Intel is now making 'Mac versus PC' ads with Justin Long

Posted:
in General Discussion edited March 2021
Intel has cast former "I'm a Mac" actor Justin Long in a series of new ads, as the chip-maker faces the threat of Apple Silicon Macs.

Justin Long appearing in an Intel ad campaign
Justin Long appearing in an Intel ad campaign


Long stars in a series of five new commercials that are now streaming on Intel's YouTube channel. Each ad plays with expectations from Apple's iconic 2000s-era "Get a Mac" ad campaign that starred Long as a Mac alongside John Hodgman's PC.

Intel's ads open with the former "Mac" actor standing in front of a familiar all-white background, stating, "Hello, I'm a -- Justin. Just a real person doing a real comparison between Mac and PC."

The 30-second spots cover marketing angles that various stakeholders in the Windows ecosystem have covered before. These include touting PC touchscreens' advantages, various 2-in-1 form factors, PC gaming, and support for multiple monitors.

In one ad, the now 42-year-old actor meets with a PC gamer playing on an Intel-based Windows laptop. The punchline lands when Long asks if they also have a Mac gamer. The laptop gamer responds, "No one really games on a Mac," to which Long sharply and dismissively agrees.





PC gaming typically requires a discrete graphics card from either Nvidia or AMD. Apple includes either seven-core or octa-core integrated graphics in the M1 chip, which the company calls the "world's fastest integrated graphics." The M1 Mac GPU out-benchmarks Intel's integrated graphics by a wide margin and even beats the dedicated AMD Radeon Pro 580X 8GB graphics card in the Mac Pro.

The ads also omit the fact that Apple is still selling Intel-based Macs, and will continue to do so for some time.

Long's Intel gig is only the latest example of tech giants hiring familiar actors from rivals' popular ad campaigns. In recent years, Sprint employed Verizon's former "Can you hear me now?" actor Paul Marcarelli to boost a rival carrier. Long has also flipped the script once before, appearing in a 2017 campaign for Huawei's Android-running Mate 9 smartphones.

Hodgman made a cameo appearance in Apple's M1 Mac launch, reprising his role to serve as the butt of PC jokes. In the short spot that ran at the end of Apple's launch stream, Hodgman's "PC" character once again tried to keep up with the Mac's advances, claiming that he's still fast before quickly tiring and announcing that his battery had drained.

Apple's M1 Macs launched in November, proving to be faster than almost every Intel Mac. Apple kicked off a two-year transition away from Intel with the launch of a new 13-inch MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, and Mac mini.

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Comments

  • Reply 1 of 62
    EsquireCatsEsquireCats Posts: 1,268member
    Intel’s attempts at consumer marketing are kind of hilarious. Their most innovative marketing approach has been to include annoying stickers on the hardware you just paid for - i see they haven’t gotten any better at it since then. 
    radarthekatjeffharrisBeatswatto_cobra
  • Reply 2 of 62
    jdb8167jdb8167 Posts: 626member
    I hate when Samsung does this kind of advertising... I mean Intel.
    radarthekatJWSCBeatswatto_cobra
  • Reply 3 of 62
    mazda 3smazda 3s Posts: 1,613member
    I will concede on the multi-monitor support though, which they point out in one of the ads. With that being said:



    The MacBook Air (M1) doesn't have a touch bar, and they are showing what looks to be a 15-inch MacBook Pro -- without a Touch Bar????
    watto_cobra
  • Reply 4 of 62
    rob53rob53 Posts: 3,241member
    Actors need money just like the rest of us but like others they go where the money is. Justin is middle age, just like Intel’s designs. 
    radarthekatDAalsethdewmejeffharrisomasouwatto_cobra
  • Reply 5 of 62
    cornchipcornchip Posts: 1,945member
    mazda 3s said:
    I will concede on the multi-monitor support though, which they point out in one of the ads. With that being said:



    The MacBook Air (M1) doesn't have a touch bar, and they are showing what looks to be a 15-inch MacBook Pro -- without a Touch Bar????

    Limited creation applications? 😑
    darkvader
  • Reply 6 of 62
    crowleycrowley Posts: 10,453member
    Intel seem a bit ratttled.    Pretty funny that they got Justin though, good coup.
    radarthekatmubailiroundaboutnow
  • Reply 7 of 62
    longfanglongfang Posts: 445member
    Why is Intel so afraid? Makes me skeptical about their ability to progress.
    radarthekatroundaboutnowBeatswatto_cobra
  • Reply 8 of 62
    fred1fred1 Posts: 1,112member
    So sad to see a company like Intel, or any other company for that matter, stoop to this level. I mean the rock bottom approach of making split second comparisons based on almost nothing. Laptop color? Really? A laptop that’s foldable into a tablet? 
    Of course the most ironic thing is that Intel is trying to take credit for things they had nothing to do with. 
    And not a word about the chip performance. So tragic
    radarthekatbaconstangmuthuk_vanalingamentropysrobabaBeatsjony0watto_cobra
  • Reply 9 of 62
    j2fusionj2fusion Posts: 153member
    longfang said:
    Why is Intel so afraid? Makes me skeptical about their ability to progress.
    Or, given the M1 is the first generation of chips in its class, they are afraid of the future...
    radarthekatbaconstangmazda 3sBeatsjony0watto_cobra
  • Reply 10 of 62
    ionicleionicle Posts: 98member
    I think intel is crapping themselves
    radarthekatbaconstanggenovellejeffharrisrobabaBeatsjony0watto_cobra
  • Reply 11 of 62
    Gotta hand it to Intel for hiring Justin Long
    watto_cobra
  • Reply 12 of 62
    most of the target audience of apple's stuff still remembers justin long and the apple commercials
    edited March 2021 watto_cobra
  • Reply 13 of 62
    radarthekatradarthekat Posts: 3,842moderator
    Can it be any surprise that another company, now that they consider Apple a competitor, is doing what every other company attempting to compete with Apple does?   Namely, copying Apple. 
    jeffharrisDetnatorjony0watto_cobra
  • Reply 14 of 62
    blastdoorblastdoor Posts: 3,256member
    So intel is scared and they are telling apple how to make them more scared — get serious about gaming on the Mac.
    GG1marklarkJapheyentropysroundaboutnowcornchipwatto_cobra
  • Reply 15 of 62
    darkvaderdarkvader Posts: 1,146member
    I mean, the gaming ad isn't wrong.

    I rarely play games.  When I do, I play games that used to run on Mac.

    Used to?  Yep.  When Apple screwed us by dropping Classic support, some of them stopped working.  When Apple screwed us by Dropping PowerPC support, more of them stopped working.  When Apple screwed us by dropping 32-bit support, ALL of them stopped working. 

    Those same games work on Windoze 10.  MS has no announced plans to dump 32-bit app support, and even some 16-bit apps will still run.  They never had to suffer through an architecture switch, we're now suffering through our third.  (Or not.  I have no plans to buy a M Mac, macOS 11 is awful, and if I can find a non-Apple laptop with a decent trackpad I may well end up running Xubuntu as my primary OS, with Mac OS of various flavors and Windoze in VMware.  Apple's current laptops are pretty dismal anyway, the thin fetish has gone too far, they're ridiculously fragile, as evidenced by why I now own a 2018 MacBook Air - the previous owner broke the screen.  Oh, and if you replace the screen on a 2018 MBA with one from ebay, the keyboard backlight won't work because the ambient light sensor won't talk to the T2 chip, another completely asinine move on Apple's part.)

    There is NO technical reason Apple can't maintain legacy support, there's no technical reason we can't run Motorola 68k apps on M Macs.  (And we actually can at least do that, no thanks to Apple, but big thanks to the good folks at SheepShaver.  )  But of course PPC and 32-bit Intel OS X apps are still no-go, because Apple needlessly broke them.  You can virtualize 10.6 on Intel hardware and sort of get back PPC and 32-bit support, but that's gone for M Macs.

    The old excuse was "MS is a much bigger company, they can afford to have people maintain legacy support."  But that garbage won't fly any more, Apple is now a significantly bigger company, and Apple has significantly more cash on hand.  Oh, and in  the Linux world, the controversy is about dropping support for 32-bit hardware, it's unlikely 32-bit app support will ever go away.

    Apple's pig-headed attacks on legacy software haven't just hurt gaming, of course.  They've wreaked havoc on business workflows that rely on legacy apps that will never be updated.

    (I don't get the gamer on a laptop thing, though.  If you're at a desk, why would you want a tiny screen on an underpowered, likely thermally throttled box?  Desktop computers exist for a reason.)
    maltzbaconstangmarklarkavon b7jeffharris
  • Reply 16 of 62
    darkvaderdarkvader Posts: 1,146member
    Oh, and what's wrong with AI's website now?  Command-clicking a URL doesn't open the link in a new tab here today, I have to two-finger it and select open in new tab.  VERY annoying.
    baconstang
  • Reply 17 of 62
    j2fusion said:
    longfang said:
    Why is Intel so afraid? Makes me skeptical about their ability to progress.
    Or, given the M1 is the first generation of chips in its class, they are afraid of the future...
    I think you'er more or less right on the money. But what makes me frustrated is their spending money on stupid ad campaigns like this. Put that money to work being more competitive. All the trash talk on the court doesn't matter a damn if you've let your game slip. Why humiliate yourself when everyone who knows anything can see right through it. Get your ass to practice and sharpen your game to compete. 
    jeffharrismuthuk_vanalingamroundaboutnowjony0watto_cobra
  • Reply 18 of 62
    AppleishAppleish Posts: 687member
    What a putz. I'm more convinced than ever that Intel is worried, and that investment in their stock is no longer a sure-thing long term wealth strategy. 
    watto_cobra
  • Reply 19 of 62
    GG1GG1 Posts: 483member
    Wait till Apple hire him (back) for M1X/M2 iMac commercials!
    watto_cobra
  • Reply 20 of 62
    Complaining about loss of 16 bit gaming? Really? Like that is a high money maker? You do realize that old code isn't up to snuff with security and isn't supported by the original companies right? How many times have we seen programs over a decade old, be a security problem? I'm sure the average person thinks the inability to run PowerPC code on the M1s is a show stopper. 

    Technically, games are limited on all OSs. You just have a greater amount of development on Windows. I think gaming on the Mac will be helped by moving the ASi, not hurt. Now you have brought the experience of developers on the iPhone and iPad family CPU/GPU on to the Mac and made it easier to move those existing apps to the Mac. Before there was a lot of Macs with underpowered GPUs, now developers can target ASi Macs knowing the lowest GPU power has greatly increased. My favorite game, Trainz now supports Metal and ASi Macs since the ASi Macs have come out and I'm running ultra settings on Trainz, vs everything on low performance settings with my 2014 Mac mini.

    Then Arcade has also helped the gaming.  
    radarthekatgrayfox691watto_cobra
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