Apple’s favorite fictional team, The Underdogs, is back with an eight-minute ad—I’m sorry, short film—about the widespread, CrowdStrike-inflicted Windows Blue Screen of Death of 2024. Via The Verge, which describes it:

Apple’s ad follows The Underdogs, a fictional company that’s about to attend a trade show, before a PC outage causes chaos and a Blue Screen of Death shuts down machines at the convention. If it wasn’t clear Apple was mocking the infamous CrowdStrike incident, an IT expert appears in the middle of the ad and starts discussing kernel-level functionality, the core part of an operating system that has unrestricted access to system memory and hardware.

CrowdStrike’s Falcon protection software operates at the Kernel level, and a buggy update last year created BSOD issues that took down banks, airlines, TV broadcasters, and much more.

But not, of course, Macs, which were impervious to the assault.

The video was funny in the cringe way most of The Underdogs commercials are (they’re all a bit try-hard and need to improve their work-life integration), but it made the point: Macs are secure by default (and also have a bunch of time-saving features).

A couple of “production” notes:

• All five domain names on the business cards are registered (between April 15 and July 21, 2025), but none take you to a working site—not even a redirect.
• On the other hand, all the cards have a valid QR code that takes you to Apple at Work. Delightfully, instead of being printed on the cards, the QR codes appear to be physically cut-and-pasted on—exactly what you’d expect from companies unwilling to reprint their business cards.
• One domain not shown but can be inferred—that of our hero company, betterbag.com—does redirect to the same Apple at Work site. That domain was registered in September 2011. (Note: It’s not, as I mistakenly typed one time, betterbags.com—plural. That’s a real bag company. I wonder how they feel about the misdirected traffic.)
• At least one other fictional company, Origami Boxes, also uses Macs—you can see their hardware, and it’s still running.

• The “Credits” at the end describe the various security features (for example, Gatekeeper “Protects users from malicious software” and XProtect “Automatically detects and removes viruses and malware”), Apple hardware (Mac mini, Apple Watch) and software (Shazam, Genmoji, Find My), plus “special guests,” including Microsoft Excel and PowerPoint, JigSpace, Mailchimp, Myngly, Adobe Acrobat, Reddit, and Slack.
• Curiously, while Numbers makes an appearance, Pages and Keynote do not, which makes me wonder how they got their presentation up on screen—PowerPoint? Really, Apple?