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You just made my day! Thanks Apple … and Jason.

hahaha

I don’t get it. Please explain.

That would be a blue screen of death in the icon.

LOL , great!

I hope you can change it when you’re using Linux ;)

If you look to this from a typical 37signals point of view:

How awesome is it that a company the size of Apple can pull this off? For me, it shows the humanity of the company, and makes me forget (for a second) that it’s just another company controlled by stake holders…

Is that for real !

BSODs haven’t looked like that since Windows 98 (not to mention monitors). Is anyone going to claim with a straight face that Win98 crashed more frequently than its contemporary, OS9 ?

Ms did the same joke in Halo (or other game, don’t remember) But coming from Apple I don’t know if it is sense of humor or cheap trashing the competition.

It’s also very clearly a clunky CRT monitor, not some sexy flat screen.

As funny as this is, Anonymouse Coward makes a solid point. Ugh.

Actually, for the record, I’ve seen a BSOD that looked like that on my Win2k pc here at work, and my wife’s old XP Pro laptop before it died.

@FredS: I have no idea about the early days of OS9 , but let’s compare Vista with Leopard. Sounds fair, no?

I would love to have seen Bill G’s face when he first seen that. I’m sure someone brought to his attention at some point. He probably threw a temper-tantrum and called Steve right away claiming an unfair / biased account of a PC. What TV show was it that the PC vs Mac ads were brought up to him and get got angry and left the set?

Does a snide attack really show a sense of humor?

@Anonymous Coward

Not only have BSODs looked like that at least through Win2K (I can confirm Daniel’s experience), but in 1998 Apple was only on OS 8 .1, and yes, in my experience, it crashed less often than Windows 98.

I love how they even Applefied the BSOD with the 3D gradient.

They used the old BOSD for simplicity’s sake. The new one (which I got earlier this week at work WOO ) is just too cumbersome… :P

Also, this is definitely the reason why I need to get Leopard! You’ve convinced me.

Does a snide attack really show a sense of humor?

yes. yes it does.

Daniel/Sandy,

Actually, Windows 2k (and NT) had a different BSOD . Read the Wikipedia entry that MI links to above, it shows an example of all of the BSODs for each version of the OS.

Sure, it was still blue with white text, but the big difference is the centered white rectangle that says “Windows”. That doesn’t exist in Win 2k or XP.

Funny. But where does this PC icon appear in OS X ?

Does a snide attack really show a sense of humor?

yes. yes it does.

Perhaps, but not a well-rounded one.

I’ll be really surprised if this makes it into the final release. Apple’s classier than this. Some developer making a funny during development, but doesn’t jive with Apple’s public persona.

So, a company which exudes arrogance is funny? Right, nothing new there, then. Let’s just say, for arguments sake, that Microsoft pulled a similar stunt.. Imagine the uproar it would cause among the Apple faithful, who would all brand Microsoft a big bully.

I think it’s appropriate for the intended audience. If you’re a big Windows user, you’re not going to see the icon anyhow. My guess is that it makes it to the final release.

Ha ha! I get it! See, because Windoze crashes. Way to stick it to Micro$$$$haft, Apple!

Seriously, this would have been hilarious when I was 15. Now it’s just lame.

Except the Apple icon should only be 7% of the Windows icon’s size… and have a Kernel Panic screen that says “Sorry, the Application you need only runs on Windows…”

kimblim, Apple’s joke is only funny ‘cause it’s true.

If Windows used an icon of a kernel-panicked OS X machine (has anyone here even seen one of those?), there’d probably be no uproar—just the lonely sound of crickets chirping as the joke slumped lamely to the floor.

Now, if Vista’s icon of an OS X server was a spinning beachball, that would be funny.

Nice,

@ Anonymous Coward: I guess I am juvenile cuz I still think its funny :)

undees,

yes it is true…. a decade ago. I haven’t had a BSOD in years. My shiny new iMac, however had a KP 10 mins out of the box, during Software Update. Thanks Apple!

Poor design, too much visual clutter. Less is more.

No matter how you cut it (as per the previous comments), it’s still dang pretty funny.

Yes, that is hilarious, but I still just don’t think it’s cool. When Apple blatantly attacks Microsoft, it just comes off as cheap and desperate to me. Just like the commercials. Again, very funny, but just sad stabs at misleading customers.

I think Apple sees it as good clean fun, and between geeks it is. But when you tell a layman that Vista sucks and will turn you into a fat nerd, that’s bad business IMO .

I certainly wouldn’t like it if an arrogant competitor started attacking my product on national television.

@undees: yeah. I had an iMac on my desk a few years ago. It crashed and wouldn’t recover. I had to wipe the drive and start over.

The only reason I’ve seen XP or Windows Server blue screen is hardware.

Eh, blue screen of death was funny about 7 years ago. How often does that happen now-a-days?

Will the idiotic dickering ever end? They are machines. Just tools to get a job done. It’s a simple joke (albeit a painfully true one if you’re a long time Win user…) The world needs to lighten up a bit!

Aside from the 3rd grade humor this is a more interesting comment on what you can get away with in the market based on your position.

When you’re the underdog you can get away with snipping at the heels of the major player and everyone thinks it’s funny and acceptable (a la Apple’s marketing which mentions Vista almost as much as OS X ) yet as you start to approach a great market share it’s suddenly frowned upon and if you’re the main player then it’s considered down-right poor taste to make even small jabs at those in the single digit shares.

People automatically assume the underdog is somehow better or has more noble purposes than the major player yet the reality is that both are trying to increase their bottom line and dominate the market.

Microsoft has done a lot of sneaky things with their business model in the past but at least they don’t have blatant bashing in their marketing. I don’t like political candidates that smear their competition and I don’t like it in my OS marketing.

3rd Grade Humor—My favorite!

“The other night I dreamt I was a muffler, and when I woke up I was exhausted!”

BWAHAHAHA ..

Lighten up, folks … sheesh.

So, do Linux boxes show as penguins?

Oh, and “PC Server”? That’s an oxymoron. It is either a PC or it is a server. Macs, desktop Linux, desktop Windows…that’s all in the realm of Personal Computer.

Sometimes a tongue-in-cheek icon is just a tongue-in-cheek icon. I hope someone doesn’t lose their job over this.

Can someone who already has Leopard check to see if there is a 512×512 version of this icon in the system?

Just to be clear it’s not just this icon that probably rubs some people the wrong way. This is the proverbial straw in Apple’s long term anti-Vista campaign. The TV spots, while some were funny, were also full of misinformation and the print ads are heavy into the bashing as well. I have no problem pointing out flaws as long as they’re real.

Another reason this gets the hackles up instead of just being seen as a playful jab is the intensity of hate many Apple fans display towards Windows users. Hate Windows all you want but when that turns into bashing the people that use it then expect a little push back. A lot of Apple users forget the past stones they’ve thrown and now that their glass house is getting pelted they say, “hey, hey, it’s all just joking around.”

Making a reference to the ancient BSOD is pretty funny, all the other crap that has come before though is old and sad.

@Indi: There is. ;)

I have vista and osx. I would choose osx over vista even if vista came with $1000. Its slow, its clunky, it is constantly in the way. Even when you turn off all the stuff that gets in the way, it tells you that you turned it off every 6 seconds.

and @Matt B.

My cubical neighbor just had it yesterday.

It never ceases to amaze me how baity people get over this Apple / MS thing. Ye Gods. It’s just a bit of a fun. If either “side” takes it seriously, they need to get a grip.

Wow!! Great. Two Thumbs Up !! ^^

To all those people defending Vista: it DOES suck. Vista with UAC turned on can easily be used to torture terrorists in Guantanamo Bay. The Apple ad “cancel or allow” hits it dead on. When you have to go through three confirmation windows to delete a file, something is seriously wrong.

Oh, and you can certainly still get a BSOD in Windows today. Usually due to driver issues, but it does happen. Although Windows NT is a lot more stable than the DOS based Win9x nightmare, MS actually managed to screw it up with Vista. Windows 2000 was probably the pinnacle of clean NT architecture.

Lighten the F*ck Up

I love it. Ranks right up there with a the sticker I got from apple when the Power PC came out. It was the Intel Inside logo with a snail replacing Intel.

In all seriousness though, the blue screen of death is almost always a hardware issue. Apple doesn’t have this as much because of their closed hardware architecture. This is a double edged sword and I’m glad to have choice.

It’s also a bit hypocritical – has any long time mac user never seen the sad mac? IMHO , apple’s hardware quality and willingness to stand behind its products has slipped a bunch. I’ve lost couint on how many iPods my family has gone through. The MacBook Pros I’ve bought for my kids have had plenty of quality problems.

Even still, I like the humorous way they take a jab at the competition; it beats frivolous patent lawsuits.

One other thing, if I may suggest to an Apple guy reading this..

A picture of the PC guy from the commercials trapped on the PC screen

Or better yet, the PC Guy and the Mac guy shaking hands on the screen (or even hugging? :-)

I noticed this a while ago on the beta and got a chuckle. But then noticed it shows as the icon for all Samba shares, from very non PC host servers, which threw me off a little. Like my Synology NAS device and other NAS devices we have at work, all running micro flavors of Linux. I’ve never seen them bluescreen or need to be rebooted nearly as often as my MacBook Pro.

So funny :)

@john: I have a MacBook and I’m writing this post using that MacBook running Vista. Haven’t used OSX for a while. I don’t miss OSX at all the way I see it.

@Mac-Fans By the way, BSOD usually happened when your cheap hardware are dying or when you have mis-configured RAM (or loosen cable). Of course that’ll never happen on OSX because 99.999% most of Mac owners never upgrade their machines; they just buy a new one.

Stop saying Vista is slow and clunky. It’s your fault being cheap-ass buying some low-end machines. Put Vista on MacBook and start arguing if it’s still slow.

My MacBook’s Wi-fi is a total crap. I have to turn it off and on to get a connection. Sometime I even have to boot Vista first to get it connect at first try before I can use OSX . Now that is an irony.

On the other hand, Microsoft will not pull any stunt like this with Vista because that will make them look like a bully. Apple is like a kid that always ask for more attention because currently Apple has a single digit percentage of followers.

NB: I don’t care what OS I have to use as long as I can run software that I need to do my job. At the moment, OSX cannot fulfill my needs.

Ryan Bergeman: That’s my new dekstop wallpaper (on Vista).

I can’t wait for the first “wha?” come Monday morning. :-)

Continuous digs at competitors shows a lack of confidence in one’s own product (put down others to build oneself up) – not something we would expect from Apple.

If OSX is so great, why does Apple need to compare it to Windows so often? Sure, it wants to mark out to consumers how it compares to the market leader, but progressing without mentioning Windows would do themselves a better service IMO .

PC users whining and saying that a BSOD hasn’t looked like that in years.

Maybe thats the point? I would hope most mac users know that 9x was the last real crashy version of windows. You would have had reason to be annoyed if it was a Vista BSOD

Apple is totally wrong with this kind of “humour”. Having been the biggest Mac advocate, I find it disgusting and lacking of taste.

Hey, even my Infrant ReadyNAS NV has this BSOD icon, for fuck. I’d like to shake hands with these microtards at Apple. Plus with the microtard project manager who canned all those funny screensavers/iChat effects from Leopard (remember the Princess Leia holo effect?).

I’m bitter, guys.

Wow, several folks chimed in and said they haven’t had a BSOD in years on Windows. I guess they must be the lucky ones.

Hell, my current work install (XP Pro, one of the allegedly non-crashy ones) has crashed at least twenty times this year alone. To be fair, only about five of those were actual, traditional BSOD -style meltdowns; the rest were frozen shutdown screens, frozen password entry dialogs, and so on.

It’s not just my work PC, either. It’s the build server, the two laptops at my last gig, the OEM installs on my relatives’ computers, and so on. I’ve never met a version of Windows that didn’t crash on its hapless owner multiple times. The OS has earned its less-than-sterling reputation.

So I have to wonder. These people who claim never to have seen a BSOD —are they actually using their computers? Installing software, running it, that kind of thing?

All computers crash. Plain and simple. My iPhone crashes more than any computer or phone I’ve ever used. As a Windows user, this BSOD joke doesn’t make me want to switch. Neither does their commercials. It just makes Apple look smug.

Oh the irony.

@Ryan: Thanks! I wonder what else is hidden in there.

@Ryan: I just noticed that was a link you posted … in that context it’s hilarious … but hey, that’s just my sense of humor ;-)

Huh, so the blue screen exclusively means non-Mac…? http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/133568/blue-screen-of-death-strikes-leopard-install.html

Very childish. I suggest you read this: http://www.dashes.com/anil/2007/10/smug-ugly.html

Fun=ok, disdain=not ok.

Okay. Funny is Funny. Everyone chuckled I am sure. Get over it. Just don’t be offendended when M$ does the same with a blinking Mac.

@Jonathan O.: You’re right that all computers crash (some more than others), but how sad is it that we all shrug and consider this normal. Ask me for a rant on my non-Windows, non-Apple DVD player someday.

As to the rest of your comment, I doubt that the intent of the joke was to convince Windows users to switch. (Frankly, Windows itself was all the convincing I needed to switch to Mac.) No, the icon was probably just a silly in-joke, like the old “Netscape engineers are weenies” bit.

@Leo: If you read the comments after the linked blog post you would have been reminded that Apple hasn’t been the one caught acting smug :-)

oops, meant to say hasn’t been the ONLY one caught acting smug … and to me both are funny…

There seems to be way more anti-anti-pc rants from windows fans than anti-pc rants from mac fans.

The conversations always start with a windows fan tossing out the ‘what if Windows made fun of Apple you mac-nerds would be up in arms!’ Umm…really? I’ve never seen that.

If only had this passion with politics…sigh.

@undees: It’s not sad that computer crashes are the norm. It’s just a reality. Software will always have bugs (the only exception, AFAIK , being NASA software).

I understand that the joke wasn’t meant as a means of convincing Windows users to switch. Instead, it continues the Apple tradition of being smug and elitist.

In sports, I dislike athletes that talk trash instead of proving their greatness through their actions. Same goes for other things in this world.

@Jonathan O.: I never meant to imply that crashes are anything other than “just a reality.” But I maintain that it’s a sad, sad reality.

We can do a better job than the one we’re doing. We could, if it were a priority, make computers and consumer electronics where crashing was something extraordinarily rare, not something that happens so often that the three-fingered salute becomes muscle memory.

this whole conversation about apple vs mac is getting very old, so here’s my two cents, and i will not say another word…

i hate microsoft…seriously. but i hate apple even more. microsoft has hit an all-time low with vista (therefore i don’t use it), but on average i have more technical issues with a mac in 3 hours than i have with a pc in a typical year. one time i spent FOUR GRAND on a G5 just so our office would have a mac, and we would have a reliable cross-platform machine for disc-based media projects.

six months later, it would not turn on. so, essentially we had a $4000 paper weight with snazzy clear plastic and silver accents.

bottom line is…microsoft brought the computer, the internet, and much of the innovation of this world to the forefront. not apple…microsoft.

the way apple has chosen to market themselves as better in every way makes them look extremely pathetic.

Ha! Love it.