Does Lauren matter?

In these days of credit crunches and Wall Street bail-outs, the notion of marketing a computer (or, for that matter, an operating system) on the basis of price makes sense. For many shoppers, price will be the deciding factor. While some of us might consider factors like performance and ease-of-use to be more important, there are plenty of consumers out there who can’t tell a good computer from a bad one, and really just want one that’s cheap.

So with that in mind, Microsoft came up with their Lauren commercial, in which the protagonist is given the task of finding a suitable laptop for under $1000. She eventually settles on a $700 HP Pavilion, but not before passing up on the Apple offerings because she can’t find one with the specifications she wants at the price she can pay.

The Macintosh web has been abuzz with people speculating on the precise model and configuration Lauren picked up, and lots of people have been describing the ways that such a machine would be compromised. Even putting aside the fact it’s running Windows Vista, other shortcomings probably include relatively lacklustre performance, a poor or non-existent graphics card, pokey battery life, and a lack of features standard on Macs such as Bluetooth connectivity.

None of this is a killer though. If the specifications match her needs, then even if you or I think that’s a cheaply constructed and shoddily designed computer, it doesn’t really matter. It may well be good enough for Lauren, and indeed millions of other consumers out there.

What was more interesting to me was the idea that Apple didn’t offer a machine at her price point because she wasn’t “cool enough” for the brand. The implication is that’s a bad thing.

(I could make a sexist comment here about how girls don’t know the first thing about cool computers anyway, but I probably shouldn’t, for fear the rather ferocious female System Administrator down the corridor might find out and stick a motherboard into me somewhere the Sun doesn’t shine…)

Apple have always been about the cool. Cool is what they do. They trade on it. Whatever else, we buy Apple computers not just because they’re good, but because they’re cool. The Mac portable line-up is the computing equivalent of the Rat Pack, circa 1960. It defines cool. It oozes cool. Above all else, an Apple laptop isn’t a $700 HP Pavilion.

Sorry Lauren, maybe you just aren’t hip enough for the room, and frankly, I don’t care.