But that's not the same thing as Apple's integration. Apple does the equivalent of Sharepoint connection to Xbox connecting to Windows Live. And it's glitzier, too.

Okay, for an example. I can create a movie in iMovie, use visual passages created in iPhoto. If I need a song, GarageBand 09 has a special view for coming up with incidental mood music - which Apple itself uses in making its promo videos. When you finish that you can send it to your iPhone through iTunes, and while you're there you can put it up directly for sale. You can burn it to DVD, you can publish it online, and iMovie is designed to export different versions to each program automatically, so it fits the medium each time. Or I can upload it to MobileMe and create an online movie gallery, or have it stream directly to my iPod touch.

Another example. In iTunes, I can drag an album off of iTunes and it immediately copies all the songs. Right click that folder and I can compress it directly from the commands. Drag that folder to iChat and it sends the album. If my friend's on a Mac, that zip folder automatically decompresses on the other side. Or I could open a video chat and we could watch a movie in tandem. Or I could show a photo gallery to him. Or I could access his computer remotely and look at his stuff directly.

It's hard to explain, but it's all these small things that don't integrate well, they integrate perfectly. Name two apps and they'll most likely work together. That includes the best third-party apps.

So for an attempt at a bigger example: I want to make an album cover in iTunes. So I use iPhoto to connect to Facebook and find tagged images of me. I find one I like, and edit it in Preview not just to crop it but to add text. The font/color editors in the Mac are the single best I've ever seen. Once I've got that, I right-click the album in iTunes and move the Preview image to the album, and in as few steps as possible I've downloaded an image, cropped it, added text, and made that the image for that entire album. My iPod touch syncs automatically with iTunes, so suddenly I have a cover that appears there, gorgeously and fit in perfectly with everything else.

For web development, I have something like Coda. I can SSH directly from the app, I can write my code, tweak my CSS, access FTP, and manage a handful of different sites all in one window. There's a built-in web browser, so I've got access to basically everything I need for web development in one place. That's third-party, but that's part of the Mac software sphere.

I've tried before to explain it, but it can't be explained. You only really get it when you've used the Mac long-term and used it to do everything. I use it to download files, watch DVDs, write poetry, organize my thoughts, write papers, send emails, listen to music, organize photos, and as you do it, all of it, you start to understand how brilliant the software is. Things flow perfectly. It's like reading a PDF on Safari. It opens with Preview.app in the browser, loads quickly, feels natural, and if I want to save it I just click a button and it downloads instantaneously. That's not enormous, but it saves me strain and it saves me time. I don't have to worry about PDF links, I can click and have it load right away. There are hundreds of small things like that. I'm certain I don't know them all: I just discovered a neat new feature two days ago regarding Expose. It's wonderful discovering new features constantly because they always come up just as you really need them and don't realize it.

They control the top-notch industries with Final Cut, Aperture, and Logic, and yet they still innovate incredibly on the consumer front. GarageBand 09 is one of the best apps I've ever worked with. It's a sheer delight to use.

On top of this, Apple has the undisputed best design team on the planet. The stuff they do is breakthrough. The unibody enclosure on the new computers. Most recently, the battery life on the 17". The iPhone. The iPod. iTunes' music store, then iTunes' video store, and now the App Store. They are conceptually ahead of every other company, and technologically superior, and they have the best-designed products.

Beyond products: there are the Apple stores, some of which are dazzling feats of architecture. The Genius bars, which really, really do work. The way they treat employees - Apple is ranked extremely high among retail employee satisfaction, and it shows when you're a customer. I've been helped an hour after the store's official closing, and that's not a unique case. My mother's friend went and made a tourist stop to the Apple store in New York City. It was just an event for her. She came out utterly awed and in love with Apple products: she was an instant fan. It's miraculous how well everything looks and runs.

It's more than just face value. The people working at Apple are obsessive. I read an article just a few months ago about how they increased the thickness of headphones just enough to prevent possible tangles. They're not a headphone company. But they put effort into that small thing just to stand out ahead of the pack.

Microsoft doesn't have that.

And this is about advertising. Apple's ads are thoroughly brilliant and have been for nearly a decade. The iPod ads. The original iPhone ads, showing how powerful the phone was. The iMac ad with the spinning computer. The Macbook Air coming out of the envelope. They advertise successfully because they focus on how beautiful their products are. You need something beautiful to advertise beautiful, but they pull it off. Even now. The App Store ads? The ones showing how you can download a guidebook of any language and have your phone speak the phrases for you? Or the very newest ones, which show four or five applications each? I have an iPod touch and those ads still excite me, because they remind me of just how powerful this thing is.

Microsoft can't do this. They have some things that are technologically interesting, but they don't make good products, not like that. You mention Microsoft Office. I've used it - I wrote a book in it - and I've used Pages from iWork, and frankly, I'd pick TextEdit over Word for most things. Pages is already a league beyond Word. It makes documents look beautiful. It makes writing extremely pleasurable. It's got such a powerful, simple engine that it's a delight to use. Same with Keynote versus Powerpoint, or Mail.app versus Outlook. Apple creates products that make you joyous. Microsoft makes products that have features you need, but they leave it at that. There's no passion.

And CP+B gets that. They're Apple fanatics. So with Seinfeld, their goal was to distract. To make you think of the Microsoft brand name, because if the name's there and the ad is warm, you'll like Microsoft more. Same with "I'm a PC." It's feel-good. That's all they can do. Because Microsoft is making deficient products, products that might be okay until you compare them to the Apple equivalents, you can't take Apple on head-on. They're a beast. They lead the music industry, they're the fastest-growing phone industry, they make computers that turn people into raving fanatics consistently. So what you do is try to make something sensationalist, something that makes people ignore Apple.

Only it doesn't work. Apple's too savvy, too cutting-edge, and too popular to be ignored that easily. So this campaign backfired, and Apple ended up gaining more than Microsoft did. It was an impressive bluff, but that's all it was - a bluff. It failed.