Embarrassing Qualcomm ad claims 'I'm a Mac' actor is switching to Windows ARM over notific...
Actor Justin Long now stars in a painful Qualcomm ad that requires you to remember "I'm a Mac," care about it, and fathom what his coffee mug means.
Good luck figuring out the significance of the mug
Apple's "I'm a Mac" ads were effective and funny. They were so effective that AppleInsider readers will remember them -- but surely no one outside of technology will.
Apple's ads wound down 15 years ago. Qualcomm is trading on consumers remembering this, for an utterly wincingly bad dad-joke kind of ad.
The ad was introduced at the very end of Qualcomm's Computex 2024 keynote, with CEO Qualcomm Cristiano Amon announcing it as footage of "a very special person actually ordering their Copilot+ PC." There's then a 23-second video of Justin Long being driven to order a Snapdragon-powered PC.
Then suddenly noticing us watching, Long says to camera: "What? Things change." For reasons passing understanding, he points at his coffee mug as proof.
That part with the mug is easy to miss, though, because you could still be busy going "huh?" at the rest of it. As first spotted by The Verge, Long is seen working on a MacBook Pro, but then there is a barrage of notifications and that's it, he's switching to Windows ARM.
It's acutely embarrassing and not just because notifications prompt the switch. No one is going to switch platforms over notifications, but if they did, no human being is going to Google the words "where can I find a Snapdragon powered PC?"
Qualcomm thinks we'll all remember "I'm a Mac," it thinks consumers will have heard of the word "Snapdragon," and it presented all of this in the snappily-titled Qualcomm Computex 2024. It's so far out of touch that you watch the ad and the kindest thing you can say is "bless."
Long is fine, by the way, but then he would be, he's an actor, and this is not a role that could tax him. It's also not his first time playing off his old Apple ads, either, with Huawei at least began a series with a funny one seeing Long pitching to direct a commercial for the company.
To its credit, that one worked even if you didn't know the old Apple ads. But when Intel launched a whole series of Mac versus PC commercials, it absolutely required you to know them, even down to mimicking the design and including verbal callbacks.
Qualcomm has also copied Intel in how it strove to make us believe that Justin Long has really switched platforms. The Intel ads even explicitly have him refer to himself by name.
It possible that Long was a Mac user who switched to Intel and Huawei and Windows ARM, with a brief stop back on Macs in between. It's possible.
And to be fair, it is all slightly more believable than that he dodged every one of the bullets in "Live Free or Die Hard." Actors act for money, after all, and will perform just about anything that's on a script for cash.
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Comments
Can anyone explain the coffee mug reference? I'm a techie and I didn't get the joke.
The MS satire was usually funny, sometimes scary, but obviously an indulgence in time and money only available to those whose deep pockets can no longer accommodate all of the cash they’re trying to stuff into them. Gotta spend all that excess cash on something. There’s only so much money you can spend on barrels full of junk food snacks being dumped out on to feeding trough like tables for the hoards of snack craving code monkeys to consume. Contrary to popular belief, there is a limit to how much junk food and caffeine code monkeys can ingest before the transformation of junk food & caffeine into code cycle reaches a plateau.
For example, AMD's new mobile chips (Strix Point) shipping July 2024:
My Macs are silent for notifications, especially my iMac which is plugged into my monitor system.
cTDP = 15W-54W
The M3 used in their testing was in a MacBook Pro 14"
Implementation by each OEM will differ (a number of devices have already been announced). I doubt it will be used in a fanless device though.
For thin and light devices, expect the 15W TDP or 28W TDP.
For larger and higher end configurations, we'll probably see this with a higher TDP and paired with a dGPU - likely NVIDIA in some devices:
Here's a laptop with it from ASUS at Computex (seen in the NVIDIA slide above), the Zephyrus G16:
- AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370
- NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070
- 16" 240 Hz OLED, 100% DCI-P3, NVIDIA G-Sync
- 4 lbs
Justin Long said there were 300 made but there were only around 67 aired plus some keynote specials:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL4AAF6508BCE0D8F0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0eEG5LVXdKo
I figured it was a reference to him getting older and drinking coffee from a mug. That's not common for student-age/mid-20s people to do, Justin Long was in his 20s when he did the ads.
Yawn, comparable power and performance to last year's M3 Pro. Old news.
This always used to happen with PCs years ago, whenever Apple introduced new hardware, the self-described 'tech enthusiasts' would always try and push PCs having twice as fast GHz, faster GPUs etc. At least there was a raw hardware advantage back then. Now people try to hype up hardware that's catching up to Apple's old chips. It's sad to watch. It doesn't make any sense either, if people are 'tech enthusiasts', surely it would make sense to have been enthusiastic about Apple's chips for the last 3 years and their upcoming ones.
Plus people still don't get that performance on its own doesn't matter if you have to deal with the daily pain of using a bad OS. What matters is having good performance + good OS + good hardware design + good ecosystem.
At the same time, there is another group of users that have a better experience with the Apple ecosystem, and I suppose you are one of them. I work in a daily basis with both environments and have good and bad experiences with both. IMO, there is no good or bad OS. It all dependes in your needs and preferences.
Perhaps many of them will embarrass Apple, like the one that included a transgender person that made us laugh at how ridiculous he looked.