Hello, I’m a Mac

The "Get a Mac" spots—Justin Long as effortless cool, John Hodgman as every frustrated Windows user who ever drew the short straw—are some of the best advertising I’ve seen. The conceit is simple enough to repeat thirty times, but they kept finding new angles on it, new small indignities for the PC to absorb. It never got old.

What genuinely baffled me then and still does: Apple never aired them in Germany. The frustration they’re selling translates perfectly. The humor translates. The soft superiority of owning the prettier machine translates especially well. We just didn’t get them, and I watched every single one online anyway and felt cheated.