Busted! Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau Caught Using a Fake MacBook

As any Apple fan knows, every Windows PC secretly wants to be a MacBook, and now we’re seeing some particularly amusing evidence of that coming from none other than the Prime Minister of Canada.

In a recent PR photo, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is seen happily enjoying a video chat on what, at first glance, appears to be an Apple MacBook. Unfortunately, it doesn’t take more than a cursory study of the photo to realize that what he’s actually using is a Windows laptop — some flavour of HP laptop, in fact.

The lid of the laptop is emblazoned with an Apple sticker in the appropriate place — presumably one of the many that Apple scatters throughout all of its products — but not only is it slightly off-kilter, but there are several other indications that this is not a MacBook.

Firstly, there’s the array of cables hanging off the side, coming from numerous ports that haven’t been found on any of Apple’s MacBooks in over six years, not to mention the barrel-style power connector.

Then, assuming that what’s on the video screen matches what Trudeau is looking at, it’s clearly running Windows 10 and not macOS. We can also see that it was most likely taken last fall, specifically on October 22, 2020, at 7:12 p.m.

As Toronto Sun reporter Bryan Passifiume points out, it’s also not too hard to see the HP logo hiding underneath the Apple sticker if you look closely enough.

The image in question was not only used in a series of ads and promotional tweets for the Liberal Party of Canada’s “Team Trudeau” training hub, but it’s also still the main banner image on the party’s training website. In this case, the Apple logo may be partly obscured by the floating call-to-action buttons, although this varies depending on screen resolution and browser window size.

While it’s not particularly surprising that this “deception” naturally became fodder for the PM’s political opponents and critics to declare a supposed scandal, it’s far funnier than it is political, and as with any staged photo, it’s almost certainly more about Trudeau’s press handlers not doing their due diligence than any attempts to mislead voters into thinking the PM is a hardcore Apple fan.

Responding to the tweets and photos going viral, Braeden Caley, the party’s senior director of communications noted candidly that the Prime Minister had simply borrowed a team laptop in one of the party’s volunteer hubs, lightheartedly putting the Liberal Party’s slogan on it by adding that “some especially keen Apple fans there just brought some ‘real change’ to the look of one of their laptops by slapping on the Apple sticker.

According to Caley, the photo was taken when Trudeau dropped into a volunteer centre to have a Skype call with party volunteers who had assisted with successful by-elections last fall.

It’s far from the first time that PR people have made mistakes like this, and indeed this one could very well be the most innocuous since the goal of the photo was to show Trudeau communicating with supporters in a very “grassrootsy” kind of way — not to promote any specific products.

We’ve actually seen much worse gaffes. Intel had a major oops just last month when its advertising agency used a stock photo of a MacBook Pro user in attempting to promote “The World’s Best Processor.” Earlier this year, Samsung’s marketing team was caught tweeting Samsung ads from an iPhone — again.

Further, legitimate Apple products are often seen in photos and tweets intended to promote the competition — often from iPhone-toting celebrities, including T-Mobile’s former CEO John Legere, Russian journalist Ksenia Sobchak (who actually got sued by Samsung for being caught with an iPhone), along with Kate Upton, Oprah Winfrey, Jessica Alba, Gal Gadot, David Beckham, Ellen Degeneres, and of course, former U.S. President Donald Trump, who infamously called for a boycott of Apple products — while tweeting from his iPhone. So needless to say, the Canadian Prime Minister is now in fairly distinguished company.