And honestly what’s wrong with the ads? Sure, they’re a bit cheesy, but not really that much out of the ordinary for magazine ads back then. There were certainly much worse (sensational, sexiest) ones…
Let’s not forget, IBM themselves used Charlie Chaplin’s “Little Tramp” [0][1][2] in their home computer ads for quite a while back then, so this isn’t that different.
0: https://old.reddit.com/r/vintagecomputing/comments/1o2y2gs/m...
1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ru4qPlTbJG4
2: https://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/onlinessays/JC35folder/IBMt...
The whole article is just plain weird. They make it sound like a personal slight, and not a legal battle pitting two companies with a history of questionable behavior against each other.
As others have noted, it was far from a slam-dunk case that what Franklin did was illegal or unethical. "You could even pull a card out of an Apple and plug it in" is not exactly the rhetorical death blow that the author of this article was aiming for.