By Tony Hallett, 13 November 2003 16:30
COMMENT There's a series of Apple ads running right now that really catch the eye. They're classic Apple - simple yet stylish. I'm thinking of the iPod MP3 player commercials on TV but also the billboards, which feel like they're everywhere. (Well, all over London at least.)
This is Apple at its best. The company may never achieve a position of real strength within the personal computing business again - certainly not to its 1980s levels - but its recent resurgence has been based on the assured selling of good products used in certain verticals and offerings such as the iPod and iTunes online music service.
This year, silicon.com's Agenda Setters panel of experts even ended up voting Steve Jobs the most influential individual in high-tech, for the reasons mentioned, the embracing of open source (to a degree) and his general all-round staying power.
So it's tempting to say the company is on the up and its confident and bold marketing just brings this home.
However, confident and bold are perhaps not words that would have been used at the Independent Television Committee this week when it took the decision to take off the air ads in the UK describing the Power Mac G5 as "the world's fastest personal computer".
The broadcasting watchdog had received complaints. How could Apple say what it was saying given how hard it really is to measure performance, combinations of hardware and software for different purposes and the speed at which new products come out? That's what some concerned viewers asked, apparently. We can only guess if they work for Wintel rivals.
So the ITC ordered the ad pulled, though different US and UK versions can still be seen at the respective websites.
Did Apple over-step the mark? Quite possibly, though arguably it and others have done much worse in the past, right under the noses of often tech-ignorant regulators.
With consumer-oriented advertising there is always a degree of braggadocio and a service such as iTunes or the iPod player has to come across as cool. Dare I say it but people even put up with a few more half-truths. (And somebody somewhere must have proved it makes a difference if Jeff Goldblum, fresh from Holsten Pils duty, is doing the voiceover.)
But for the business-oriented spiel - and a high-end Mac isn't just for your casual surfer - a bit of funky music and well-crafted tag line isn't quite enough.
It's perhaps the most enduring request we make to advertisers - interest us but don't lie to us. And Apple is not alone in having to tread that line carefully.
Comments
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1. anonymous
It appears from a few independent technical sources, that Apple does indeed have the fastest personal computer. How you measure speed is not by software, which can be poorly written and not reflect the true performance of the underlying system. You measure speed by synthetic tests that exclude anyone companies implentation. Apple tested the Scalar functional units versus the scalar functional units in the Pentium 4 and the Xeon. Normalizing the test on a per cycle bass the IBM 970 processor is a significantly faster scaler processor. This isn't debatable really, it is simple measurements.
The other aspects of a processor is the vector unit, in which Apple's Altivec has always been the superior SIMD processor thus far. Some may point to SSE being able to perform SIMD on double precision FP data (two FP values at a time, whereas Altivec can only go as high as 4 single precision FP values) however, the 970's contain dual double precision FP units that can perform a multiply and an add in one cycle each: 4 64-bit precision values per cycle!
Other aspects of performance include FSB, the G5 has the highest at 1GHz, memory is at the current highes, IDE drive performance, the highes, AGP the highest and a Pro model at that. Firewire 800, USB 2, etc.
So does Apple have the fastest PC today? Yes. It's not for nothing that an Apple G5 Cluster is the fastest supercomputer among all desktop processors today, even Intel's Itanium 2! NASA has drawn the same conclusions as has recent FFT tests between all the major processors.
2. anonymous
And yet Intel are allowed to imply that their Centrino wi-fi will get a connection on Everest?
3. Adrian Carter
I'm getting the impression that people in the UK have already made complaints to the ITC (I've seen postings from people who claim they've already complained on various sites, usually Apple related) about the Centrino adverts and the implied notion "you can setup and surf anywhere, even on top of a snow covered mountain".
Personally if I was stuck up said snow covered mountain I would have better things to do with my time and resources than look at family pictures. Things such as sending a wireless email saying "Can someone get me down from here!"
Cheers
ADi