Apple is known for its "Get a Mac" commercials, which blast Windows as virus-laden and virtually unusable. They have been a real headache for Microsoft which is finding that people's negative perceptions of Vista often have little to do with the OS's real problems.
While slightly more sedate with no clear "enemy", Apple's iPhone commercials could favorably be cited as capturing the enthusiasm of an Apple advertising push and less favorably be labeled as hyperbole. Indeed one of Apple's iPhone commercials were already axed in the UK for being misleading.
In the UK an independent non-government entity controls what commercials are allowed on TV. If citizens make complaints it will investigate commercials and take them off the air if it finds them to be too misleading. In Apple's ad it states, "You'll never know which part of the internet you'll need... all parts of the internet are on the iPhone."
As the iPhone fails to support Flash and crashes on many webpages, the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA), the independent regulatory agency, deemed it "deceptive" and removed it from the air.
Now another iPhone commercial has been axed by the ASA.
The ASA received complaints from citizens about another of Apple's iPhone commercials, which stated that the new 3G iPhone was "really fast" and proceeded to show shots of webpages loading in seconds or less. In total 17 people complained, saying it was a deceptive representation of the phone's true speed.
Apple UK claimed it was merely meant to show the new generation was faster than the last one and that the claims were "relative not absolute". The company also pointed to text that appears onscreen during the commercial, which states that, "Network performance will vary by location."
Nonetheless, the ASA sided against Apple, saying that the ad was misleading and that Apple could no longer show it in its current form. The organization describes that the ad was meant to lead viewers to believe that the phone could perform at the speeds shown in the ad and it states, "Because we understood that it did not, we concluded that the ad was likely to mislead."
While Apple disagrees, its only choice is to now alter the commercial, which seems unlikely, or more than likely simply stop showing it in the UK.