Do you remember the “I’m a Mac” guy? The cool guy with his thumb in his jeans pocket who said Macs and macOS were easier for the average person to use than the cumbersome and complicated Windows? Was that really 20 years ago?
Yes, it was, and as actor Justin Long now says, “things change.” 20 years later, one would hope that would be the case. At the end of Qualcomm’s Computex keynote presentation on June 3, Long appeared in an ironic ad where he was confronted with numerous reminders, notifications, and other annoying messages from Apple’s notorious, nanny-like operating system. Mr. I’m-a-Mac brushes off all the annoyances and keys in search of a Qualcomm Snapdragon-powered PC instead.
“What? Things change,” Long says. “They really do.
More than 20 years ago, Long worked with actor John Hodgman (“I’m a PC”) to promote the user-friendliness and ease of use of macOS. And that was indeed the case at the time, but more than two decades later, a lot has changed.
Although the pop-ups shown by Long aren’t talking about MacOS’s capabilities in handling disk space, battery power and other core CPU tasks, the fact that they’re all presented as yet another notification that Mac users have to close, opt out of or spend a lot of time managing, regardless of CPU performance, is absolutely appalling. It positions the Mac, MacOS and Apple as the nanny, hall monitor and playground scold that no one pays attention to.
As The Verge reportedLong has been on somewhat of a rehabilitation journey. In 2021 he cut ads for Intel that mocked the features of Apple MacBooks, as the company was moving away from Intel processors.
In any case, Qualcomm’s take on the average Apple person, like every other Apple user, being bombarded with dozens of irrelevant and annoying notifications makes a great point about macOS’s bureaucratic feature creep and the salvation that awaits in alternative platforms.
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