Acts of Volition

I don't own any Apple products, but I find Apple's marketing strangely entertaining. This is partly due to the fact that the advertising is often very well done and partly because it is just strange.

Apple's most recent 'Switch' ad campaign is no exception (see the ads). While it certainly wouldn't prompt me to buy anything, I would venture that it will be quite successful. Despite some absolutely hilarious criticism (Flash/Audio), the ads capitalize on a common thread among many computer users - we hate and fear our computers. The cause for this hate and fear cannot be pinned on any one product or platform, but Apple will likely succeed in planting a seed in many minds: "This computer sucks. Apple is better."

I'm really just trying to justify why I watched a webcast of Steve Jobs' keynote at MacWorld this week. As always, Steve gave a well-delivered, if not a little creepy, run down of how great Apple is. I don't blame him - it's his job.

What caught my attention was a short excerpt from the presentation that Jobs would love for none of us to have noticed. These few short seconds said more than the entire MacWorld conference. While doing a demo of the Mail utility in OS X, something went wrong with Jobs' demo machine. It's not clear exactly what went wrong, but Jobs casually leaned over, flicked a switch, and said something about a "backup" machine.

What he did was switch the monitor, keyboard, and mouse he was using to a completely new machine that was waiting in the wings - obviously in anticipation of just such a scenario.

Wouldn't it be nice if every time you had a problem with your computer you could seamlessly switch to a standby?