Apple Inc.

After a hiatus of three and a half months without a new TV ad, Apple (AAPL) broke out a pair of fresh "Get a Mac" spots Monday night to soften the ground for the next operating system war with Microsoft (MSFT).

Earlier that day, Apple had announced that it was shipping the newest version of its flagship Macintosh OS — Snow Leopard — on Friday, nearly two months before the scheduled release of Windows 7.

"Top of the Line" and "Surprise" zero in on one of the main differences between the two systems — the profusion of viruses and other malware in Windows and the lack thereof in Mac OS X.

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It's been three and a half months since Microsoft (MSFT) put owners of Apple (AAPL) computers on the defensive with the first (and perhaps the best) "Laptop Hunters" ad — the one featuring a perky actress named Lauren who does a price comparison and decides she's "just not cool enough to be a Mac person."

Lauren, you may recall, started with a $1,000 budget but ended up with a $699.99 Hewlett Packard (HPQ) machine.

Someone in Redmond must have liked the way that $700 price point played in the focus groups because a cut-down version of the original Lauren ad was back in heavy rotation last week, and this week it was joined by a new TV spot in which an equally photogenic laptop hunting family starts with a $700 budget, rejects the $999 white MacBook, and ends up, like Lauren, with an HP Pavilion dv7.

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A report last week that Apple (AAPL) is preparing to slash prices on its entry level MacBook and iMac models has triggered a flurry of speculation about what the new price points might be.

According to AppleInsider's Kasper Jade, Apple sees the cuts — which could come in the next month or two — as an "interim solution" to the growing popularity of netbooks, those sub-compact laptops that Steve Jobs once dismissed as "a piece of junk" but which are flying off the shelves at $299 to $349 apiece.

For example Acer, whose Aspire One netbooks are Amazon's bestsellers, saw its U.S. market share grow 49.4% (to 13.6%) in the first quarter of 2009, according to Gartner Research, even as Apple's share shrank to 7.4%, down 1% year to year. Mac sales actually fell last quarter for the first time in nearly six years.

How low will Apple go to turn that around? Jade's reporting — based on unnamed sources "familiar with the matter" — is fuzzy on that point, but in the comment stream he makes it clear that he's talking about price reductions in the range of $100 to $150.

Applying these cuts to the current entry-level machines, we get:

• White 13-inch MacBook: $849 – $899, reduced from $999
• 20-inch 2.66 GHz aluminum iMac: $969 – $1,019, reduced from $1,119

With gross margins last quarter of 36.4% — up from 34.7% in Q1 — Apple can certainly afford to sacrifice some profit to grow share. As AppleInsider points out, Apple last month started selling 2GHz iMacs to the education market for $899.

The real questions is, will it work? Will consumers who are buying $349 Acers — or like Microsoft's (MSFT) Lauren, $699 HP (HPQ) Pavilions — give the MacBook a second look if it's priced at $849?

Would you?

Her name is "Lauren" and she's making the Apple (AAPL) guys nuts.

She's the young, hip, Volkswagen-driving redhead who stars in the latest Microsoft's (MSFT) TV campaign. Told that if she can find a 17-inch laptop for under $1,000 she can keep it, Lauren ends up — to the Mac aficionados' dismay — with an HP (HPQ) running Windows Vista.

"I would have to double my budget, which isn't feasible," Lauren says as she drives away from an Apple Store, where 17-inch notebooks start at $2,799. Then she sighs and delivers the ad's coup de grace: "I'm just not cool enough to be a Mac person."

Ouch.

The ad first aired Thursday night, and the Apple press has been taking pot shots at it ever since. Among the complaints:

• "Lauren" is an actress, not the ordinary American shopper the ad claims
• The Apple Store scene was faked; before-and-after photos suggest that she never actually went into the store to try the computers
• The $699 HP Pavilion dv7 she chose over a $999 MacBook is a mess. "It is the epitome of what people dislike about PCs," writes Computerworld's Seth Weintraub. "It runs Vista Home on a slow AMD mobile processor … its screen is abysmal … its networking is five years old … it is loaded with crapware and trial antivirus software that will have to be purchased or wiped off the machine." (link)

One Gizmodo reader even offered to give Lauren his old 17-inch Powerbook so she could do a comparison without worrying about cost. "I do believe," writes Mitch Gewirtz, "everyone on this planet is 'cool enough to be a Mac person'." (link)

Crispin Porter + Boguksy, the agency that produced the ad, has clearly hit a nerve. The campaign goes directly at what may be Apple' biggest vulnerability: the growing differential between Macs, which have largely held their prices throughout the recession, and PCs running Windows, which have been engaged in a brutal price war that forced the industry's ASP (average selling price) down more than 13% in the last quarter of 2008 alone. (See here.)

"Apple, right now, is a fine-tuned machine that targets specific audiences," writes VentureBeat's MG Siegler. "It doesn’t care about selling a 17-inch laptop for under $1,000, because those machines have nowhere near the profit margins of the machines it does sell." (link)

Perhaps most thoughtful analysis of what makes the ad so effective — and so infuriating to Mac users — was provided by Fox News' Clayton Morris, who devoted nearly 9 minutes of air time to a discussion of the spot by a panel that included SquareSpace's Anthony Casalena and Engadget's Joshua Topolsky.

Topolsky is especially trenchant. "This is almost a red-state-blue-state ad," he says. Not only does it hammer home the issue of cost, but it embeds that message in a subtle bit of Apple bashing. "'I'm not cool enough' is so pejorative, says Topolsky. "This is the stigma of the Mac user as a pompous jerk." (link)

The ad is on heavy prime-time rotation, but in case you missed it, we've pasted the YouTube version below the fold: More