I want to be the Mac.

You’ve got to love those Mac commercials. You’ve just got to. Who can watch those commercials and NOT want to be the MAC? The PC is older, slower. The Mac dresses better, and looks like he’d be much more fun on a date. What’s more, the Mac so clearly sees how dorky and behind the times the PC is, and is so sweet to him anyway. Even when the PC gets a little snarky, the Mac rises above. The Mac is the bigger man, the better human being.

It is really brilliant, near-perfect marketing. It makes the viewer WANT to be the Mac.

Or does that just happen to me?

I used to be a Mac girl. Around 1989 or 90 I bought my first Mac. It was a Mac Plus – had no hard drive. When trying to run the first version of Word, I would have to play a game we called “disk roulette,” exchanging the program disk and the disk we were trying to save the file to four or five times to complete an “Apple+S” or “save.” I eventually bought an external hard drive with 4 MB of RAM, because, as the sales guy told me, “You’ll never need more than that.” My dad (who helped finance this significant purchase since I was still in college) was a bit skeptical: “You’ll never being using a Mac in business, honey.” Ha. I showed him - the first two companies I worked for used Macs (first seven years of my career).

When the very first iMac came out, I bought it right away – before they even came out with all the fun flavors (a move I would later regret, because lime is much more my color than Bondi blue).

Now I am a PC girl. Have been since about 1998. Last year I needed to invest in a new laptop and a few people suggested I look into an iBook. But I didn’t. It was before this ad campaign. And now I’ve blown my budget for probably the next several years on another PC-based system. And those commercials are actually making me feel like I’ve made a mistake. Did I?

Mac ads.