Ben to Apple: Enough with the "Mac vs. PC" ads!

Yes, I'm a Machead. I own a MacBook Pro, an old PowerBook G4, an Apple Airport Extreme Wi-Fi base station, an Apple TV, and an iPhone—and my wife has an iPhone, too. But if I see one more of those smug, squirm-inducing "Mac vs. PC" ads on TV, I'm gonna toss my HDTV out the window.

The final straw was last night, after watching one of the latest ads, entitled "Stacks." (Apple has all the ads—a few dozen, from the looks of it, dating back to 2006—enshrined right here, for obsessive Mac fanboys to endlessly fawn over.)

As usual, the ever-cool Justin Long ("I'm a Mac!") asks the perpetually stiff and uptight PC stand-in John Hodgeman why he's (in this case) "having a very difficult time finding pictures of my friends!"

"Wait," Long asks quizzically, "so you're just going to look through your thousands of photos until you find the right one?"

Hodgeman, as is his habit, looks at Long like he's an idiot. "Yes, one by one, what other way is there?"

At which point Long sympathetically telling Hodgeman—sorry, I meant "PC"—about a "cool new feature" in iPhoto: "Faces," which let you just "tag a face once, and iphoto automatically find other pictures of that person for you!"

Hodgeman protests that it "sounds expensive," but Long cheerfully replies that iPhoto "comes free on every new Mac." ("New" is the key word here; I paid $79 for my copy of the iLife '09 suite, which includes the new iPhoto.)

PC then purses his lips, admits that "I guess I could refine my search method," hands a stack of snapshots over to Mac and barks, "You do it."

Funny right? Well, no actually—instead, at the end of the ad, I found myself shouting "Arghh! Faces does not find all your friends automatically!!!"

How do I know this? Only after hours of pointing and click on iPhoto, telling "Faces" that no, that portrait up on the wall of that restaurant is not my Uncle Jim, and that perfectly focused and lit "unknown face" right there? That's my wife, for Pete's sake, the exact same wife I've tagged like, dozens of times in iPhoto by now!

Hey, I recognize that face-recognition technology is never perfect, but please—don't sit there (or stand there in my TV, for that matter) and tell me that a Mac will sort though "thousands" of photos and "automatically" tag all your friends and family, after you've tagged someone just "once." At least, it didn't for me.

This new "Mac vs. PC" ad reminds me of an earlier generation of Apple commercials, which was only slightly less annoying: The testimonials from "real" users about how easy their Macs were to use.

One of them in particular comes to mind: A charming young woman who was delighted that she could plug her printer into her new Mac, and it "just worked"—unlike PCs, which require these annoying things called printer drivers.

That ad stuck in my craw a bit, because  … well, I'd just unwrapped a new HP photo printer for Christmas, and when I tried plugging it into my iBook G3, guess what? It didn't "just work." I had to visit HP's Web site, search for my model number, and ... yes, download a driver.

Don't get me wrong: I love my Mac. I love my iPhone. I'm not giving them up. But I really, really hate these ads (and I find it amusing that so many diehard Mac apologists are totally up in arms over a few low-key "Lauren" ads after Apple's three-year parade of "Mac vs. PC" spots). They're smug, insufferable, embarrassing—and sometimes, flat-out wrong.

C'mon, Apple—enough is enough. You're better than this.