Just last week, Microsoft seemed really fired up that its “Laptop Hunter” series of ads were angering Apple – so much so that the company received a call from Apple’s legal department, demanding the ads be changed to reflect new lower pricing on Macs.

Microsoft’s response? “We’re just going to keep running them and running them and running them,” said COO Kevin Turner. And that they are, although they’ve considerably softened the message by removing specific mentions of price from the commercials, instead having “Lauren” say the far less powerful and much more obvious “it seems like you’re paying a lot for the brand.”

Here’s the updated ad:

As AdAge notes, the original ad featured Lauren saying “This Mac is $2,000, and that’s before adding anything,” and her mom following up with “Why would you pay twice the price?”

So what’s the big deal? In a recent poll, our readers indicated that they significantly prefer Apple’s “Get a Mac” ads (55 percent) to Microsoft’s “Laptop Hunter” (22 percent) series. Microsoft tells AdAge that the adjustments “[do] not change the focus of the campaign, which is to showcase the value and choice of the PC.” But by not directly assaulting Mac on its biggest perceived weakness – price – it seems unlikely that momentum will shift.



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