i consider the I'm A Mac to be one of the most vile campaigns ever; besides the fact that pretty much everything in it was wrong, the deviousness of each ad was infuriating AND it pushed a lot of people to buy macs when they should have bought pcs and i will even tell you why.
first off; that image is the opposite of reality.
at a consumer level (non-corporate) macs are by far the more professional-owned computers, not pcs. (we're assuming macs -> osx, pcs -> windows)
during the 90s macs had a lockdown on post-prod software, like final cut, or protools. if you were in the printing, video, photo, or sound editing business, all your colleagues and everyone you worked with was using a mac, saving on mac extensions, exporting mac files, and you needed a mac.
(i bet apple is really happy they insisted on proper monitor calibration, because that's what saved them)
businesses owned macs; "civilians" owned pcs.
the only reason to own a mac was always that the industry standards ran on them. to tell a college kid to buy a mac is like telling a gamer to run unix.
the reason why the NT platform was so superior, aside from the freedom to upgrade, and the lower cost, was the popularity; it was de facto, the "industry standard" of non-professionals.
i'm sorry if your family keeps asking you to fix things they should ask google, but that's what makes a responsible computer owner - people need to learn how to computer, so that they know what they are computering.
XP was, in practice, the open standard, that people coded on; whatever mod or addon you want for your pc, you can get it because someone has coded it and made it available for free.
And not just coding, but creating the modern computer community, from amazon to imgur to youtube. Maybe the servers ran on unix, maybe there were some linux users - they all contributed. But we created the digital world, through hard work and learning difficult stuff.
Macs didn't contribute squat; how much community-created resources come out of the mac world? Not from Apple, but from mac users.
Do you remember tucows? It was all either expensive, for-profit coded windows-freeware rehashes($40 for a mp3 player app in 1998), or 2d browser games. Zero new content.
The mac community didn't create winamp, bittorrent, overclocking, gumtree, Anandtech, and most certainly did not fight against SOPA or break the AACS encryption key.
I grew up with the development of computers and i have seen the many efforts (Microsoft in primis) to control computers and take away our digital rights, and i know that we have much freedom today that we take for granted, but that was given to us by people like Linus Torvalds and Richard Stallman. People fought, if metaphorically, for computers to be as they are today, upgradeable, moddable, and the property of their owner, not of who runs content through them.
Also, I'm sorry if macs have been crap for the past 20 years; maybe if they didn't cost twice as much and have 3 year old hardware in them, there would have been a bigger community. And, if they had been pushed - by need or will - to actually improve the platform they live on, then they would be a viable alternative to windows, like Linux is.
Apple's attitude of "don't think about your computer, just play" is irresponsible and made our society worse; there's too many people who have no idea of the implications of their choices, be it security, owners right, market control. PC ownership gratified savings, efficiency, intelligence. It was the coming of age of computers and we needed to have people as informed as they could possibly be; instead, we got an army of zombies.
Please don't mix yourself or other AT people who own macs, with the generic mac user. It's fine to own a mac (despite the cost and draconian control), just not for kids. It's bad, bad bad to sell your product by insulting people who are working for you.
The computer community needs people to contribute, in order to advance and Apple wants people to not do that.
Apple could have sold their product in so many ways, "it's the industry standard for editing", "we have a more stable, more modern OS", "Macs have better build quality", or simply "we are not Microsoft" but instead the chose to lie about their product and mislead hundreds of thousands of people.
Facebook
Twitter