It starts like any other day at work. The Underdogs, Apple’s beloved band of awkward geniuses, are about to make their big debut at Container Con. Their booth is perfect, their pitch rehearsed, their Macs humming quietly in the background. And then, the lights dim, the air shifts, and a familiar blue glow fills the hall.
The Blue Screen of Death.
Everyone else’s computers freeze in digital panic. Deadlines vanish. PowerPoints crumble. Somewhere, a Windows technician is sweating bullets. But not the Underdogs. Their Macs stay alive, untouched and unbothered, quietly carrying on as if nothing happened. It’s business as usual in Apple land.
That’s the entire premise of Apple’s new short film, BSOD (Blue Screen of Death): part workplace comedy, part corporate flex. It’s funny, a little smug, and unmistakably Apple. The company doesn’t name names, but the inspiration is obvious. The CrowdStrike meltdown of July 2024, when a single faulty update crashed millions of Windows PCs worldwide. Banks shut down, flights were grounded, and even hospital systems went offline. It was a day the tech world won’t forget, and Apple’s marketing team clearly didn’t.
In this version of events, the Underdogs, powered by MacBooks, iPads, and iPhones, emerge unscathed. “It’s a PC problem,” their IT guy shrugs. “Your Macs are secure.” What follows is pure wish fulfillment. The team signs deals, helps other vendors, and somehow becomes the moral center of a collapsing trade show. As chaos spreads, the Macs keep running.
The ad ends with a familiar line: “There’s no security like Mac security.” And in classic Apple fashion, it’s both self-aware and serious. The video links to Apple’s enterprise page, where the company outlines its kernel-level protections and tight integration between hardware and software. It’s the kind of system design that makes a CrowdStrike-style failure nearly impossible.
Of course, Apple isn’t pretending Macs are invincible. Every device has vulnerabilities. But in a world where one bad update can paralyze millions of computers, Apple is reminding businesses of its greatest strength: control. It controls the chips, the code, the updates, and by extension, the calm.
It’s also a return to form. The BSOD ad channels the same energy as Apple’s old “Get a Mac” commercials, this time dressed in modern enterprise humor. Instead of “I’m a Mac” and “I’m a PC,” we get a team of characters whose quiet confidence speaks for itself. The tone is sharper, the message subtler, but the punchline is the same.
As the music swells and the Underdogs walk away with their big win, it’s hard not to laugh, not just at the chaos, but at how precisely Apple timed this reminder. When the world breaks, the Macs don’t.
