Apple a Pro at Building Buzz for New Products
Frank Fox - 2008.02.14
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I thought some of the comments about my article The Top 11 Reasons to Choose Macs over PCs were a little harsh. Now I'm not going to cry about it, but I did do some thinking.
On item 2, when I said that you buy a Mac out of lust, I was thinking about how effective Apple is at drumming up interest in their new products. It got me thinking about how to demonstrate this, and I thought the Web would serve as a good way to do so.
It just so happens that Intel is selling a similar processor to the one in the new MacBook Air to other PC vendors. I found an article on Macworld that gave the names and models of two computers. This would give a comparison of popularity, by using similar laptops with lightweight designs and processing horsepower.
I first searched Google for the Fujitsu LifeBook P8010. It scored well with 36,000 hits. [Editor's note: we made our screen captures using lowercase search terms, which always finds more matches. dk] That sounds like pretty good interest for a computer that is just going on sale. Maybe my argument wasn't going to prove effective.
Then I checked on the Lenovo ThinkPad X300. These were even more popular with 123,000 hits. Obviously the ThinkPad brand can drum up interest even before a product is launched, not bad. Maybe, I thought to myself, enough people really do get excited by new models of PC.
Then I checked for the MacBook Air, and it redefined the meaning of popular: 8,960,000 hits. I couldn't believe the results and started skipping thru the results just to read the web pages titles; maybe there would be a lot of false positives. Up to at least page 40 these were bona fide articles about the MacBook Air.
Wow. I like this laptop, but I never guessed it was getting this much coverage.
So there you have it, a completely nonscientific proof that Macs,
even with their tiny market share, can whip up 72 times the interest
level as one of it PC rivals. [Editor's note: Or, in our more
exhaustive search, 32 times as much as the ThinkPad X300. dk]
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