I'm honestly surprised at how horrible these ads are. If Microsoft really wanted to play ball, they do the following:
"I'm looking for some serious gaming power in a laptop"
Screw the battery life. Get a gaming rig that's meant to be a desktop replacement or a lan party machine. No matter how you slice it and dice it, there isn't a single Apple machine that will compete with a serious gaming laptop on the PC side of things. You've got laptops with dual graphics cards, over 1TB of storage, 1080P screens, blu-ray, hot-swappable drives, hdmi, etc. Not to mention some reputable machines, such as those from Alienware and Acer.
Microsoft sort of tried it with the little kid, but they just said he wanted something for gaming and didn't really go after it. They should have started mentioning games (and how 95% of them aren't available for Mac), machine specs, etc. And even if they said "for $2,000 to $3,000" a top of the line Macbook wouldn't even give you half of what a top of the line gaming rig would give you at that same price point in terms of specs and for gaming there's no comparison at all.
Their ad group is just horrible and they really should try leveraging some strengths that they have instead of the lame ones that in many cases turn out to be a bit of a stretch to begin with.
They could even step away from laptop's and start a Desktop Hunters, with an obvious advantage being customization and upgradeability:
"I'm looking for something that will grow with me as technology advances"
"Let's take a look around"
"Look at the iMacs... these are so sexy."
"How can I upgrade this?" "Well, all you can really do is change the hard drive and ram so when you want an upgrade, go buy a new machine."
"What about the PC?"
"Oh well you can start at whatever price point you want and just upgrade from there. New graphics card, more ram, additional optical drives or hard drives, etc. No real need to buy a new machine when you can sort of just add things as you see fit"
"That's awesome!"
And if you're wondering why I compare the iMac as the desktop instead of the Mac Pro it's because the Mac Pro is not a consumer oriented desktop. It's quite expensive for one and the Xeon processors are not ideal for day to day tasks. In fact, it's been proven that Xeon's will actually perform worse for day to day tasks. So, if Microsoft were to do this, the more realistic comparison would be the iMac. But, even if they were to compare the Mac Pro against a high end PC desktop at the same price point, spec wise the PC would win by quite a margin. It would more than likely rock SLI graphics cards, over 1TB storage, would have a blu-ray drive, hdmi, 7.1 audio and probably a monitor for the same price as the Mac Pro sans the monitor.
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Now I obviously have a Mac (iMac to be exact) or I wouldn't be here. But these are some valid points that their ad group should really touch on as they are obvious advantages instead of the far stretch crap that they try to pull now.
To Microsoft:
Stop being stupid and advertise your strengths and not your price. People will see right through you and people care more about advantages than anything else.
