. Marlboro also said smoking was no threat to your health.

Instead of wasting money on yet another G5, I got myself an AMD Opteron 254 dual processor machine with more hardware specs than you could get for DOUBLE the money at Apple's. I run 64-bit Suse Linux, and for all I know that environment is not one bit less user-friendly than just about anything running under X11 on OS X.

Unless Mac OS X will allow OS-level clustering, run on bigger Sun, IBM, HP, Acer or Fuj-Siemens servers, run on slim Dell laptops - we're not seeing any 'setting free'. It's this reverse advertising talk that NOW is really infantile, whereas ten years ago, it was 'cool'.

So, no, I'm not your "Windows user". But funny you should bring "Windows" up: I bought my first Windows machine with a TV card, after Apple advertised EyeTV that cost me over 400 CHF and never ever run reliably - they were nice enough to refund me for that unfunctional box, so I used that money to buy myself a cheap PC with a TV card that, funny enough, still runs reliably today, and helps me catch up with some TV shows I may have missed otherwise. Otherwise, Windows is no comparison to OS X, but useful of course, if a particular application is not available for Mac OS X.

- Where is OS X on "real" computers? Where is OS X taking over features of other OSs that are really cool?

- Where is the Powermac with 4-8 harddrive bays, and 2-3 slot/tray loading devices, and your personal choice of motherboard, 2-8 processors, and up to 32 or 64 GB of RAM?

- Where is the fully user configurable small pizza box, that can be unsightly or snazzy (depending on your choice of case), that hosts anything between a PPC G4 to an AMD Opteron 280, anything between 0.5 to 8 GB of RAM, 2 harddisks (anyone want to live without harddisk mirroring in the times of IDE controllers keeling over?!?) and 1 tray/slotloader (CD, DVD, ...)? And I want to order my slot/tray loading disc reader/writer on basis of it's manufacturer and detailed specs - not on basis of "Apple puts it in for ya".

Apple's hardware always sort of sucked, but their software and OS were cool. So, I like my IBM M keyboard, my Razer Diamondback mouse, my Acer LCD screen, my G4 is more useable since I went to order replacement Papst / Thermal Take fans and replaced the CPU, and OS X just (still and unfortunately) happens to run on an Apple computer. Me liking OS X for desktop productivity doesn't mean I'm unable to perform bang for buck evaluations.

Right. That's why everyone was announcing Turion64 laptops instead of Core Duo laptops at CES.

Not aimed at anyone in particular, but, I do hope the Apple forums aren't going to descend into Intel fanboy v AMD fanboy threads over the next few years. It's interminably dull. Both have their plus and minus points but to be honest, I don't care.

'running under X11 on OSX'

If that's you comparison point then that's great for you. Nice hardware, and I'm not knocking Linux (use it myself on 3 systems) but many people couldn't care less about hardware - it's all about the software they need to run.

If you get all that with Linux and can run the software you need then great.

BULL...Apple and Dell serve 2 differant markets, like Ford and Lexus.

Folks who buy their computers from Dell do so because it looks cheap. I say looks because Apple doesnt play in the shitty specs that Dell does, apple is using Core duo, not 5 year old up-clocked p3-based celerons.

Dell also sells the desktop, do you think the Music match, quicken, AOL 30 day AV trial, and all the rest of the stripped down crapware icons are there for no reason?

If Apple massively overtakes Dell in the PC market, it will be because people are willing to pay a little more for quality, stability and user experiance / usability,

By the way: Apple has a much smaller share of the PC market if you look at...humm...i dunno, real, meaningfull numbers, like...hmmmmm....unit sales!

i wouldnt take those numbers too seriously. Not to say dell doesnt have more market share, but i wonder how much more apple and other quality brands should have when you factor in the fact that people are buying crappy computers (aka dells) running windows, which they want to replace in about a year out of either desire (its slow) or nessecity (viruses, harddrive failure etc).

People want to buy new computers because the old ones are slower, hardware crap out and viruses?

Speed: Yeah, Damn those faster Intel computers. Thank god we never had the problem of agressively faster hardware year for year for a looooong time.

Hardware: How do the exact same harddisk know its inside a Dell and not a Mac so it need to break faster?

Viruses: Even if mac users are smarter than Windows users I do grant them the intelligens to realise that it is easier to update their virus scanner than their computer

Huh? The G5s were a lot faster than the G4s. And Intel stalled around 3Ghz for a long time, much as the whole industry did at the 90nm process stage.

It's only really since dual core that we've seen speed leap forward again.


I presume you've not done support for Windows users? Novice users can get them into a real state whilst trying to defrag them or run weird tools to try and get them running fast again when the problem isn't the disk anyway, it's malware.


You'd think so, but in my experience it's not the case, they just buy another £400 Dell or Packard Bell and start again when the old one gets so slow it's unusable. It's often cheaper than trying to fix their mess.