@ Mort Blort – the funny thing is, as well as a show of support, the $150million was more about an out-of-court settlement for patent disputes (can’t remember if over the OS in general or Quicktime) than any ‘bailout’. That this ‘bailout’ is still the mainstream perception is amazing to me. If anything that deal is yet another example of Steve Job’s acumen as a dealmaker extra-ordinaire (witness also Pixar>Disney, deals with music industry and Hollywood, Intel, Cellphone carriers etc etc) where Microsoft is made to look like the shining knight, while Jobs clearly held the gun to Gate’s head in the background.

Anyway, back to the ads – it’s hilarious that Apple have focussed on MS’s well-publicized $300million ad campaign, I’m not sure it’ll necessarily help Apple sell more hardware, but it won’t hurt them either and it does poke yet more fun at clumsy, flailing Microsoft by turning their media ’strike’ against them.

iPhone 3G – yes indeed problems, and what has happened? Fixed. And where there are issues AT&T have fixing to do. So, nonsense Jim.

MobileMe problems? Again, all fixed and running smoothly.

Just open your eyes on the net and you can see these issues have long been dealt with.

Apple gets on and fixes issues, improves products, improves software, unlike Microsoft who don’t like to discuss their products or problems…

That’s why Microsoft is headed for the dung heap and Apple is loyally appreciated by its massively growing customer base.

And it’s necessary when most computer buyers believe Windows is all there is.

NB: Microsoft in its manipulative scheming way, owned a piece of Apple when it needed to make sure there WAS another player to avoid action against their growing monopoly.

Not the mention that these new Apple ads are extremely lame:

“Look, Microsoft is spending money on ADS! That’s OUR specialty people! Look at these two cool trendy guys that we’ve been using in the same rehashed ad for years now!”

Cry more Apple, the Microsoft ads own yours.

If the advertising pile was hypocritical, then the “fix Vista” pile was grotesquely so. What’s Apple working on right now? Fixing MobileMe. Fixing the iPhone. Building Snow Leopard, which is nothing but a big stack of bugfixes for OS X.

And as to those commenters who keep constantly spewing anti-Vista propaganda — before you start typing again, I suggest you learn something about the current state of affairs. Most of the Vista problems at the beginning were caused by faulty video drivers from the likes of Nvidia — who, oh, wait are causing even Macs to fail. Incompetent third party vendors are everyones problem regardless of platform.

These days, there are relatively few problems with the platform, I have it on 3 machines in my home office and they’re all rock-solid — even on a cheap Acer notebook. Don’t get me started on the money I wasted on my MBA — I’ve had more problems with that machine than any computer I’ve owned in 25+ years.