Apple‘s “I’m a Mac / I’m a PC” commercials, which since 2006 have either been contrasting cool Apple kids with stuffy PC users or pitting intolerably smug MacHeads against charming John Hodgman, depending on your point of view, may be finished.
In a recent interview with The Onion‘s delightful pop culture appendage The AV Club, Justin Long — the “Mac” half of the commercials — said that while he couldn’t speak definitively, he thinks the ads are kaput:
AVC: what’s the status on those Apple commercials?
JL: You know, I think they might be done. In fact, I heard from John, I think they’re going to move on. I can’t say definitively, which is sad, because not only am I going to miss doing them, but also working with John. I’ve become very close with him, and he’s one of my dearest, greatest friends. It was so much fun to go do that job, because there’s not a lot to it for me. A lot of it is just keeping myself entertained between takes, and there’s no one I’d rather do it with than John.
If Long is right and “I’m a Mac / I’m a PC” is indeed over, an culprit would be the iPad, which could be asking for an all-new publicity blitz of its own (if the yammerings of the tech press aren’t enough). Then again, Apple is in such a different position today than it was in 2006, thanks to the explosion of the iPhone and climbing computer sales, that it may no longer see the need to compare itself with an irrelevant would-be rival in just one of the platforms it occupies. Either way, it’ll be interesting to see what comes next.
(AV Club via CrunchGear. Thanks, Rachel.)
