You may be eating your bacon sandwich but you’re thinking of my sweet, sweet, Gypsy lovin’
Kal = Quality.
I mean your humour, not your loving. I must make it clear that I have no idea about your loving. (I wouldn’t want Washte to have to kill me with her bare hands).
First: the fact that folks are ranting about how much they hate the ads prove that the ads are getting at least part of the job done: they’ve made an impression, and you remember them. On some level, therefore, they are effective. Also, the fact that the ads are so frequently parodied, to me, smacks of envy.
Second: it appears that some of you Wintel people still believe in the Megahertz myth. Megahertz is not the sole measure of performance. Think about it this way: which puts out more power, a 4-cylinder engine at 4000 RPMs or an 8-cylinder engine at 3000 RPMs?
Third: I find it very humorous that the same folks who used to call Macs “toys” now believe their systems are superior because they have more games. Mmmm, that’s irony you’re tasting!
The Mac-commercial guy who opened his IBM-type machine to solve a printer problem was the lamest. He probably wondered why his machine stopped working during that last blackout, too.
Oh contraire, mon ami. You may be in the midle of your sweet sweet lovin’, but you are thinking of my bacon sandwich.
Read the fine print, boy-o.
Wowee! They’re using a program that was originally written for the Mac as a benchmark. What are the real life benefits of this? You can apply a Gaussian blur half a second faster than me? A two gig Wintel notebook will run a person about fifteen hundred bucks. The top of the line one gig powerbook costs three grand. But, hey, whatever you got to believe that helps you make it through the day. 
But without Mac ads, we’d have no Ellen Feiss.
Beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep!
Effective in that I’d be embarrassed to switch after that lameass campaign, yeah. 
I do see your point, but I don’t necessarily believe in the “bad publicity is still publicity” theory, at least in this instance. I don’t hate all of the Switch ads, I hate the ones that portray Mac users as PC-hating whiners or total morons.
If you’re including me among that number due to my “it doesn’t play my games” comment above, I’m not tasting any irony. I call all of my home electronics “toys”, and I’ve liked computers for their game possibilities all the way back to the first computer I owned, a Commodore Vic-20. For my most-recently purchased computer (I have 2 laptops and a desktop networked at home, running 3 different versions of the Windows OS) I chose the model that I did based heavily on video/audio options (built-in cards was the absolute dealbreaker), and video card will be the next thing I upgrade.
I know you and I have tossed this around a wee bit but…
[IMHO]
Mac’s, back in the day were, by far, the best computer you could use for multimedia applications. Hands down. But PC’s have caught up them in that aspect. (For the most part.)
[/IMHO]
As for the games, the lack of them has always always been a reason I have stayed away from them. Let’s be honest, Mac’s having a limited selection of games is nothing new. (But I do see the irony of what you are saying.)
Now, I’d never buy a Mac because they are so damed expensive and I like to build my own PC, but damn, I’d love to have one anyway!
(BTW: I have never seen any of these Mac ads.)
[hijack]
[matt runs in screaming wielding a giant anime mallet]
CRISP!!!
wham wham wham wham wham
… I feel better.
[/hijack]
aka soggy and greasy and partially cooked.
Give me a perfectly crisp “snap” when I bite into my bacon, every time.
And Mac rocks.
::stops in and looks around::
Hey! Who’s responsible for the millions of bacon shards all over the place?
That describes the recipient of my sweet, sweet lovin’
Ill bet my Mac can make a perfect pancake better than your PC so NA NA NA!!! 
Kwyjibo:
Not just IYHO… Digital Video Editing (very pro-Mac, usually) agrees:
They do similar comparisons using Photoshop filters. The Mac wasn’t even close.
I will add that I don’t dislike Macs - I think OS X looks fantastic, and I can see how their case designs appeal to certain people (just not me). But people who say Macs are faster for multimedia are demonstrably wrong.
Why did some people start calling ham “Candian Bacon”. Is that some sort of insult? Do Canadians really not know the difference between ham and bacon? Seems unlikely to me.
I prefer my Bacon crisp and hard (insert your sexual metaphor of choice here), as undercooked pork products are not my scene, baby.
The problem with this is that Intels/PC engines are 4 cylinders running a 3000RPMs and PowerPC/Apple engines run at only 1250RPMs.
PPC processors are not doing nearly triple the work of a Intel processor.
Darkrabbit
“When I started at the design firm, my Mac was the fastest machine in the company for the sort of work that I do. But then I got transfered out of the Gaussian blur department”
That may be true, but your curiosity is aroused.
Now whenever you so much as see bacon you will dream, Tansu. Oh, shall you dream…
You have nothing to fear from Washte though; she laughs at other women who wish to be taught the secret, mystic arts of sweet, sweet, Gypsy lovin’ because she is safe in the knowledge that only she can undertake tuition.
Your libidinous fantasies are really quite, quite sick. Nothing distracts me from my sweet, sweet, lovin’. Nothing!
Although I may eat a bacon sandwich afterwards, while playing with my Speak and Spell.
I want bacon and maple syrup for breakfast.
Also, I wish to offer my little tale of Mac Joy ™. I don’t know where these Mac ads get off saying that those boxes, however cute (they are), never fail. NEVER FAIL??
I work for some hippy organization here in Hawaii. They like Macs. Oh, ok, this will be fine, says I, being the sweet little glarGH I am. The damn thing died like 10 times, locked up every half an hour, needed its OS re-installed 4 times and actually lost those little screw things the monitor plugs into. SUCK!
But it was really cute.
That is all.
Oh, well then. Your Mac sucked, so all Macs suck.
My PC beeps (overheating alarm) everytime I try to launch Juno. SUCK!!! All PCs SUCK!
Oh…wait. Maybe it’s just a particular problem with my individual PC. Oh, no. That can’t be it, because that would make, like, sense, to think that. PCs SUCK!!! PCs SUCK!!!
::shrug:: I like my Macs, a lot. I have owned quite a few PCs, and I feel that I was a little more familiar with Windows than your “average user”. (Which means, not really knowledgable, but OK. And I’m not shy about opening up a manual.)
And you know what? I like my Macs better. My experience, my choice, my preference. And yeah, as it so happens, I use Photoshop A LOT. So the fact that my Mac runs Photoshop extremely well matters to me. Why the hell do some of you care what computer I use? And why do you care if I spend whatever I spend on my computer? (By the way, I didn’t spend a lot on this G4, thanks to eBay.)
Do I start threads bitching about all you PC users? Does any other Mac user do that? Not that I know of. So what the hell is the deal here? Someone needs to link to Fenris’ thread “Platform Wars, last restort of the pathetic loser” (I’m too rushed for time to do it myself.)