‘What? Things change!’ The ‘I’m a Mac guy’ actor, Justin Long, does new ad for Windows PCs
Hey, remember those "I'm a Mac" TV commercials from 20 years ago? Qualcomm and Microsoft sure hope you do.
As spotted by The Verge, Qualcomm snuck a quick little nod to Apple's famous ad campaign into its Computex 2024 keynote address.
Justin Long appears in new pro-Windows ad
Starting at about the 1:17:00 mark in the keynote, you can see a short video where actor Justin Long (Herbie: Fully Loaded, Live Free or Die Hard) gets so annoyed at his Mac swamping him with notifications that he starts searching for where he can find a Qualcomm Snapdragon-powered Windows PC.
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At the ad's conclusion, he looks toward the camera and says "What? Things change!"
This is, of course, a reference to Apple's old "I'm a Mac, I'm a PC" commercials from the mid-2000s. In these ads, Justin Long was a cool, hip, young guy who represented Macs — and actor John Hodgman was a stuffy middle-aged man in a suit who represented Windows PCs.
Long would extoll the virtues of Macs (the main argument at the time was that they didn't get as many viruses as PCs) and generally come away looking cooler and less boring than Hodgman.
This is all part of a recent larger movement to prove that laptops running on Qualcomm's latest Snapdragon X Elite chipset can be as powerful (if not more) than the best MacBooks. (The new Surface Laptop 7 and the Surface Pro 11 are some of the recently unveiled Snapdragon X Elite-powered PCs). It felt like the "Mac vs. PC" debate ended at least a decade ago, but maybe we're back.
Alex Perry is a tech reporter at Mashable who primarily covers video games and consumer tech. Alex has spent most of the last decade reviewing games, smartphones, headphones, and laptops, and he doesn’t plan on stopping anytime soon. He is also a Pisces, a cat lover, and a Kansas City sports fan. Alex can be found on Bluesky at yelix.bsky.social.
