According to Adage, Microsoft did, in fact change the advertising after getting the call from Apple legal. Kevin Turner famously told people gathered at a Microsoft conference last week the Laptop Hunter ads were working:
And you know why I know they’re working? Because two weeks ago we got a call from the Apple legal department saying, hey — this is a true story — saying, “Hey, you need to stop running those ads, we lowered our prices.” They took like $100 off or something. It was the greatest single phone call in the history that I’ve ever taken in business. (Applause.) I did cartwheels down the hallway. At first I said, “Is this a joke? Who are you?” Not understanding what an opportunity. And so we’re just going to keep running them and running them and running them.
In the original version, Lauren at one point comes upon an Apple computer and pouts: "This Mac is $2,000, and that’s before adding anything."
"Why would you pay twice the price?" asks Lauren’s mom. "I wouldn’t," says Lauren, who ends up leaving with a $972 Dell laptop she suspiciously found later in the spot.
In the latest version of the ad, that portion has been edited out. The original ad has been removed from YouTube and other sites by Microsoft, and replaced with a version (below) in which Lauren doesn’t talk about how much the Mac costs, but she does say: "It seems like you’re paying a lot for the brand."
NPD data this week revealed that of the $1000+ retail computer market in the US, Apple gets 91% of the revenue. That’s up from 66% in 2008 when the Laptop Hunter Ads started running.
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