Makes You Want to Boot Them

Quote: “Hello, I’m a Mac.”
“And I’m a PC.”
New Macintosh ad campaign.

Figure of Speech:  personification, or prosopopoeia (pro-so-po-PEE-a), the humanizer.

Did you ever have to play a vegetable when you were a kid? Apple’s new ad campaign uses the same rhetorical device, which the ancients called prosopopoeia (“make human”).

In the Apple ads, a young, hip, rather smug guy plays a Macintosh, while a soft-bellied nerd plays the PC.  The PC sneezes from a virus, freezes up mid-sentence, and can’t communicate with the pretty young Camera from Japan.  The Mac has no such problems.

The campaign is timed to head off Microsoft’s new operating system, Vista, which features Mac-like whistles and bells.  To turn the argument away from the relative value of a PC, the ad agency uses Ethos, argument by character.  Aristotle said Ethos is the most persuasive of all the appeals — more than emotion, even more than logic.

There’s only one flaw in the ads: the PC seems more accessible.

Snappy Answer:  “And I’m a little teapot. Can we talk computers now?”