It’s been funny watching the Mac faithful take arms and begin poking holes in the ad.  This blog on Fortune does an effective job of recapping the issue and that it’s worth the read.

Some of the complaints according to Fortune:

• “Lauren” is an actress, not the ordinary American shopper the ad claims
• The Apple Store scene was faked; before-and-after photos suggest that she never actually went into the store to try the computers
• The $699 HP Pavillion dv7 she chose over a $999 MacBook is a mess. “It is the epitome of what people dislike about PCs,” writes Computerworld‘s Seth Weintraub. “It runs Vista Home on a slow AMD mobile processor . its screen is abysmal . its networking is five years old . it is loaded with crapware and trial antivirus software that will have to be purchased or wiped off the machine.”

I find the first two points pretty funny. First off, “Lauren” may be an actress, just like nearly everyone who appears in commercials is an actor/actress.  Does this make the situation any less realistic? “Lauren” may have actually never gone into the Apple store, but if she did she wouldn’t have found any 17″ laptops under the $1000 range (or perhaps even under the $2000 price range).

As for the third point, if I was in the same situation I would have gone ahead with the Intel processor, which would have likely added $100 to the price, still well below $1000.  I can’t speak to the screen quality, but the networking part is laughable too – haven’t WiFi standards been stagnant for the last five years? You still don’t see N-class networking widely adopted.  As for the crapware and adware, that is an unfortunate reality of PC’s, but crapware can be removed (with tools like Decrapifier) and there are plenty of free antivirus utilities that can be installed.

Don’t get me wrong, I like Macs and I think the OS is beautiful and stylish, but when people talk about buying a Mac, I tell them that buying a Mac for your next computer is essentially the same as saying your next car should be a BMW: They’re well-built, they give a good experience, but people who own them swear by the quality, while people who don’t own them cite the price and see them as a status symbol.

It’ll be interesting to see how Apple responds. I believe Fortune nailed a point when Engadget’s Joshua Topolsky said “This is almost a red-state-blue-state ad.”

On my home machine I easily have 20,000 pictures and the previous version has been great at managing it.  Though after upgrading, the beta of Live Photo Gallery started to freak out on me and kept shutting down on Vista.  When I tried to remove the Gallery beta the installer kept failing, and I was forced to uninstall the entire suite.  I figured that Photo Gallery may not be ready for large photo collections and I can simply install the previous version and still use the betas of Live Writer and MovieMaker.  Unfortunately I’ve come to find out that you can’t upgrade or downgrade individual applications – it’s all or nothing. Furthermore, you can’t run both the previous and beta versions at the same time.  This has prevented in me using the Live Writer beta (which as been fantastic) on my home computer.

I realize this is a personal gripe, and of course this is part of using beta software and sure enough will be fixed soon.  I just wanted to throw my issue out there to see if anyone else trying out Live Wave was experiencing this issue?  Has anyone else had trouble with Live Photo Gallery, especially if you have a large photo collection?

I became intrigued with the work Microsoft has been doing in the Expression Web space, and was delighted when they made it part of their MSDN Subscription tools.  It’s not that I’ve grown tired of Dreamweaver, but more of that “grass is greener” interest.  However, my interest abruptly halted when I realized that Expression – for all of it’s touting of standards and non-mucking of code (being the anti-Frontpage) -  still doesn’t support one of the most basic features: specifying a virtual path to root in links & references (like a stylesheet or menu).  Basically this removes any of the WYSIWYG and interactive functionality, which leads to the question: why would I want to be using this program again?

I can appreciate not trying to duplicate every competitor function, but when other market leaders like DreamWeaver & GoLive both support this function, how have you been ignoring this for so long?  This is the second-highest rated bug in their “Connect” feedback site, used to log bugs.  What’s disappointing is that MS came out with the beta of Expression 2, but that feature is still nowhere to be found.  Moreover, there’s an acknowledgement that it’s not really on their roadmap just being “considered” for a “future version”.

It’s unfortunate to see an application with so much potential be plagued by their inability to incorporate the most essential features to be competitive.  It’s too bad, designers may have liked this tool.