The UK equivalent of the Apple US Switch campaign was launched today in the UK. Featuring Mitchell & Webb, well known and highly-respected UK comics, they maintain the signature people-standing-in-front–of-a-white-backgrounds look of other Apple campaigns.
The casting is perfect, with the PC played by David Mitchell and Robert Webb being the Mac – the business/casual roles they played in the genius TV venture, Peep Show.
Apple must be spending large on this as it’s all over the UK MySpace pages, with double ads showing on a lot of the pages.
Clearly riding on the shirt-tails of the world’s obsession with iPods, through this campaign Apple, are attempting to persuade iPod-owners that their computing lives could be just as beautiful as their music lives. By the look of the last Quarter’s figures from Apple, where they sold just over a million Macs and over 21 million iPods, it’s not a bad idea to increase your computer sales.
There’s three campaigns in the wild at the moment, Restart; Virus and Office, are all worth a watch. Luckily someone (just perhaps, just perhaps, the advertising company!) has put the adverts up on YouTube – a pretty neat trick for something that hasn’t been on TV yet.
Restart plays on the fact that PCs freeze and often crash during use, while Macs don’t suffer this to the same degree – although it’s not unknown.
Virus takes great delight in the 140k new viruses that were created for PCs last year, while the number of Mac viruses remains minimal – something that might change if lots more people starts buying Macs.
Office encourages people to detach their home PCs from being associated from the work PC, which is normally a PC – what this will do to people who have Macs at work is yet to be established.
Quite what Mitchell thinks of being cast as the dorky PC is unknown, but we suspect he’ll be mopping up his tears with his bulging appearance fee cheque.
BTW – Our fave Apple advert remains the Home Movie.
New figures from research firm Epitiro puts BT as the leading consumer broadband provider for the 4th quarter of 2006 (October-January).
Epitiro’s testing procedure monitors “customer experience” for internet access services, analysing over 622,000 real-time data samples from eleven locations around the UK – meaning that each broadband service was tested around 60,000 times. 
“Speeds have increased from 3817.82 kilobytes per second in the third quarter due to new ADSL Max entrants into the ten largest broadband providers. However it’s unlikely that many ADSL Max services will perform at their full capacity of 8Mbps. The speed of broadband service reduces the further the customer’s connection is from their local telephone exchange,” he added.
Filmmakers who upload their own movies on to the video-sharing website YouTube will soon be able to enjoy some financial rewards for their efforts.
Failure to Launch
Extending the Logic of Blockbuster’s “Total Access”
We all know that the Web is all about Trust, don’t we … and those companies that do not prove that they’re trustworthy will lose out.
Norway has declared iTunes to be illegal because it doesn’t allow songs downloaded from the online music store to be played on any other equipment except their own, today’s FT reported.
The original complaint was made by Torgeir Waterhouse, senior advisor to the Norwegian Consumer Council. He told the FT that “he was in negotiations with pan_European consumer groups to present a unified position on iTunes’ legality.”
Getting a new machine with a new operating system is both a joy and a pain. The joy is the shiny new OS you have to play with and the likelihood that it runs considerably faster than the previous machine. The pain, is trying to make sure you’ve remembered all of the little bits of data tucked away in forgotten corners, and usually having to reconfigure all of your settings back to the way you had them on your previous machine.
Beyond this, you can choose from a wired/wireless network for top speed, or resort to a USB 1.1 or a parallel cable. There’s also an option to use removable media such as a CD-R or DVD-R.
Firm believers in technology being used to add something, not being used for the sake of it, we also think there are some areas that technology should stay out of. 
There are just too many risks to let this go ahead.
They’ve been compiling stats on this using 
The real figure of pirated copies is likely to be far higher than the 22.3% figure quoted, as it’s only the innocent/daft who would let their computer tell Microsoft that they are using a piece a software they bought from the bloke at the car boot sale for a fiver.