Washington Apple Pi

A Community of Apple iPad, iPhone and Mac Users

Apple Marketing: Oxymoron?

Washington Apple Pi Journal, reprint information

Macs worth $150 million

Originally published in 1997

There is a widely held belief that Apple's advertising over the past decade has been, ah, lame. It may look nice, but it doesn't tell you why you should buy a Macintosh instead of something half as intelligent. (That is what "intel" means, isn't it?)

So noted fictitious weekly columnist Mac the Knife posted some proposed Apple ads, with bite, on the MacWeek web site, http://www.macweek.com/mactheknife/. Unfortunately, Mac has since taken these down. Also unfortunately, we falsely credited Mac The Knife with creating these proposed ads; they were actually created by Grant Barrett. (Mac didn't say. You just can't trust tableware anymore.)

Grant has given us permission to post his original creations. Additionally, we have quite a few contributions from others, as well as new ideas we've had, as well as our original ideas. So select from the following:

Original Killer Ads (from Grant Barrett)

Son of Killer Ads (sent in by Web visitors)

New Pi creations (still no math required)

Original Pi creations (no math required)

If you have additional suggestions, please send them to webmaster@wap.org (make sure they are short and to the point, like these examples), and we'll add them to the collection.

Legal fine print: these are not real Apple ads, these are parodies. In fact, we don't even admit to ever hearing of a computer company or recording company named Apple. But if a manufacturer of MacOS computers wants to use these, that's fine with us. And we admit to liking apple pie, motherhood, the American flag, truth and justice, and other basic laws of the universe. On the other hand, a Star Trek-like warp drive would sure be handy.

Patience, grasshopper: images loading!

Macs know about the year 2000

1987 Macs work with 1997 software

Stroll the Internet, publish a book

Why settle for Mac-like?

Your friend got the other brand

You can run Mac OS

Macs can run the other guy's software

Your brother Joe doesn't have a Mac

Mac OS 8: due July 1997

(Mac OS 8 made it on time; why wait for Windows 97?)

Mac help books are thin

Created on a 10 year old Mac