Verizon DSL commercial SHOWING OS X!¿

[dricci]

WTF...

I just saw a Verizon DSL commercial. They had some teen using a flat panel apple display (I think a 19 inch) RUNNING OS X PURE AQUA GOODNESS WITH IE! He was watching some skateboarding streaming movie in IE. It looks so real, too!

The thing that confuses me is, Verizon doesn't support Mac OS past 9.0.4.. So do you think this has something to do with the graphics department just using Macs and OS X, or do you think Apple paid for this (I saw the Apple for a good 3 seconds on the display and in Aqua menubar), or do you think Verizon is going to start supporting Mac OS X?

I have Verizon DSL and their online account management sucks and their speeds are slow and their support sucks.

[adambyte]

I think it's probably just the ad company's idea to use a Mac. And, although a lot of Macs have been product placement by Apple on many shows, on some shows they're there simply because the producers/other hollywood people enjoy Macs, and put them there. I suspect it's just the advertising company, though... most use Macs, right?

[roger]

It could be construed as representation that they support OSX however. It depends whether the ad is an offer (with terms and conditions in it) or an invite to treat, which means that they are not contracturally bound by what they show. (The latter is more likely to be honest - look at the small print in the advert).

However, even if they are not mis-representing they will probably be falling foul of any advertising standards agency if they do not support OSX.

BUT - if they were found of any wrong doing by an ad agency of mis-advertising their products it would not be good publicity of OSX.

R.

[Gedankenspiel]

My personal opinion is that Verizon's ad agency wanted to be hip and get some attention by using one of the more snazzy looking computers out there.

And why not show Mac OS X in their ads. It works great with OS X - got it working within mintutes like a charm. In fact the slow connection process under OS 9 was killing me and I was afraid all the benefits of DSL over dialup were eliminated through this long process. (By the way, I sped things up even more by getting a Belking Firewall that is also a DHCP server that is always on).

I know this forum is not about Verizon DSL but I have to say thato once I had it working it has been fast and reliable. No complaints here.

G

[fryke]

And why would a DSL-service have to *support* Mac OS X? I never cared for this, just always used a router/gateway that had NAT built in. Never had a problem with any service, I've got cable at home and ADSL at work. Why shouldn't the Verizon DSL work out of the box? To use 'an ADSL modem' that hooks to the computer via USB is a crappy solution, anyway. And AFAIK cable and ADSL modems usually just work via Ethernet and give you an IP via DHCP.

[Gedankenspiel]

On another note - I noticed how Verizon gets slow the longer the connection of my Firewall is alive. After I disconnect the power and plug it back its back to the old full 760K speed again.

Anyone with the same prob? Might be the wrong forum for it but thought I'd ask.

G

[roger]

The reason that it is good that a cablemodem or DSL services supports an OS is because when you ring up their helpdesk when the service goes down, if your OS is not supported, then they always blame it on that. If they support it then they can run standard diagnostic tests on your machine to convince themselves that it is the service that has dropped and not the machine itself.

This happened to me not long ago. I knew the service had dropped but trying to convince the monkey on the other end of the phone was very difficult. We have an understanding now - if they can make sure that all the lights are lit up on the cablemodem then I won't bother them about anything else.

Fortunately my provider supports OS9, so I can boot into that if necessary.

R.

[fryke]

That's why at every support call, my first answer is that I'm using one machine running Windows XP, one running RedHat Linux and one using Mac OS X (although Win XP and Linux are on the same machine). If *that* isn't enough, I tell them that I'm a mature network administrator that actually *knows* what he's talking about. If that *still* doesn't help, I ask for a techie instead of a phone supporter.