Stop the Noiz

Apple a Pro at Building Buzz for New Products

Frank Fox - 2008.02.14 - Tip Jar

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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.

Fujitsu Lifebook P8010 with 46,000 hits

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.

Lenovo Thinkpad X300 with 595,000 hits

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.

Apple MacBook Air with 18.9 million results

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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Recent Stop the Noiz Columns

Dell XPS 13 Takes on the MacBook Air, 2012.01.20. Although Apple's MacBook Air wasn't the first ultrabook, it set the standard. How does Dell's new XPS 13 compare?
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