OK, so Microsoft has come out with it’s “I’m a PC” ad, and it’s supposed to be a counter for the Apple “I’m a Mac, I’m a PC” ads. Except it isn’t.

John Gruber at Daring Fireball sums it up pretty well

The high concept of Apple’s long-running “Get a Mac” TV campaign is that the characters portrayed by John Hodgman and Justin Long are personified computers. It’s right there in the opening lines of every ad in the series: “Hello, I’m a Mac.” “And I’m a PC.” Hodgman is not “Windows”; Long is not Mac OS X. They are not representative or average PC/Mac users. They are computers.

I thought everyone got that. I was wrong.

Another reason I think these ads work: While I think the Apple ads are effective in pounding in one message (Macs are more dependable than PCs), I don’t believe they’ve been effective at convincing people that users of PCs are losers. Why? Because, at the end of the day, we all love John Hodgman, the “I’m a PC guy,” way more than the straight-man hipster dude who plays “I’m a Mac.”

Hodgeman isn’t a “PC guy.” He’s the computer! There are some ads that point out that Windows runs on Macs! The point isn’t that Windows users are losers, or that people using Windows aren’t doing anything cool. It’s that maybe you could do even more with a computer that gave you a better user experience.

But that’s not the point of writing this post. It’s this:

Microsoft’s ‘I’m a PC’ Ads Created On Macs

Flickr user LuisDS found that metadata on the creative copy of the “stereotyped PC user” and other photos appearing on Microsoft’s “I’m a PC” website revealed that they were produced using Macs running Adobe Creative Suite 3.

[…]

When LuisDS checked on the photos again this morning after publishing the metadata details on Flickr last night, he found that Microsoft has scrubbed the revealing details from the work, an effort that also resulted in the 272 KB photo ballooning to 852 KB.

I’m writing this because my irony meter exploded and I’m waiting for the smoke to clear so I can fix it. Bwahahahahaha!