Microsoft Changes ‘Laptop Hunters’ Ad After Apple Complains
New Version Reflects Lowered Price on Mac Notebook — NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — Following a complaint from Apple, Microsoft has quietly tweaked at least one of the ads in its “Laptop Hunters” campaign to reflect its rival's lower pricing on its Mac notebooks.
Context & Ripple Effects
A week after Apple demanded Microsoft stop running the Laptop Hunters spots, Microsoft has not pulled the campaign — it has edited at least one ad to reflect Apple's lowered Mac notebook prices. The tweak matters because the campaign's whole premise is the price gap between Windows laptops and Macs, and Apple just moved the number the ads were built on.
The episode sits inside a longer price war around Apple's hardware: Dell had already confirmed its own MacBook Air rival back in December 2008, signaling that Windows vendors intended to compete on price against Apple's premium notebooks rather than cede the segment.
First-order effects
- The revised spot removes the price comparison Apple objected to, so Microsoft's flagship attack-ad claim — you get more laptop for less money — no longer rests on a Mac price that still holds.
- Apple is forced into an unusual posture: rather than answering Microsoft's campaign with its own creative, it defends its position by cutting notebook prices and filing a complaint against the copy.
Second-order effects
- Every Windows vendor running comparative price ads inherits a maintenance burden — if Apple reprices again, stale copy becomes self-defeating, pushing rivals toward broader value claims that survive price moves.
- Apple's complaint establishes that price-based attack ads are contestable ground, raising the cost for Microsoft of anchoring future campaigns on a rival's list prices rather than its own product merits.
Third-order effects
- Comparative advertising keyed to competitor pricing is structurally fragile in fast-moving hardware markets: whoever runs the price-gap claim must either update copy continuously or accept that the claim decays with every competitor repricing.
- If the pattern holds, the Mac-versus-Windows fight shifts from messaging dominance to pricing discipline, where each company's price sheet constrains what the other can credibly say in public.
The trend: The Mac-versus-Windows rivalry is migrating from creative messaging wars toward price-based positioning, in which each side's list prices effectively dictate what the other's ads can claim.