Microsoft's Surface Book Ads Borrow Music From Apple to Focus on Things a Mac 'Just Can’t Do'

Following the launch of a few ads focused around the advantages of Windows 10 PCs over Macs, this week Microsoft continued its campaign with new commercials showcasing the Microsoft Surface Book. The ads feature wildlife photographer Tim Flach describing the pros of the Surface Book, pointing out a few things that he "just can't do" on a Mac.

The first video showcases Flach's "initial impressions of the Surface Book," with the photographer commenting on the detail provided by the two-in-one laptop/tablet device. Flach also detaches the top half of the Surface Book to directly edit and manipulate his photographs. He ends the video stating, "I can't do that on my Mac."

The second ad delves deeper into the powers of the Surface Pen and its 1,024 levels of pressure sensitivity, with Flach comparing the experience he had with Microsoft's device to his time as a painter. Despite the touch-screen similarities the Surface Book shares with the iPad Pro, Microsoft keeps the comparison specifically to Apple's Mac line in each video.

As pointed out by a reader of The Loop, the score for Microsoft's new ads skews close to a Retina MacBook Pro commercial from 2012. Both videos use variants of "Song" by Kidstreet, with Apple's ad playing the "String Version" of the tune and Microsoft's playing the "Reimagined" version.

A third video posted to the company's YouTube channel echoes much of the sentiment of the first two. Microsoft sells the Surface Book starting at $1,499 and goes up all the way to $3,199 thanks to a boosted 1TB flash storage and Intel Core i7 processor. The company first introduced the Surface Book at an event last October, referring to the versatile computing device as "the fastest laptop ever made, anywhere, on any planet."