YMMV / Get a Mac

• Adorkable: PC is more mild mannered and endearing compared to his more arrogant and smug counterpart Mac.
• Crack Pairing: Enough people think the two are adorable together that Mac x PC fanfiction has been written.
• Designated Hero: The Mac is presented as the superior option, although he is portrayed as a stuck-up jerk compared to the Adorkable PC.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • The ad that was a Take That! at Windows Vista's infamous UAC prompts became this when MacOS Catalina introduced very similar and often just as obtrusive prompts.
  • The ads portrayed Mac as a millennial in casual clothes who was fun and user-friendly, while PC was a middle-aged man in a suit and depicted as outdated and less convenient. These days Apple products are seen as high-end and expensive, but many software products are still designed to run optimally on Windows instead of Macs, if they even can run on Macs; Windows PCs on the other hand, tend to be cheaper and more flexible with the software and hardware they support. This means that the dynamic of the two brands is pretty much flipped from what the commercials portrayed.
  • Justin Long would go onto to do a series of ads for Intel where he extols the virtues of modern PCs and how they're more functional than the latest Macs.
• Pandering to the Base: The ads seem designed to reassure Mac users that they're better off using a Mac than a Windows PC, rather than offering any arguments as to why a PC user should switch (and some of the comparisons intended to have that effect are misleading or exaggerated).
• Rooting for the Empire: Despite Apple's best attempts to portray the PC as inferior, many viewers tended to side with the likeable everyman PC over the Smug Snake Mac.
• Unintentional Period Piece: The ads were created at a time when PC design was considered dull and the failures of Windows Vista left a sour taste in people's mouths. Since then, PC design took a page out of Apple's book and became sleeker and flashier while Microsoft refined the Windows platform to be less infuriating.
• Unintentionally Sympathetic: They cast John Hodgman as PC to make him come off as a whiny, oversized Bill Gates caricature. Instead he came off more as a lovable loser who tried to be as cool as Mac and was left being embarrassed and ashamed of his failures, turning him into an underdog that people felt sorry for.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: Mac was supposed to be seen as the cool, trendy option compared to PC. Instead he came off as a Smug Snake who flaunted his superior capabilities to PC. This not only reinforced the image that people who preferred Apple products were elitist snobs, but the things that Mac boasted about (photo editing, video editing, interconnectivity with other Apple products and software) were flashy and impressive, but not necessarily things every user would need, especially in comparison to the "office work" (word documents, spreadsheets, a calculator) that PC is better at.

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