Hey, remember the “I’m a Mac” TV commercial from 20 years ago? Qualcomm and Microsoft would like you to remember.
Qualcomm made a subtle reference to Apple’s famous advertising campaign during its Computex 2024 keynote, The Verge reported.
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At around 1:17:00 in the keynote speech, actor Justin Long (Herbie: Fully Loaded, Die Hard) gets fed up with the flood of notifications from his Mac and starts searching for a place to find a Windows PC with a Qualcomm Snapdragon.
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At the end of the ad, he turns to the camera and says, “You know what? Things are changing!”
Justin Long types, “Where can I get a Snapdragon-powered PC?”
Credit: Qualcomm
This is, of course, a reference to Apple’s old “I’m a Mac, I’m a PC” commercials from the mid-2000s. In those commercials, Justin Long was the cool, stylish young guy representing the Mac, and actor John Hodgman was the stiff, middle-aged man in a suit representing the Windows PC.
Long extolled the virtues of the Mac (the main argument at the time was that Macs were less susceptible to viruses than PCs) and was generally considered cooler and less boring than Hodgman.
This is all part of a larger recent push to prove that laptops running Qualcomm’s latest Snapdragon X Elite chipset can perform as well (or better) than the top-of-the-line MacBooks. (The new Surface Laptop 7 and Surface Pro 11 are among the recently announced Snapdragon X Elite-powered PCs.) The “Mac vs. PC” debate felt like it died at least a decade ago, but maybe it’s back on track again.
