Snippet: Microsoft Shares Holiday Ad Promoting Surface Go Over Apple’s iPad ☇

Mitchel Broussard for MacRumors:

Microsoft this week shared a new ad on its Microsoft Surface YouTube channel, this one aimed at promoting the Surface Go. As the ad begins, a little girl stares into the window of a Microsoft Store and begins singing about her preference for the Surface Go over Apple’s iPad, to the tune of the song “Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer.”

She sings, “Grandma don’t run out and buy an iPad, it was fine when I was six but now I’m 10. My dreams are big so I need a real computer, to do all the amazing things I know I can.” Microsoft’s ad is aimed at Apple’s own “What’s a Computer?” ad campaign, which began in 2016 and showed off a few of the things that the iPad Pro can do as a replacement to a traditional laptop computer.

I think there’s a lot of things Microsoft does well (ironically enough, I adore their iOS apps), and getting their jabs in at competitors at just the right time also seem to be a talent. A few years back, they went after Google and there have been a few little snide comments in ads about the Apple products over the years. This ad plays right into the, “Is the iPad a real computer?” argument that we’ve been seeing all over since the introduction of the current iPad Pro. It’s a tad annoying and cheap, but then again so is the Surface Go.

Jokes aside, it’s weird that the Surface Go is often positioned to compete with the iPad Pro, but is probably better matched with the entry-level iPad (and still smoked in terms of raw performance). Unfortunately, what many of these arguments fail to realize is that even with its flaws and shortcomings, iOS on the iPad works really well for some people, just as I’m sure having a traditional Windows environment would work really well for other people.