My initial reaction to the ad, upon watching it in the launch event was "huh, that's a fun reference to the Hydraulic Press Channel". The slapstick elements (trumpet noise, squishy balls) made it come across as light-hearted, rather than an ominous display of force by a large company crushing artists' tools.
This idea of 'squashing all these tools down to a thin slab of glass' made sense given their somewhat unusual focus on the thinness of the device. It was a bit of a throwback to the early 2010s smartphone innovation, where the size of the devices was the yardstick by which manufacturers would outdo each other. I would charitably interpret it as an uninspired marketing team trying to spin some version of Jobs' classic "the iPhone is simultaneously an iPod, phone and internet device" - however the party trick is old, and nobody's impressed anymore.
Perhaps the blowback is a sign of a wider weariness that people have accumulated towards big tech companies over the past few years, mixed with a nebulous malaise about 'AI' and what it means for the status quo and people's livelihoods.
This outrage feels so manufactured. I'm a huge basketball fan, coach, ex-player. If they included a basketball in the ad my thought would've been "yeah, you can play NBA2k on it". I'm not mad about the destruction of a single basketball. I don't feel like its disrespect to the game. It's showing that this single device has captured elements of basketball into a small form factor.
As you note this may hint at a larger weariness with big tech -- and I tend to agree. I feel like if it was a public library crushing a bunch of things, and then ends with it lifting up and showing a library card there wouldn't be the same concerns.
Interestingly, basketballs are designed to be as standardized and replaceable as possible (so there’s no question about whether they affected the game.) Whereas musicians do not think of instruments that way. Nor photographers and their cameras, etc. The reaction might be specific to artists. They’re represented on HN, but not as much as non-artists, I bet.
Musicians might not think of their personal instruments in that way, but surely any musician will acknowledge that there exist cheaply made imitations of their instruments that can be treated as more or less disposable. I can get a trumpet on ebay for $60 shipped to my door, and I expect to be able to do whatever I damn please with it, screw what anyone else says.
As a musician, the availability of cheap instruments doesn’t reduce the impact of the symbolism in this ad from my perspective.
It’s not just a question of monetary value or quality, and is more about the implications of the imagery and the resulting questions it raises about the goals of a multi trillion dollar company.
You’re welcome to do whatever you want with your $60 trumpet, and that’s not going to bother me. I see that as orthogonal to the issues with a company of Apple’s size and reach symbolically destroying an entire room full of creative objects while selling to people who are deeply invested in those objects in their own lives.
> a company of Apple’s size and reach symbolically destroying an entire room full of creative objects while selling to people who are deeply invested in those objects in their own lives.
Is it the symbolism that's the is the issue or what's actually been happening for the past 40 years? There's a reason it is called "Garage Band". There's a reason it is called "Paint". Apple isn't investing in the camera tech for the past 15 years so people don't use it. Their ads showing the incredible non-retouched photos with iPhones seems like much more of an attack than this ad.
I think the two go hand in hand, i.e. what's actually been happening for the last 40 years is the context in which this ad was introduced, and the reason the ad feels so bad for many people.
There's a big difference between using product names that align with the analog versions of the tools and symbolically destroying a room full of tools that people often find give them purpose and meaning. It just feels gauche.
> Their ads showing the incredible non-retouched photos with iPhones seems like much more of an attack than this ad.
The difference to me is that one is saying: "look how good our cameras are now, and here's an example of what you can get out of them" and the other is saying "we can just crush this entire room full of tools now because look at this iPad".
I'm not bothered by the camera ads. As a person who carries a camera and loves cameras, the iPhone is a supplement to my kit and the better it gets, the more flexibility I have.
But crushing a shelf full of lenses just makes me cringe.
Definitely their goal is to stop people from playing trumpets and instead play angry birds.
Somebody who worked on this ad probably feels passionately about one of the things which was crushed, and thought it would just be a fun ad. Sure, marketing is their main gig, but they love to get home and throw on some Miles Davis after a long day. They probably never bothered to think too hard about the ramifications of a stupid ad because it’s just their dumb job.
Or maybe they knew 100% what they were doing and it’s evil turtles all the way down.
This means you’re scared a tablet can replace you as a musician. If you have that fear, maybe you should look into it more because from a non musicians perspective, I don’t believe it replaces them, just makes those sounds available to everyone.
Musicians become emotionally attached to instruments that have been with them for a long time. To musicians, instruments feel like they have souls and personalities of their own.
You can do whatever you want with your trumpet but it's not something I'd want to watch.
This is the correct answer. It was taken as an assault on what everyone grew up with and learned their particular trade on (and still may use).
It's also a bad comparison on Apple's part. An ipad is another creative tool and provides a different experience than other methods (like traditional painting). For example, I play acoustic and electric guitar, but also use Ableton. I love my acoustic for the feel and experience, something I can't get in Ableton. I use Ableton for digital composition and sampling, something that's completely different from the feel of strings and how the notes feel through the wood of my acoustic. They are different experiences and usage and purpose.
Okay so don’t watch it? If I buy a $60 trumpet and a $30,000 dollar ad slot, I expect to be able to show whatever I damn please involving my $60 trumpet on my $30,000 ad slot, modulo laws of the land concerning acceptable use of broadcast media. If you are emotionally attached to the $60 trumpet I have used as a prop on my $30,000 ad slot in service of my personal artistic expression: fuck off, I don’t give a a shit, and there’s no reason I should. (Apologies for the crassness, but I really do believe the laws of the land correctly provide us significant rights of “uncouthuness” on public broadcasting channels)
?? I don’t understand this response. People aren’t saying that they shouldn’t have been allowed to run the ad. You seem to be responding as if they were.
People are saying they found the content of the ad objectionable/upsetting.
Is your position that no one should find any ads to be objectionable or upsetting?
What are you arguing here?
Edit: to be clear, I’m not upset with apple over this. I wasn’t upset by the ad (which I haven’t even watched)
My position is that if people find it objectionable (and it’s not actually causing any real harm) they should carry on with their life pretending like it doesn’t exist. This pitchfork army debacle is a load of bologna.
> they should carry on with their life pretending like it doesn’t exist
No, they don't have to listen to you or pretend it doesn't exist. They are perfectly entitled to loudly express their own free speech criticism of Apple's ad or criticism of anything, really.
Creators are also likely one of the biggest market sectors for iPads, so if you were Apple it would do good for your sales to listen to their voices and not offend the people you are trying to sell to.
Did the ad suggest to you that the iPad was a replacement for cheap, low quality physical objects? That would not be very good copy for Apple. On the contrary, all the instruments etc. seemed rather nice to me. The piano alone was probably worth thousands of dollars.
Basketball may be designed like that, but trust me -- hoopers care about their basketballs. There are arguments all the time about the Wilson Evolution vs Baden Elite vs the Spalding TF-1000 vs Wilson EVO. And at AAU games the home team gets to pick the ball -- this is the only advantage they have (since there are no real home arenas) and I've definitely seen teams not be able to shoot because they practice with Evolutions (which are heavier on average) but they play the game with Evos.
Even in college the home team gets to pick the ball (except in situations like tournament play), and players definitely complain about balls (e.g., the Nike balls are horrible).
My point -- almost everyone who cares deeply about an endeavor has strong opinions and ties to their tools (I suspect just as many, if not more, kids sleep with their basketball as they do their musical instrument of choice). My bigger point -- unless Apple came to my house and took the ball out of my bag, I don't really mind that they used a ball which they probably just bought from Amazon.
Yes, a closer analogy would be "look, this guy had a basketball signed by Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant in 1996, and now it's being blown to smithereens and replaced by a 3D model on his iPad".
True but another article I read mentioned Hollywood types being "upset". In what way did the advert hurt them?
Might someone somewhere been rubbed the wrong way? Perhaps. With 8B+ ppl on the planet, anything is possible. But I agree with the post you commented on. That is, the "outrage" felt manufactured. It's been a slow tech news week and perhaps the media was bored and needed some web traffic?
Note: I recently read Kara Swisher's "Burn Book". In a way, entertaining. But when you realize that she - openly and shamelessly subjective to a fault - considers herself a journalist you quickly realize what a cluster fuck that profession has become. Editorial is not journalism. Op-ed is op-ed. We outside The Media shouldn't have to explain the difference to those on the inside.
I have to acknowledge that there’s probably a pile-on effect from people who enjoy outrage, but a lot of the negative sentiment is coming from level headed musicians and artists; a group that I identify with.
And I wouldn’t say my reaction is rage. It’s closer to a combination of deep disappointment, strong dislike, and a growing feeling that the nebulous worries I’ve felt about tech and its impact on art/music are being made very real.
I don’t find it analogous to a library. Such an ad would imply (to me) some kind of digitization, which frankly is a huge problem at a time when libraries and access to physical books are increasingly under threat.
And I find it different than a basketball, because no one is worried that NBA2K is an actual threat to the game, and basketballs are inexpensive standardized objects.
What they crushed was symbolic of thousands of years of human artistic creativity and output at a time when there’s a lot of anxiety about AI more or less crushing those fields for real.
I like the ad on the whole, but I was a little upset about the destruction of seemed like a perfectly good guitar. I play the guitar as a hobby.
But then again, rock bands have been making me upset by smashing guitars on stage for decades now. And these are the same kind of musicians who are apparently outraged now.
Can sort of understand the discomfort, but musicians have been smashing their own instruments for dramatic effect for a while now.
I think it’s the disappointment that Apple is supposed to be on the side of creators and humanity in an era where the arts have been under attack in schools. Apple makes great tools that should complement an artist and their work. It enables a kid who can’t afford an expensive studio to produce their own music. It’s not that it was an outrage machine - it was a population of creatives saying “hey, this feels a little weird”
Look at the replies to the original tweet, it's all as you say completely manufactured outrage. Perpetually-online wannabe influencers with 70 followers talking about how it's "problematic." Maybe it has to do with Big Tech, I don't know but that sounds like it could be it.
I am personally refreshed reading through the comments here and seeing a nuanced, rational response to the ad rather than the manufactured outrage you mentioned.
Lazy journalism is to blame here, as always. Newsrooms have been purged of any talent over the last decade and the only people left are the same "perpetually-online wannabe influencers" you talk about, trawling Twitter for easy stories and rage-clicks. Nobody would have heard or cared about this ad if formerly esteemed publications like NYT weren't running lazy stories about it.
I wasn't outraged, I was disappointed. No manufacturing needed.
"Let's take dozens of objects people enjoy, put them in to a gray featureless factory under a gray featureless industrial press, destroy them in a splash of color, and replace them with a bland featureless grey slab no one really asked for"
And that was my reaction as a loooong-time Apple user.
I understand the intent. The execution is abysmal.
I disliked the ad. I wasn’t outraged. I take a nuanced view that it was a piece of creative poised to be an impressive addition to Apple’s advertising laurels that missed the mark because its creators failed to account for a growing cultural unease.
Outrage is profitable, it drives engagement, and encouraged by these platforms algorithms. And when everyone sees so much outrage all the time, it normalizes it on the platform so even if you're not seeking income from it, that's the default stance.
I think the big thing here is that if you don't have an attachment to any of the items being crushed you probably don't feel as strongly. If you're a trumpet player, seeing a trumpet being crushed is going to be a bit distressing. If you're a photographer, you're putting a monetary value on those lenses being destroyed. If you're into old arcade machines, you're thinking about how many of those cabinets are left in that good of a condition.
AFAICT people are not so much upset about objects of value being destroyed as they are about the symbolism of creative tools being crushed flat and turned into an iPad. For artists and similar creatives, it evokes the way AI companies have already stolen their intellectual property, and their promise to make them all but obsolete in the future.
For me, it’s a mix of both. I’m a musician and a photographer. I felt a visceral negative reaction because those objects are sitting here in my apartment, and I’ve invested thousands of dollars and thousands of hours into them.
I also found the symbolism a bit distressing, because it takes the general worry I’ve felt about AI’s impact on art and music and animates those worries very literally.
Most AI/tech proponents are quick to point out that the original forms of expression aren’t going anywhere. But this felt uncomfortably close to “where we’re going, you won’t need these things anymore”.
And the thing is, I’m a big fan of the iPad and it’s incredibly useful as a companion to these artistic endeavors. But I’m not a fan of the idea that it supersedes them.
I'm a former professional musician. Not being able to tell the difference between your own pet being tortured and an object on tv being destroyed in a commercial would be a severe mental disorder.
People have anthropomorphised and attached sentimental value to musical instruments and other artistic instruments since the beginning of civilization. Just because someone writes an academic paper claiming it's a disorder doesn't mean we should care what they have to say.
There's a big difference between "I give my guitar a name" and "Seeing a commercial where a trumpet gets squished is the same as my own pet being tortured".
Let's not pretend you didn't say "Watching a musical instrument get crushed is like watching a pet getting tortured".
A metaphor would be "the boy was a cat as he tip toed quietly through the house".
You're thinking about what reasonable people would say and mean, but these people actually want to say that seeing a trumpet getting flattened in a commercial is the same as watching your own pet be tortured. Why that is, is anyone's guess. Maybe to seem sensitive and deep.
Remember when I predicted that you would attack me and attack 'how I asked' for evidence instead of actually explaining how watching a commercial of a trumpet being mushed is the same as watching your own pet being tortured?
Even then it's about things that someone actually owns and not something from a TV commercial.
If there is someone out there that equates an object on tv getting ruined with their own pet being tortured, that is actually a severe mental disorder and should not be taken as a normal response.
That would be a person unable to function on a day to day basis.
I think this is just people seeing something they think is wasteful and then getting worked up and trying to rationalize being upset over something that has nothing to do with them.
This response is basically just you saying "nu uh, you're wrong" again. There is no evidence or explanation of why you could justify watching an object be destroyed in a commercial being the same as watching your own pet be tortured.
Find me any example of people thinking this is normal. How would someone go to the movies or throw anything away? It's complete nonsense.
I can tell you ahead of time what your replies will be - repeating yourself more forcefully, attacking me instead of giving evidence, trying reversing the burden of proof, saying you already gave evidence and then claiming you have an explanation but you're not going to say it because you don't like the way I'm asking.
For me I can't see the symbolism part, but I have serious concerns about destroying that many things and making such a big mess just for one ad. That's just me though.
The arcade one particularly distressing given that arcades and their unique arcade hardware are rapidly vanishing across the world without replacement.
And the arcades that DO exist are often 90% shitty ticket games that cost $1, have about 15 seconds of gameplay, and then maybe after blowing through $50 you'll have enough tickets to buy $2 worth of Tootsie Rolls and maybe a balsa wood glider. If you got really lucky, maybe a plushie.
Though there are some "barcades" popping up these days that focus on classic arcade games to appeal to older the older crowd.
I happened across a nice one when I was in Denver, recently. It's called Akihabara. Tons of imported Japanese cabinets (including Taiko no Tatsujin and Typing of the Dead), and a bar with imported beers, sake and house cocktails. I wish I'd had a smartcard for saving progress, but it was only something I found out about during the trip.
I'm definitely more into the 90s and early 2000s era of arcade games than 80s stuff (and the seat-friendly JP cabinets are nice) so I enjoyed the opportunity to play games that are hard to find here, and bring back memories of wandering (relatively lackluster) bowling alley arcades with a pocket of quarters.
I understand that there is an entire culture surrounding these machines and that people enjoy collecting and restoring them. Hell, I would even like to build a cabinet myself one day.
But there's a reason they are disappearing. They're old and obsolete. While they may have value to a niche group, they are overall viewed as mostly worthless.
Secondly, there's a very simple solution to disliking what someone else does with their own property. Purchase it before they do whatever you dislike. Either from them or by beating them to the punch and buying it from the previous owner before they do.
> Secondly, there's a very simple solution to disliking what someone else does with their own property. Purchase it before they do whatever you dislike. Either from them or by beating them to the punch and buying it from the previous owner before they do
I think this kind of sums up why it was a bad ad.
"Don't be mad, you could have just outbid me" isn't a great thing to have to be saying at the same time you're asking the same person to get hyped about a new product.
The Gutenberg bible is also old and obsolete. The pyramids at Giza are old and obsolete. Stonehenge is old and obsolete. Ancient cave paintings are old and obsolete. The Wright brothers' flyer is old and obsolete.
Most of the reason that collectors have to spend a lot of money on arcade cabinets, though, is not that they have high market resale value; but rather that the machines they can manage to acquire are usually in terrible condition, requiring large amounts of conservation work to get working and presentable again. And they’re so broken down, because everyone but these few collectors have valued — and continue to value — these machines so little that they’ve allowed them to rot in warehouses for decades. Many arcade cabinets are recovered from e-waste recycling centers, or even landfill.
If they truly had market value, then people other than the collectors themselves would be making a business out of finding and restoring these cabinets, in order to sell them to the collectors. But no such business exists — because there just isn’t the demand to sustain it.
I’m reminded of a recent YouTube video about MadCatz gaming peripherals. The video’s author had to spend thousands of dollars buying the few remaining controllers on the used market to use as examples. Why so much? Not because of high demand. Because of limited supply — they were so valueless (mainly due to just being awful products even when new) that every owner of one had long thrown in away; no gaming store wanted to buy any used (being seen selling such brands was a mark against the quality of a store!); and even thrift stores had long dumped them for lack of interest. These gamepads and flight-sticks had value to this one guy making this one video — but literally nobody else.
A one-time purchase, does not a market-clearing price make. The market is still just as illiquid after such a purchase as before it.
> Why so much? Not because of high demand. Because of limited supply
Eh, "high demand" is meaningless on its own in this case. There's high demand relative to the supply.
And not everyone recognizes value in an old cabinet and throw theirs out (further reducing supply), but that just means the market isn't efficient, but that's true of the market for most things.
Your "solution" is so unrealistic for all but the very wealthiest people that it's on the verge of seeming disingenuous. My bank account would have to be quite a few orders of magnitude larger for me to be able to purchase even a fraction of all the things in the world I would like to preserve.
I was so angered by your opinion on relics being worthless that I checked your comments and you seem alright in other respects. I do like HN for this reason. So yeah I disagree with you this time but I’m not going to be rude
The console says “Space Imploder,” which isn’t a real arcade console, from what I can tell. There’s more discussion here[1], but it seems likely that a lot of the things weren’t real (or if they were real, they weren’t were junk that was broken beyond repair).
This seems to be a major point that’s missing from the discussion. If a lot of this is stuff that was fake or already headed for the dump, it completely undermines the argument that perfectly good equipment was destroyed.
The point isn't how it was produced, but what the message is. And the message is destruction of creative instruments is good, akshually, because shiny & thin.
No amount of "but we only rendered it" is going to fix it. It speaks about values the company holds.
Also, the focus on how these devices are increasingly consumer only instead of me being able to use my device to create
Disclaimer: one of my goals is to build apps for my machine on the machine itself. I had this working on the now defunct Firefox phone OS (Its apps were deployed as Zipped HTML/JS and related resources -- I cobbled together a dev environ out of a few browser based tools).
TL;DR: I'm a tool-using creator-type species, The modern "CONSUME ONLY" device craze makes my eye twitch; Ads that reinforce destruction of tools make me want to join fight club.
Man, you touched on something that has been a sore point for me my entire smart phone owning part of my life. The inability to make a simple program without huge hurdles, just for my phone and no one else.
Having a locked down tool that is so dumbed down is annoying. For example, I'd love to make a custom unit converter so that I can quickly and unobtrusively convert between metric and imperial without being online/etc. that also displays the answer with closest drill size
This reminds me of an article from Maddox in 2007 about how the Nokia E70 is better than the iPhone because he can use the terminal on it. [0] Time may have proven him right.
Art creation is creation. Muic, images, video -- they all benefit from good screens, fast processors, quality stylus integration, first party apps, and full-stack attention to latency. The iPad is about creation, just not your type of creation.
So if you own a house or car then it's distressing to see one destroyed in a movie? Both of those cost much more than a trumpet, and for many people are more personal and unique, but somehow most people manage to keep their eyes on the screen.
Depending on the context, probably? During my suspension of disbelief of the narrative, it might make me say "I don't like this destruction!" and to root for whatever might be mitigating the destruction
Honestly, outside the context of a movie or education, I find it pretty off-putting altogether. The videos of brand new cell phones being destroyed, TV's kind of less so but still, cars being crushed or vandalized, etc. If I put my psychoanalysis hat on (always dangerous when your subject is yourself, but anyway) I feel two big things:
1. A part of me just does not like waste. I'm keenly aware of our rampant consumerist culture's slow and continuing march towards collapsing our biosphere, and one of the ways those thoughts manifest themselves is being really upset with people buying products simply to turn right around and destroy them, while barely using them, usually for profit in the attention economy but sometimes seemingly just because they're wealthy and bored.
2. And another part: growing up poor, I'm keenly aware of how valuable things can be for people like me, who didn't grow up with much. Maybe that old computer that works fine that you're going to run tannerite through for a YouTube video means nothing to you, but I vividly recall many points in my life I could've really used it, and I know I'm the absolute opposite of alone in that fact.
The "artistic" angle that a lot of the outrage this is drawing didn't really hit me as hard as these things did, but that's just my subjective experience. I respect people who love these beautiful things and don't want to see (probably) completely functional, or even repairable, useful things destroyed so a multi-billion dollar company can sell more products. (And let's be honest, given the nature of video production, the ones we actually saw destroyed were likely a fraction of the ones actually destroyed.)
The artistic angle I do understand though is if it's done for something like a movie, it doesn't hit the same for me. When it's done to make other kinds of art, even schlocky hollywood crap art, at least that has... a result, I guess? It's destruction to create something. This was destruction for... another fucking ad. That will be forgotten in probably 2 weeks.
Edit: The more I've thought about it, the more gross it feels, and I find myself really sympathizing. Times are pretty tough right now and artists have it rough during good times. How would you feel if you, as a piano player, who hadn't gotten to play in years (or maybe even ever!) on a piano like that, how would you feel seeing Apple buy one that at least looks to be in perfectly good working order, and smash it, in the service of selling you a stupid iPad? I really think this is impossible to comprehend without taking into account that everyone is hurting right now: inflation, Bidenomics, whatever it is you want to call it: people are broke, our expenses are going up, and our salaries remain the same. Yeah, I totally understand why this ad in this cultural moment hit a nerve: a whole ton of people, especially creatives, are struggling right now and here's Apple, buying up a ton of awesome things, and smashing em to bits and being like "here, you don't need a piano, you need an iPad!" Yeah, no shit people are upset.
I remember Obama's "Cash for Clunkers" program where people were paid to pour sand in engines and run them to destruction.
This was all supposedly in the service of replacing them with more fuel efficient cars. The trouble was the numbers weren't run. To equal the emissions from manufacturing a car, a car would have to be driven 20,000 miles. One can easily see that the increase in fuel economy didn't add up.
Then there was the "create new jobs" fallacious reasoning, akin to the broken window fallacy.
I remember once watching some heist movie while recovering from a motorcycle crash, and the sight of all the faceless mooks crashing their bikes during its car chase scene was so viscerally uncomfortable that it took all the fun out of the spectacle. This had never been a problem before.
> So if you own a house or car then it's distressing to see one destroyed in a movie?
I think there's a difference between showing items getting damaged as a depiction of some sort of chaos or violence versus lauding it as being obsoleted by technical progress.
That's because the blown up car is not advertising anything.
Instead, imagine an ad extolling the virtues of public transport by blowing up cars in a parking lot. It sends the complete opposite message than what was probably intended.
Yeah, I do a lot of live recording from my piano to Mac and I was thinking the same thing.
But maybe the ad is saying - you're no longer programming a MIDI track, the AI piano player in Garage Band or whatever is just going to be indistinguishable from a real piano.
I wasn't initially bothered by it, but I think the people who are have a fair point especially about the generative AI implications of replacing real creative tools.
Yeah I don't care how good the AI is, it's not the same as the experience of playing a real instrument. It's taking away someone's creative experience and replacing it with a synthetic version. Even if the result is higher quality artistic output it eliminates the process of producing it which should not be discounted.
If I saw a house, that looked like the one where I grew up, being cheerfully destroyed to build a Walmart parking lot, yes I might get a little distressed. It would certainly not improve my opinion of Walmart.
if a car is like a tool that you tolerate in order to get to work, then no, you might even enjoy the recording of the enactment of a revenge fantasy you can't afford
if you spend your weekends polishing your car, buying aftermarket addons for it, modifying it, and/or considering which car to save up for next, then yeah, it's gonna fucking hurt if you watch a movie and see them blow up a car like the one you long for, especially if you think they did it for real instead of using cgi. and that's true whether that car is a lamborghini countach or a low rider
This comparison falls wildly short and completely misses OP's point.
Many people own cars, but only a small number of people are deeply into cars, and for one of those people I can definitely see a vintage car getting destroyed on screen causing a negative emotional reaction.
Many people own homes, but it's their own home that they get really attached to, not the abstract concept of a home.
My wife is a lifelong, fervent string musician and I have been with her in a film where she shouted out in pain when a string instrument was brutally destroyed. OP is talking about having that kind of attachment to an artform, not about causal ownership of objects.
It depends on the context. On an entertainment yt channel, one single real trumpet, so what. But the context apple produced is the implication that the very concept of a trumpet is being destroyed and replaced with a thin, temporary simulacrum.
The difference is subtle. In the first case, a single real trumpet. Only worth a few hundred bucks. In the advertisement, the crushed trumpet is a symbol representing everything around trumpets: lessons, spit valves, centuries/milennia of history, inherited instruments, afternoons afterschool marching around on a football field with childhood friends.
> I don’t think it is healthy if you are emotionally distressed seeing a trumpet being crushed.
My first thought was the exact opposite: watching the specific ad without being distressed, shows an emotionally damaged human being. Especially the last part where the toy gets crashed screaming is really messed up.
I would guess that if it is a real trumpet the props department went down to the local used instrument store and picked up the cheapest Yamaha in the discount bin. But, the way the trumpet crumples doesn't quite look realistic to me.
I know it's actually hard to tell. There's definitely some CGI in there. But a lot of it looks pretty real too. But the issue with it was the destruction of all of the creative tools. So it's in some ways not quite as bad if it's not real.
Some bits are obviously physically impossible, so definitely CGI.
I can be persuaded that some shots are real+CGI, and squished into the larger CGI view. They might have crushed a few "things" to see how they would fail, and then CGI'ed up a final version.
The wide shots do not look real. The lighting is not believable. The failure modes of many individual items are not believable. The whole pancaking effect of the big crush is not believable.
I understand the discomfort at seeing wanton destruction. It bothers me to see great old houses or cars get wrecked for movies, for example.
Nowadays, most of that is fake.
And I think almost all of this ad is fake as well.
Even if it is a cheap one, it's still wrong. I have the same visceral gut reaction to seeing a musical instrument get destroyed as I do to seeing a book burnt. I own a lot of very expensive, very nice instruments. However, some of my favourite music I have created has been on dirt cheap charity shop instruments.
It's just the shear waste of it all that strikes me. Like so many of those things cost so much money to the people that could use or want them. So many high-paid tech workers are already out-of-touch with what most people consider affordable that I'm not surprised their marketing team thought this was ok.
But most artists are starving, and we live in a world where waste like this isn't really morally acceptable.
It's like a dog whistle. People who care about this are not unhealthy, they are having a visceral reaction to something that you don't understand the significance of. Try curiosity instead of dismissiveness.
You’ve probably never invested hundreds or thousands of hours in a hobby, art form, craft or skill. If you had, you would find the ad at least mildly disconcerting.
If you don’t see how, maybe it’s time to get off the screen? Stop consuming and try creating for a bit?
I don't think it's healthy to have so little perception or understanding and think think everything is that simple.
No one is traumatized. It's just unappealing and tone-deaf that's all. Showing a harmless little toy head and face getting squished and then popped, and presenting that as cool and fun and good, just makes you wonder about the person who produced that imagery and thought it could possibly have those associations, that's all.
Showing a bunch of mixed colors of paint oozing down the side of something is not "emotionally distressing", it's just unappealing, especially to Apple product customers, who buy Apple products precicely because they are sleek and minimalist and clean. Steve's & Ive's entire universe was clean & sterile.
It's remarkable because Apple are supposed to be the KINGS of exactly those sorts of intangible things like impression & subconscious reaction, where things like a 0.1mm or 0.1degree difference in a shape actually matters.
> Showing a bunch of mixed colors of paint oozing down the side of something is not "emotionally distressing", it's just unappealing, especially to Apple product customers, who buy Apple products precicely because they are sleek and minimalist and clean. Steve's & Ive's entire universe was clean & sterile.
For me it was a different reaction: They literally replaced a bunch of colors with grayness. In a gray factory. Under a gray slab.
This is very different from what Apple used to mean and advertise.
"We squeezed all this functionality into this one device"? That doesn't sound that hard to understand.
No wonder everyone on this site complains about loneliness and therapy and this and that. Most humans aren't 'distressed' by this stuff. I always did wonder about the oddly neurotic opinions expressed here. Now it makes sense: people have little to no emotional resilience here. Everything is the end of the world.
I'd say that's a first world thing for the generation that grew up on SSRIs and the pathologization and medical treatment of every negative emotion from grief to mild discomfort. Not specifically a HN problem.
But they didn't actually squeeze all that functionality into a cold piece of glass, plastic, and silicon. They're only suggesting that you see it that way and to give them your money instead of buying and learning to play an instrument.
I mean, I guess just having an iPad can get you laid somehow these days in the very stupid world we live in, but the guys in the band with actual musical skills are probably getting way more action.
I guess you don't understand advertising. Emotional response is a common theme. Consider Honda's continuous "Dream" series of ads. If you think everyone is a snowflake you aren't enlightened, you're just very bad at sales.
The entire ad is a symbol for Apple's iPad replacing everything being crushed. It's not "Space Imploder", it's every single arcade game every made. It's a representative for arcade games in general. Nobody should take "Space Imploder" literally. They can't use "Space Invaders" likely because of copyright, but I'm sure that they would have in this ad if they could have just so that someone wouldn't end up missing the point and suggesting "but, Space Imploder doesn't even exist".
You mean the arcade cabinet that conveniently switches to a GAME OVER screen while it has sparks flying and smoke pouring out of it when it gets hit by the crusher? Somehow I doubt you lost an actual cabinet. I'll be surprised if it's even made out of wood and not polygons.
It's possible that some of the close-ups are practical, but the wide shots, such as when the cabinet is being crushed, look fake and plastic as hell. And quite a lot of the destruction is super dramatic, whereas real objects under real hydraulic presses are way less so.
> If you're a trumpet player, seeing a trumpet being crushed is going to be a bit distressing
Really? I play the trumpet and felt nothing watching this ad. My trumpet wasn't being crushed, so who cares? It wasn't a rare Stradivarius, nor even a high-end Schilke or anything... Even if it was - why care? They can make more trumpets after all...
You either get the symbolism of "let's crush all remaining vestiges of creative culture" or you don't.
If you don't, that's fine. Policing the extent of people's reactions doesn't make for constructive conversation, and, ironically, is merely a different form of "over-reaction."
> You either get the symbolism of "let's crush all remaining vestiges of creative culture" or you don't.
Correction: you either choose to believe that's the symbolism, or you don't.
I "get" it, intellectually, but I don't think that was the intent of the advertiser, nor do I think it's the obvious interpretation of the ad. The obvious interpretation, to me, was "hey, we can piggyback on this hydraulic press channel meme and sell iPads!"
Tellingly, few people care that the hydraulic press channel exists, despite actually crushing all sorts of stuff [1]. See also: the viral "does it blend?" ads [2], and any number of music videos or performances where instruments are destroyed [3] (practically a meme unto itself), etc.
The intent behind media matters but isn't all that matters. How people might interpret something is important (albeit often unpredictable).
I think the symbolism of "let's crush all remaining vestiges of creative culture" is a pretty obvious _potential_ interpretation from a _non-trivial amount_ of people. In that sense it is an interpretation that matters for our present discourse, even if it isn't the interpretation that the creator of the ad intended.
> How people might interpret something is important (albeit often unpredictable).
It's a big world out there. There are literally billions of possible ways that people can interpret whatever you put out in the ether, and many of them are...precious...to the extreme. Worry too much what any one of them is going to think, and you won't do anything.
The obvious conclusion, to quote every influencer on the internet, is: "Haters gonna hate", but admittedly, I don't work in Apple PR.
I don't think the ad intend this messaging. I do think it unfortunately parallels what many advocates of AI do believe, strongly. And that's what people are reacting to.
I think the ad is a bit a Rorschach test. Most people see a butterfly. Others see man violently stabbing a bicycle, and that says more about them than the creators of the ad.
basically agreed, except I think that the latter group is 90% comprised of people who see an opportunity for performative angst and/or attacking Apple.
Or, you know, _only_ seeing the butterfly and then being dismissive about other interpretations, maybe people who do that also have things revealed about them. ;)
I find it incredibly hard to believe they had no idea what message they could be sending. Everything reacts to its destruction. They choreographed the final moments of each prop to show pain.
The hydraulic press channel does not do that. Their videos convey enthusiasm and sheer glee.
If you are already weary of too many screens; and you find a world with more physical objects less bleak.
It's not so much that Apple "wants to destroy everything". It's just that they care more about the digital world than the real world. This is the same intuition that makes people weary of virtual reality.
It's in the context of how the FAANG segment of the tech industry has become overbearing and is cheerfully destroying all sorts of great things in order to replace them with more tech.
It's not really about Apple specifically, but more that the ad is graphically illustrating something that already seemed to be all too true.
It's simply uncomfortable to see a lot of valuable creative tools being slowly destroyed for no reason, especially a piano. I'm not even thinking about the symbolism.
I thought it was obvious that the entire ad is CGI. Nothing really breaks how it would. When the top of the piano breaks, all the dampers magically fall off.
Maybe so, but decisions aren't based only on what's cheapest. A lot of the objects destruct in a way that's more exciting than how they'd compress in reality.
ironically enough, the use of CGI replaces the need/demand for real instruments in making this ad just like how AI is replacing the need/demand for real instruments in creative industries
I picked up on the context of all the human experiences we perceive as wrapped up in those items - as sorts of resiviors for human emotion and symbols of self actualization. I think a more apt analogy would be: you wouldn't host an estate sale at the site of that person's funeral.
If my metronome app stops complying with iOS developer guidelines, it will stop working or Apple will pull it. This doesn’t happen to a real dedicated metronome. The App Store is a problem for iPad. Developers need the freedom to develop solutions for iPad without Apple constantly breaking their APIs or introducing new standards. Otherwise nothing on iPad is timeless.
How much of a blowback was that really anyway? I mean a social media headline that a few others pile on... is rather limited as a blowback.
If anything both ad idea and implementation are mediocre - and perhaps should have been rejected on that account. This is indeed Youtube shorts stuff. And someone pointed out the exact same ad idea from LG 15 years ago https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NcUAQ2i5Tfo with even more musical instruments.
> Perhaps the blowback is a sign of a wider weariness that people have accumulated towards big tech companies over the past few years, mixed with a nebulous malaise about 'AI' and what it means for the status quo and people's livelihoods.
I think you hit it on the head. It's not so much anger about seeing a piano or a trumpet get crushed but more about the symbolism of it. Which, I think is definitely tone deaf on Apple's part.
The fact is, artists, developers and many people from all walks of life are terrified of what AI will mean for their jobs and their livelihood, and also, afraid that it cheapens everything they've spent all their life learning and mastering.
There's definitely a lot of pent up fear and/or hatred for it bubbling at the surface for many people and this commercial just kind triggers those feelings.
It's also from Apple's long-time core audience. I'm not sure how people don't understand this, other than maybe they've forgotten the roots of Apple's comeback.
I am not a musician or photographer, but I see the emotional value of those extremely well crafted and often beloved objects.
I create software, mostly, but I practice woodworking as a hobby, and I can tell how difficult it is to build a piano or any kind of musical instrument.
I found the ad extremely distasteful, enough to trigger mild nausea.
I see the point they were trying to make, but it is both dumb and old, and frankly nobody asked for a thinner iPad.
The most annoying part is that _they_ did not feel what countless people saw and felt, they are too disconnected from their audience.
The outrage is not made up, some of us felt it in our bones, I understand that we don't all share the same sensitivity, but you can't simply brush it off as if this was somewhat orchestrated or theatre.
My initial reaction was the opposite — “wow they are kind of late to the hydraulic press channel hype. That’s odd.”
For a company that has always prided itself on having strong marketing chops, this felt out of character. And perhaps a sign of the general change in culture and standards at Apple.
Perhaps the blowback is a sign of a wider weariness that people have accumulated towards big tech companies over the past few years, mixed with a nebulous malaise about 'AI' and what it means for the status quo and people's livelihoods.
Exactly. It's not only the creative artists who are opposing, although that's what this ad targets; a lot of others not in big tech are also very displeased with where things are going. The sentiment of this resistance can be summed up in two short sentences: "You will not replace us. Machines will not replace us."
I saw the ad as trying to draw an equivalence between the iPad and all of those creative tools, as if owning an iPad is equivalent, or even better, than owning those objects. This is a lie, a deception, and apart from lamenting the loss of so many wonderful objects the lie of it is what really sticks in my craw.
It made me cringe, but only because I saw it after hearing about the controversy. It made me wonder whether I'd have had the same reaction if I just saw it "fresh".
“Perhaps the blowback is a sign of a wider weariness that people have accumulated towards big tech companies over the past few years, mixed with a nebulous malaise about 'AI' and what it means for the status quo and people's livelihoods.”
To the former point, I think it was Doctorow that coined the term “enshittification”.
To be fair to Big Tech, they’re not any worse than healthcare companies, or airlines, or any of the countless (sometimes it seems basically all) corporations that have been steadily turning the crank on making the modern experience a little worse every year for typical people (I’m not interested in silly summary statistics like per-capita GDP or the CPI, those are gamed to hell: give me an arithmetic mean and I’ll give you a corrupt system).
It’s that so recently they were so much better. When I joined a FAANG in 2011 I had no issue wearing company gear around. People would be like: “that’s awesome I use that every day it’s great”. By 2018 I was lying in coffee shops and bars about what I did for a living (one of the main reasons I left).
Regarding AI broadly construed, it could be used as a wildly powerful tool for leveling the playing field, the way Google was when it appeared. It’s in the hopes of realizing that outcome that I work on it and am so vocally critical of those who just trivially don’t want that.
But it could also become the greatest tool for oppression since the firearm, and I think the public is starting to get wise to the fact this is unfortunately the path we’re on.
It’s trite, but I always come back to this: when the robots are finally capable of doing all the work, do we get Star Trek TNG or Blade Runner.
The technology is a step in either direction depending on how it’s used and regulated.
Yeah — I liked it in general. But can completely see why artists would hate the concept of a giant weight crushing the artistic object that has fueled their life-long obsessions.
I ask myself the same thing almost everyday and then that one really cool thing comes along. Yep pretty much mental gambling in the same way other social media is. I got rid of all of that, HN is my last hold out for now.
> Backlash for a short ad crushing a few colorful items in an interesting way is simply neurotic. See the definition of neurotic for more clarification.
I can absolutely see what they're going for- something like "you're iPad contains the power of all these cultural tools", but visually that connection isn't there. It just looks like "Hooray! Culture has been destroyed, now there is only iPad!"
I took the message that all that culture is now available in an even slimmer form factor. This is the problem with art. Unambiguous messaging is impossible as one casts a wider net of interpretation
I think the mark of a good ad is that you can turn the music off and most people will get the message. The imagery of destroying the things is the problem, if you turn the music off you really don’t know how you are supposed to feel about this. Apple conveyed similar messages before with animations that did not destroy the underlying album arts, just shrunk them into an iPod. It would hit very different if they crushed a bunch of music paraphernalia people got a lot of enjoyment out of.
Very true- I wonder if the prevailing interpretation would be different if this was 20 years ago. The destruction of all those tools would probably have a much more "punk rock" interpretation from people if Apple weren't the megacorp they are today.
There's nothing anti-establishment on the commercial. They need some minimal amount of punk if they want a "punk rock" aesthetic.
All that is there is a megacorp stealing a previously popular (comical) format, to show people's culture being (quite forcefully) transformed into establishment. The commercial is repulsively anti-punk.
20 years ago there were healthier vestiges of traditional arts and culture across society - it's easy not to appreciate or miss things until they're gone.
I found it super ironic how they blathered on about all of the recycling going on in their products, then blatently show all those items being destroyed when they could clearly be recycled.
I do think that the 'rendered' idea was the best - almost thinking differently, or something...:S
It's an animation of items being destroyed. It's very fake and Apple used an exaggerated cartoon style animation so it couldn't get mistaken for reality.
It's like getting mad at road runner for dropping a piano on Wile E Coyote.
It's not about the actual instruments that probably weren't actually destroyed to make the ad. No one is mad about that. The visual of instruments being pointlessly destroyed can be viscerally upsetting. Just because you have no emotional attachment to such objects doesn't mean other people do not.
I wouldn't think most (if any of it) was real. At the most I'd expect they were destructive props in the same way the table with the legs sawn to break in the just the right way for a movie stunt is a "real" table, but not a "real table".
As the other comment says, the cans would never crush flat before the piano starts to deform at all. Then when the front of the piano comes open, a pile of all the dampers just falls out, despite that area not being touched yet. It's all done to look exciting but not realistic.
Yes. Why in the world would a director use practical effects for something like this?
The CG isn't even that good. It looks like something out of DALL-E.
It calls to mind yet another way in which the ad could have been crafted to communicate without controversy or offense -- the instruments could have been more obviously cartoons.
The ad clearly didn't communicate that message to a huge portion of its audience. There's plenty of us who can see the intent but still don't like the ad. There are so many other ways to communicate that message in a more effective way.
I think everybody agrees that that was the _intended_ message. But it's a forced transition. At the end of the ad there is _just_ an iPad. It's not as if the user has any choice now. And that makes the ad very weak. Why is Apple even going into the destruction business? They are supposed to be a creative (creating?) company, if it were an Lockheed Martin ad it would have fit ;)
By whose definition? Art is creative expression and there's no qualifiers in standard definitions to exclude work that is used to promote something else.
I'd say flyers for shows are art. or movie posters. or book covers, for that matter. Or trailer music? corporate jingles? They're all art.
By academic definition in the Science of Culture school of thought that I align with.
Art is roughly self-expression or interpretation of reality performed with symbolic means.
It's a debatable definition of course, as aesthetics are nebulous, but most others are far too broad and therefore lose their meaning and usability, at least in the academic context.
> I'd say flyers for shows are art. or movie posters. or book covers, for that matter. Or trailer music? corporate jingles? They're all art.
They are not if we're talking in generals, though there can be conditions where a specific piece can be viewed as such, of course. All the things you mentioned are products of craft most of the time. Crafts belong to the wider sphere of aesthetic culture of course, but it's not art. Of course, I know some artist/illustrators closely collaborating with authors/musicians for their posters and covers, but it's more of an exception to the rule.
Roughly speaking, the need to tailor a creation to align with the desired brand image or marketing strategy inevitably conflicts with honest self-expression.
> By academic definition in the Science of Culture school of thought that I align with.
Can you give me one example of this school of thought? An actual institution or some book/paper that goes into this topic? I have not been able to find much anything except broader topics of culturology or science of culture. I've also not found anything suggesting that my examples aren't considered art by it.
> All the things you mentioned are products of craft most of the time. Crafts belong to the wider sphere of aesthetic culture of course, but it's not art.
Crafts and Art overlap frequently. Someone can be a woodworker that builds tables and they might not be an artist. They fine tune their craft and build sturdy, excellent tables, but they're not creating art. However, if they are making creative decisions about how they want to express themselves through the tables they create, yes, it is art.
> Of course, I know some artist/illustrators closely collaborating with authors/musicians for their posters and covers, but it's more of an exception to the rule.
It hardly matters if they are or aren't, you don't need a band to participate in the creation of a flyer for it to be considered art. The art part comes in from what the artist who is creating it.
> Roughly speaking, the need to tailor a creation to align with the desired brand image or marketing strategy inevitably conflicts with honest self-expression.
Constraints are a normal part of the process of creating art. If I commission someone to create an oil painting on a canvas of a specific size, that is also requiring an artist to tailor their creation to align with an external factor out of their control. That doesn't make the resulting piece not art.
I get that physical constraints aren't the same as ones that are tied into art, like what message you're communicating. I think I just fundamentally disagree that it disqualifies something from being art. If I give a writing prompt to a writer, is the resulting piece of literature disqualified from being art because I shaped what it is to be about? I don't think so. Similarly, I don't think that defining themes to use in the creation of a piece of art makes it less honest. It just means that the self-expression is conveyed through different means.
Being true to HN guideline of assuming good faith, I can say that the place is really irrelevant, as, from my experience, you can't effectively force a definition within an institution without taking away academic autonomy. Mind it, this is a definition stemming from the Social Studies/Culturology context, and not from Art Criticism/Art History, as the former fields do not concern themselves with making a value judgement.
I'm long out of the loop, so I can give only general directions. You could say that the definition in question aligns with Riegl's idea of embodiment of Kunstwollen, perhaps in some way with Collingwood's aesthetic expressivism view of art, and also integrates the semiotics approach, which helps with underlining the importance of both the form/medium and the subjectivity of perception (this is important for looking at art in historical/sociological context).
If your question was, in fact, an Ad Locus attack - well, the name for it is Genetic Fallacy, I believe.
PS: A school of thought is located in the minds of its supporters ;)
My postscript just meant to point out the fact that since you asked a question about a school as a place while answering to my comment mentioning a school of thought (that's not a place), perhaps there's some miscommunication happening.
Me mentioning a school of thought and not a specific institution implied the fact that when it comes to culture, there could be a considerable variety of positions within one such institution. For example: when it comes to universities, students can be taught by professors from different faculties but the subjects can intersect significantly, so they get to see the varying approaches to even the basic stuff and they are supposed to make their own minds. Humanities are like that, there's no formulas set in stone until disproven.
I'm not so sure about that; the emoji with the eyeballs squeezed out of their sockets didn't exactly scream "compression" to me. It felt like they were aiming for over the top cartoonish destruction - but destruction nonetheless.
I hate ads, but I'm struggling to understand how something being an ad disqualifies it from being art. Advertising is a creative human endeavor. Ads are designed to make you feel something, just like art.
The romantic ideal is that art is not about consumption, but the reality, both historically and currently, is that art objects are by and large made to be bought and sold. If you disqualify all works meant for consumption, you would have very little left that we currently recognize as art.
There are a long list of arts with adjectives in front of them. commercial art, applied art, fine art, etc...they aren't art just because you have co-opted art to mean only fine art. Also see:
Art and design exist ubiquitously in all things and all actions. It is the people without taste who pretend art or design is a separate activity from all other human endeavors. Perhaps a subset of "pure" or obvious art are works devoid of function except to be perceived.
"Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable." - Cesar A. Cruz
Its not Apple's style, but they could have opened the ad with some cringe fake scientists discussing how to shrink and/or combine and/or smush music, books, art, etc together. And then at the end show them excitedly rushing to the IPad as if they've solved everything.
So an Aperture Labs reference? They could have Chell pick up the iPad and throw it at a screen of Cave Johnson’s motivational speech. Then it could bounce off without causing damage, showing how lightweight it is, and who it truly serves.
Beautiful, colourful, creative objects gathered together in a the middle of a grey room and destroyed to be replaced by a generic rectangle. This is like the 1984 ad with Apple as the bad guys.
Hahahaha you’ve never worked in ad creative have you? It’s full of people who have been crushed by their inability to support themselves making pure art.
This ad makes perfect sense from that perspective.
Okay, Zappa is a bit defeatist although what he says is true, I don't think it's that bad... But here it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=88zvm7-fhKo (Frank Zappa on American culture)
American exceptionalism is easy to pick apart, and George Carlin would agree.
The point he's making was (c. 1970) that much of American culture's presumption of innate superiority post-WW2 was unfounded overconfidence demonstrating a lack of humility and intrinsic tempered confidence in relation to other rich traditions that also exist. It is also true that American culture was and is intrinsically hollow and shallow in many (but not all) dimensions not replicated in other parts of the world. And to be fair, Zappa was brilliant and a guitar virtuoso but a bit off in a way the 60's-70's counterculture celebrated profusely in a reactionary oppositional mirror of mainstream American culture. Growing up, my hippie nudist neighbors with their hydroponic weed and horrible tasting tomatoes would be all over everything Zappa. Incidentally, I have a signed Zappa KSJO sticker signed at a Campbell, CA venue and its newspaper clipping provenance... going to get it framed and probably sell it on FleaBay at some point.
Frankly it’s bizarre. He was a fantastic rock musician who seemed to forget where delta blues, jazz, bluegrass comes from. They drew on older traditions but were distinctly American culture. Maybe his point was really that it’s not popular culture but you can criticize any country’s pop culture.
edit: I'm surprised at the downvote. I'm a huge Zappa fan. I know that he was into many kinds of music. That is why I find it strange that he doesn't even consider the rich tradition of American folk music to be part of our culture.
So which is it, am I wrong that he was a great musician? Am I wrong about the rich tradition of American folk music? Am I wrong about pop culture in other countries? Is it because I didn't mention country music?
I didn't downvote you (just upvoted, since you got me to stop and pay attention to that parent comment).
I understand and agree with your point that certain genres of music have significantly evolved, if not been entirely created in, the US, and that it's weird for a professional musician to take the stance that that isn't the case.
At the same time, I've often thought similar things to what Frank Zappa said (despite never hearing/reading that interview before, or knowing much about him at all). I often think about how a lot of the social/racial/religious/etc unrest we have going on in the US is because we have no national identity. We are a melting pot, but we're also just a melting pot.
Similar to convincing people to stop perpetuating racial issues in the US, when race used to be connected with nationality (and still is in some places)-- or convincing people to stop raking modern-day Americans over the coals for people 250 years ago taking the land from Native Americans-- it's going to be difficult to convince people to draw a line at a point in time where we stopped "stealing" or "being influenced by" other countries' music and started legitimately creating our own. It will simply never have been "from scratch," and people will either figure out how to accept that and (critically) move on at some point, or they'll keep being upset about it for eternity and we'll keep tearing ourselves apart.
Double-edge sword with only one surface. Just don't get it wet, expect it to last over 7 years, expect your old accessories to work with it, or for it to actually substitute for the mastery of physical artistic crafts like Mehmet Girgiç is to felt.
Missing from this extremely short and underreported article is how badly this played out in Japanese market. The culture they have states that musical instruments, creative tools have some energy and imbued sense of spirit to them. So destroying these elements of culture is really really blunt and gauche to them. The majority of the push back came from Japanese people, and then artists empathizing with their sentiment.
Not because eg one piano got destroyed; surely that happens all the time, even on camera for eg movies and such. But there was something about watching beautiful objects be destroyed, in slow motion, gratuitously, and with an upbeat/sunny tone, that just aesthetically made me squirm in my seat
It goes beyond aesthetics for me. It's like they took everyone's deepest fears about technology and AI, that it will replace or "crush" authentic human experience and creativity, and they just embraced and celebrate it by literally crushing representations of human creativity. At least I'm glad the corporate types were actually honest about their goals, though, instead of their typical doublespeak
This was what I understood it to be as well, they let it split out by accident/enough group think. I’ve worked in tech long enough to firmly believe this sentiment exists.
Agreed, that's exactly how tech companies are, and Apple is one of the biggest. Apple doesn't really care what people create, so long as they are buying an Apple product to create it on. It doesn't matter that an iPad doesn't feel or sound like a trumpet. If someone buys their product to learn to play a trumpet or a piano, then they were the fool parting with their money that Apple was hoping to find, and there's a lot of them apparently.
Exactly my thoughts - this ad does very little to invoke the desire for the product, unlike many other Apple ads.
It's not like Apple has forgotten how to make such ads - the recent one for iPhones with family members asking to not be let go while the owner tries to delete photos represented a familiar experience of people trying to free up storage, and how they wouldn't have to do that if they bought a new iPhone.
On the other hand, this ad just shows stuff being destroyed, just like some of those useless Youtube videos which shows perfectly usable stuff being destroyed under the pretext of "ASMR" or whatnot. Not only is it very difficult to watch as someone who didn't have a lot of money and was taught to make careful use of it from an early age, it just invokes negative vibes, as if possessing a musical instrument is something to be ashamed of.
Their marketing team has been missing the mark for a while. The “big and bigger” billboards with people in the distance holding up phones to the camera with a giant hand tiny body look feels like something Samsung would have done in the early 10’s
I haven’t seen anyone mention this yet, but I think the concept here was inspired by all the viral hydraulic press videos on Instagram and TikTok. Here’s a similar video showing random objects and consumer products being crushed in slow motion with similar upbeat music: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=q9BtYEnrkg4
Sure, maybe that was the intent. But most of the objects I see in the linked video are cheap and mass-produced (a water bottle, some sticky notes, some plastic toys), which makes it feel totally different
I'm not bothered by the destruction. Destruction itself can have artistic value. For example, you can't portray the Nazis on screen without showing how destructive they were.
What bothers me is the arrogance to say that an iPad, a device which will be obsolete in a few short years, can replace all those instruments and tools that last more than a generation.
This is similar to the history channels which use AI colorized historical footage which wildly shifts objects from red to blue in a few frames and have the audacity to claim this is an improvement over the original.
I had same reaction to the 'niceness' of what they were crushing. Things looked too good, like still usable. What if they were slightly older and dinged, scuffed up, looked more like they were done being useful.
For me it was just because of the damage it caused. I guess if I heard someone was throwing out a piano I wouldn't think much of it, but the destruction of everything in the ad made me uneasy. I just felt like it was so wasteful to destroy things in the way they did. But again, maybe I have a double standard, because if I saw someone throw a trumpet or an old camera in the dumpster I probably would not care as much.
I don't think these objects being real or not makes much (if any) difference to those who view the ad negatively. The underlying idea that Apple is crushing these tools of human entertainment and creative expression, only to replace them with their own "jack of all trades" remains the same.
Can confirm. I reacted negatively to the ad (in a "this ad causes emotions which the creators absolutely does not want an ad to cause" kind of way), and for me it's all about the imagery and symbolism. I hope and assume that the destruction is primarily CGI, but the visuals of destroying positive "soulful" things like instruments and replacing it with a lifeless slab of glass just doesn't sell the product to me.
In fact, I think this would have been an excellent art piece if the message was "heartless tech corporations want to destroy the good things in life and replace it with a cold slab of glass".
At first I had a negative reaction. Then, looking for comfort, noticed that the video is mostly CGI. But then again, I felt the same. It is what you say: the image of destruction of beautiful objects is bad per se, it's not what the objects are, it's what they represent.
Without expertise I would just casually guess that a hydraulic press this size does not exist, or if it did, it would not be used for that. So at least that part is CG.
Yeah, it looks super CGI to my eyes. Especially the desk and the piano. I also can't imagine anyone trying to direct this kind of a video without having precise control on what the destruction looks like.
Really interesting to consider that this might be one of the few incidents that Shintoists, or at least "cultural Shintoists," have gotten offended at a western production.
Makes me wonder if this is why Apple went out of their way to apologize for the ad. I think if this ad just had non-culturally-specific backlash, they would've simply moved on. But because this impacted a specific market's sensibilities, maybe they felt the need to do a public mea culpa.
I have seen recently a documentary about Japanese food, and an interesting fact was that the chefs at some big Japanese restaurant had a special decorated grave, in some nice yard, in which they deposited their old kitchen knives, when those were so worn out that they could no longer be used.
They felt that it would be disrespectful to just dump somewhere the main tools of their work, after they had used those every day for decades.
I think a lot of people are a little bit Shintoist. That's one of the reasons why we have museums - we regard things as some kind of reflection on people and events, and a chair in which a famous person sat or an instrument they played is different for us than otherwise identical object that doesn't bear that imprint. We may not literally believe in things having spirits, but for many the things have some qualities that go beyond their physical structure. Emotional value, etc.
The popular sentiment has changed from enthusiasm about "digital", to disillusionment about big tech inserting themselves into our lives to monetize everything.
In 2009, smartphones were a novelty, and the iPad has not been announced yet. People were wowed by the new capabilities that "multimedia" devices were enabling. They were getting rid of the old, outdated, less capable tools.
Nowadays "multimedia" is taken for granted. OTOH generative AI is turning creative arts into commoditized digital sludge. Apple acts like they own and have the right to control everything that is digital. In this world, the analog instruments are a symbol of the last remnants of true human skill, and the physical world that hasn't been taken over by the big tech yet. And Apple is forcefully and destructively smushing it all into AI-chip-powered you-owe-us-30%-for-existing disneyland distopia.
It aired on the Internet, which is available in Japan. You can see some examples of backlash from Japanese people in the replies to this tweet, if you have a twitter account. https://twitter.com/tim_cook/status/1787864325258162239
I see several people stating they're ashamed to owning an iPad, and will never buy one again. Is this a form of hyperbole to push a message, or is there really this much emotion?
The skepticism is strange to me. I think the ad is actually compelling enough that it's making some of us really examine the question of whether or not the iPad really can (or should) replace these things. Apple is making a bold statement, so strong reactions are expected.
I've known for a while now that I'm more creative with a 2H pencil and a sketchbook than I am on my iPad. I'm more creative noodling around on real strings than in an app. This has made me pause to consider whether I should ever again plug in my currently uncharged iPad.
> really examine the question of whether or not the iPad really can (or should) replace these things.
> This has made me pause to consider whether I should ever again plug in my currently uncharged iPad.
I can't comprehend this. It's not an either or scenario, and I don't believe destruction/replacement was the intended message of the commercial. These things can be (somewhat) emulated with the iPad (are inside it). You can use an iPad for those, while riding on the bus, eating lunch, whatever, or when creativity does strike you. But, I don't think any reasonable person is thinking an iPad is a parity replacement for piano or a physical paint brush, or will use it to replace those. It's a tool, available when someone wants to use it. I have trouble believing this much, and fairly profound, introspection is only happening because of a silly commercial showing things being compressed into an iPad. I think it must be something else/indirect/unrelated, possibly something to do with identity. But, I suppose this is evidence that these emotions are real, which is fascinating to me, seeing the iPad as a small form factor computing device/useful tool.
I'll just say that I have a piano at home that exists, and I can happily use, regardless of the charge state of my iPad. I can go between them, without issues. But, I will say, the objective limitations/irreproducibility of compositions that come with using musical notation is much better handled with sequencers (which can then be used to produce the under-expressed notation).
Absolutely no offense - I don't see what this has to do with Japan at all although this has been repeated everywhere. I think this is just an unfortunate natural intuition.
Japanese users normally aren't exposed to the rest of WWW at all, even on social media, so there's intuition that any notable interactions observed has to do with the four-seasons and egg sandwiches way. But it's also true that there are 0.35x as many of the people here as there are US Americans, or 1.5x more than Germans, which creates a lot of presence in itself, possibly even grossly exaggerated on Twitter due to cultural fit and ongoing collapse of its en-US bubbles. I think this instance is example of the latter being the case mistaken as the former.
I agree that the comments on Japanese culture were unwarranted, off-topic, unnecessary, offensive… and while I know very little about Japan, I feel I should ignore random internet opinions on it.
But can you elaborate on your second paragraph? Should culture always be immune to criticism?
I always understood the whole point of political correctness was to not spew hateful words about anyone and that should be the standard.
Criticism is one thing, but the poster felt the need to "educate" all of us about how an entire country's opinion is invalid because "it's not an utopia". Nobody brought that up, and disregarding an entire culture's opinion of an advertisement campaign because weebs have unrealistic expectations, in a discussion with a valid and informative point about said culture, is tastelessly petty. And why belittle liberal arts majors anyway?
Let's call it what it is: racism and intolerance of other cultures.
I feel like this ad is also a litmus test for empathy: if someone can't spot the inferred symbolism or understand why people have a problem with it...they are very impaired in that regard.
I guess I wasn’t sure what you meant by “target”. I agree with you on all counts, except that I’m not sure I interpret the comment as “hateful”. Wrong and offensive, yes.
I think they didn’t really understand the criticism of the ad, and decided that the reason people were so opposed was out of some irrational reverence for the Japanese, themselves irrational due to some spiritual heritage.
Aside from the destruction of low-tech artistic tools triggering non-tech people aspect, tonally the ad was also overly edgy, which is off-brand for Apple. As noted elsewhere, it felt like a video game commercial from the '90s: gratuitous in its attention-seeking.
Re: the Pokémon commercial, I feel like the Apple commercial put way more focus into the actual destruction of the instruments… Like, a lot of its runtime was spent on actually showing each thing getting destroyed individually, so it has a completely different energy compared to the silly Pokémon one
It’s like if the Pokémon one showed each Pokémon getting crushed with splattering and gore…
Yeah there was revelling in the visual and nuance of their destruction. Could have done the whole thing CG where the objects squished together satisfyingly like they were made of clay rather than cracking and shattering. Honestly was easier/cheaper to do also.
Yeah, I think if they did than then it would have actually been a good ad. But focusing on the destruction/actually having destruction at all took away from the point that "it's compressing all these things into one" and made it interpretable as "we're destroying all these things, cause iPad can do it all"
1984 was edgy for its time. I think the difficulty is that the iPad is no longer an edgy product. The least edgy thing you could be these days is an iPad owner, and this ad wasn't the one to change that.
1984 [1] was edgy precisely because it worked as a criticism of society and culture, and then showed a way to 'break free' of mindless dystopia. This [2] ad is pretty much the exact and literal opposite. It essentially takes a sampling of the great things that culture and society has produced, destroys them, and then shows the Product, while literally singing "All I Ever Need Is You." Here [3] a guy basically reversed the ad, with the iPad being crushed, and then slowly lifting it up to have all the great stuff in society come out of it. And suddenly it's actually quite uplifting and positive!
Today's "1984" ad would have to include someone throwing a sledgehammer through an iMac, and similarly destroying an iPhone. It wouldn't be an advertisement for any corporation though, because a truly game-changing act today would be to opt out of the extractive and coercive cycle of modern proprietary technology.
Rebellion can't be bought, but in the 1980's I think it was still an open question whether computers would ever be something that non-nerds wanted. In hindsight, it seems inevitable that general purpose, user friendly computers would crush everything, but was that really a given? Isn't there a possible world where IBM and/or Xerox do own everything and never make it past huge, expensive systems that were only made for specialists?
For everyone here that loved our C64 or DOS PC, how many of our peers actively rejected early computers because they weren't fun to use?
Besides which it seems to me that Apple has never really been against having a single giant corporation controlling everything you can see, do and say, they were just against that corporation not being Apple.
What about rebelling against the cultural elements of rebelling? Much of the image of rebellion has been a futile cycle of (ironically) trying the same thing repeatedly and failing to make any changes. Not falling into the bullshit of old bearded white men who never had to work for a living, were total economic illiterates even if they called themselves economists, and have been dead-for centuries.
"1984" was edgy in a cool way, but that's not the type of edginess I'm evoking. Most '90s video game commercials that were edgy did so in a puerile, juvenile way as befitting the target audience. And not just video game ads, there was definitely a big "xtreme" trend as well.
The Apple ad taps into that xtreme vibe by embracing destructive energy to depict a physical contrast. Which is visually attention-grabbing, but it puts the focus on the act of destruction, and reduction, and people who like the destroyed objects feel miffed.
"1984" I'd say was edgy in a rebellious way as you point out, which I'd argue gives it more substance. The sledgehammer hitting the screen isn't even the focus, it's the climax to a sequence that carries more of a meaningful message than "wow look how much functionality we fit into this thin shell."
> "1984" I'd say was edgy in a rebellious way as you point out, which I'd argue gives it more substance. The sledgehammer hitting the screen isn't even the focus, it's the climax to a sequence that carries more of a meaningful message than "wow look how much functionality we fit into this thin shell."
Well, it just wasn't focusing on empty slowmo destruction of a big screen. It had an emotional message behind it. A bit like original Star Wars vs Rebel Moon.
For low-tech I meant analog as opposed to digital. And I meant nothing pejorative in non-tech; these days, there's fewer and fewer positive connotations in being techie.
we're on a technical forum, but "low tech" isn't inherently inferior. All the MIDI's in the world can't truly replace a good ol' acoustic sound. That's why we still have Orchaestras.
The other half, sure. To think that all tech people are welcoming the current portrayal of AI/LLM's/Generative Art is simply tone deaf. Some of the most cynical detractors are in fact highly technical people.
On the contrary, I wish this was dismissive. It's about time that the Overton window gets shifted about the overly nostalgic articles that get praised by "the right people", which means we need to "read the room" and share the same opinions.
It is an absolutely good thing that an inexpensive device is replacing an expensive one, and that impoverished children will be able to create music with an inexpensive iPad and will not be forced to learn obsolete methods to "finger" an instrument.
How to even start here..
Calling the ipad inexpensive will make people in most of the world to laugh at you (even the discounted stock of ipad 9th is unapproachable for many).
While a guitar at a local store (just looked it up) costs under 80 EUR, needs no apps, no power, no subscriptions, has no EOL, doesn't have a battery that will go bad.
Yes you need time to learn, but you do not necessarily need to invest more money with an analog instrument.
I’ve never seen a guitar under about $300US new that was actually playable without some serious attention from a guitar shop, and on the lower end they’ll probably just tell you there’s not much they can do to make it better. They may need frets filed down to remove rough edges, neck adjustments, to simply have the tuners replaced because they’re so poorly-made they basically don’t work, et c.
Guitars that cheap are similar to crappy small-key $40-80 electronic keyboards that can only sound like three notes at a time and sound terrible doing it—they’re so bad that they will tend to frustrate and turn off even a beginner.
I bought my German made mandolin that's like 100 years old for less than 10% of an ipad, and it'll never be obsolete, that's the whole point...
It'll always be up to date, I'll always find the parts to fix it, and even if one-day it somehow gets damaged beyond repair I can recycle it in my fireplace in about 30 seconds
I feel like people making your point don't see the fundamental difference between a functional tool like a hammer and an artistic tool like a musical instrument, and it's kind of scary tbh.
> I can recycle it in my fireplace in about 30 seconds
not disagreeing w/ anything else (beside responding to a sarcastic comment, usually 'caring for the children' [esp. out of place] is a decent giveaway + repeating 'inexpensive'); however burning stuff is not recycling. If anything it releases all the carbon (CO2 + CO) in the atmosphere, compositing in the ground is a tad better option, but the lacquer might prevent that part... for a while.
>Not more than burning my regular fire wood, and infinitely better than fossil fuel
Not recycling still, recycling would be making something out of it, e.g. a plate, a toy, whatever.
Another option is making fiberboard alike material out of it from sawdust.
Dunno about termites, it'd depend where you live, but then again, I am not sure how that came into the discussion. Anyway compost is used in gardening, so it's a form of recycling.
> It is an absolutely good thing that an inexpensive device is replacing an expensive one.
Professional musician (pianist) here. It’s an outlandish take on solving affordability by destroying acoustic instruments and replacing them with iPads. Let’s see someone play the Prokofiev Toccata in real time using Garageband, no MIDI files allowed.
Aside from whether the iPad is inexpensive or not, it just doesn't replace an actual piano or trumpet.
If your use case is really covered by the iPad, you could also make do with a refurbished corporate DELL costing half the price or 3 years ago's Surface Pro, same way the track makers were doing 2 decades ago.
So no, Apple's marketing would sure want us to think so, but impoverished children are probably not saved by 2024's thinner iPad in any significant way.
I can just visualize the post iPad high school jazz band -- twenty kids sitting in chairs with their tablets, rhythmically tapping virtual buttons on their touchscreen. One stands for her solo, tapping her screen at a different cadence. Oh, she's playing trumpet? I thought she was a saxophonist!
What artistry! What musicianship! Thank God for Apple and the new iPad!
There's a lot to break down here, but I'll take the less obvious angle. If you're calling the shiny new iPad an "accessible, inexpensive device for the impoverished", Apple's multi-billion dollar, decades long marketing has clearly failed you.
Yeah, how dare people have emotional connections with musical instruments! The great (and very inexpensive) iPad will finally allow humans to become equals and set poor people free. Nostalgia is exactly what's wrong with this world.
Yes, this is very over the top, but the iPad is neither inexpensive (compared to your $50 garage sale guitar and synthie) nor is it sufficient to make music.
People enjoy music from instruments not only because someone was able to compose a song on it, but because the instrument carries emotion, there is sweat and pain in learning it, people become masters of their instruments and have actual connections to them. The iPad is a powerful device for making music, sure. But it's not exactly the device I would choose to allow impoverished children to create music. And I, personally, enjoy music more when I know it's actual people playing instruments rather than just a producer mixing some stuff and only recording the singing. Calling playing an instrument obsolete and "fingering" is insulting.
I get your sentiment, but I feel like your view on iPads and there being no musicianship to it is just wrong. The instruments in garage band have velocity sensitivity and can be played expressively by tapping the screen just as you can tap the keys on a piano or hit the marimba with some mallets.
In fact on some of the synthesizers you gain an additional mode of expressiveness because you can adjust your input as you're playing notes, similar to MPE synthesizers like the Osmose.
An iPad is more than sufficient for making music.
I say this as someone that really enjoys playing my instruments (mostly guitars) and wouldn't trade the experience for an iPad ever.
I mean that's just a nonsense statement. You can say "make music (that I don't like)" but you 100% cannot say that an iPad is insufficient to make music when thousands of people do that every day and tens of thousands of people enjoy their output.
Between the fact that you think that entry-level instruments cost more than iPads, that somehow "fingering" an instrument is a bad or obsolete thing, and that you think iPads are affordable to the impoverished, I'm really not sure where to begin correcting you.
Just... yikes. I hate to be flippant, but you're so out of touch that my only thought is to tell you to touch grass.
Yeah, why learn to play an instrument with your caveman hands when you can rent an iPad and make something that sounds the same with the AI in Garageband!
I'm not so optimistic these days. Poe's Law has long since died. Even if this was misunderstood sarcasm, you can probably find this opinion around the net (mayeb even further down the post).
> Aside from the destruction of low-tech artistic tools triggering non-tech people aspect...
604 comments on this HN post (at the time of writing this), the bulk of which appear to be opposed to this video, and you're trying to tell me that tech folk aren't, to use your word, "triggered"? C'mon now.
Yikes, that was really offbrand for Nintendo also, but it fits within their 90s "Play It Loud" marketing strategy wherein they tried to compete with ow-the-edge Sega and later Sony.
It accurately shows how tools are being replaced with digital and cloud. It’s a violent process and precious things get destroyed along the way. It totally hit the mark.
But true, it doesn’t make people want to go grab an ipad, so I get why they don’t want to use it.
> It accurately shows how tools are being replaced with digital and cloud.
No it doesn't.
Throwing away all other sentiments, I really would like to see a 100lb digital piano replacing a 500lb upright piano while keeping its action, feel and sound, if not a grand piano. That hasn't happened yet, not even remotely, after all these years of technology advancenent. Anyone who is serious in learning and performing piano would be doing that on a real piano. And of course iPad isn't even in the conversation -- what can you do with a touch screen?
You’re talking about whether an iPad can accurately reproduce the quality of the original tools.
While I would certainly agree, like it or not, many of these things are being replaced by iPads/iPhones and other smart devices.
Many people used to carry around point and shoot cameras, calculators, watches, flashlights, etc. but those things are just short of completely depreciated.
Sure, this ad included things that aren’t quite as deprecated, but the trend is in that direction, and not away.
> I really would like to see a 100lb digital piano replacing a 500lb upright piano while keeping its action, feel and sound, if not a grand piano.
I get the impression that you’ve not played a digital piano lately.
While purists will definitely not touch an electric, most casual players — and especially beginners — will be fine with, and are buying — and preferring! — a good electric piano over a grand or even uprights these days.
I wanted a grand myself for years, but couldn’t justify the cost or space consumption of a grand.
We’re now the happy owners of a Roland FP10, and it’s great! The sound, IMO is amazing, and about as close as an electric can get to the real thing.
We recently sold the digital piano after 3 years of playing on it and replaced it with a traditional piano (an upright). It's true that a digital piano works for beginners. But for someone with dedication, they outgrow digital pianos extremely quickly.
EDIT: it actually depends on what you play. We usually play traditional pieces, especially those by Chopin so a digital piano definitely doesn't cut it.
The r/piano subreddit is full of amateur pianists who own a high-quality digital piano who share their experiences playing a grand piano for the first time. 99% of the time, they express astonishment, amazement, and their wish to someday own a grand piano. 1% of the time, they complain that the grand piano they played on was way out of shape and was difficult to tame.
For a lot of people, and it seems yourself included, a digital piano is an excellent compromise. It gets the job done, but if all else were equal and circumstances permitted, such people would still prefer to own a grand piano, for significant and non-negligible reasons.
Without a doubt. I’ve played on a grand and upright, but I’d still call myself just barely above beginner. But I do have a good ear for appreciating music and acoustics, and agree that they’re definitely much better.
But it’s crazy the progress they’ve made in the past decade or so in reproducing the sound — and particularly the feel of the hammer action — of acoustic pianos.
And whether it’s budget, space, and/or experience level, a digital piano serves as a great replacement.
When world-class artists come to the NPR studio, a place with high end upright and grand pianos, to perform; many of them bring Nords Korgs or Rolands. Why do you think that is?
We are not talking about the same kind of piano here. And different artists value different things or just need other features, and the "authenticity" of an upright piano is very likely what they are looking for, which is totally fine. This really is another topic. Sorry.
> I really would like to see a 100lb digital piano replacing a 500lb upright piano while keeping its action, feel and sound, if not a grand piano. That hasn't happened yet
It absolutely has. The sales of upright pianos are down, while sales of digital pianos are up. I'd call that replacing.
"Hybrid pianos have gained immense popularity among music lovers. These pianos are increasingly being used to provide keyboard lessons as they combine the electronic, mechanical and acoustic aspects of both acoustic and digital pianos. In addition, hybrid pianos take up limited space and can be easily moved due to their small size and lightness. In addition, these pianos require little maintenance. Temperature and humidity do not affect their configuration due to amplifiers and speakers. They can also be connected to digital interfaces, laptops, iPads and other devices. As a result, pianists are increasingly preferring hybrid pianos, prompting vendors to launch more innovative products that will boost market growth during the forecast period."
I know someone learning piano for fun. They carry their lightweight digital Yamaha to the couch, plug it in, and start paying, walk up to their room, play some more. Digital keyboards/pianos are great, if creating music is your concern, rather than the instrument.
There is the kawai novus5 which is a digital piano with the action and soundboard of a real upright piano and enough speakers to sound almost exactly like a real piano. There are also some new roland models I haven't tried. Many dealers lump these into their acoustic piano offering and don't market them differently because they are that good.
Dude, that's not an argument and not how you discuss things.
You need to at least put a link to some article that says someone built it, and other pianists agree it can replace both the ACTION and the SOUND of a piano. Oh, it should weigh about 100lb, not 500lb.
(And if such a thing exists, why wouldn't it commercially be available so that everyone can buy it? Plenty of people include me would want it. Why wouldn't Yamaha or Roland build this 20 years ago, as if they don't have the resources for that?)
Also, looks like your comment only focuses on the sound part of it -- if real at all -- and ignores the mechanical part of it. That's a big no.
Before seeing more evidence, I'll just assume such a thing does not exist.
That would've be hilarious as parody of this commercial if the hydraulic press shot out flames too and burnt some books. Make that message even more ambiguous lol.
Burning books certainly doesn’t have the connotation it used to, given that the idea of a book is now mostly divorced from the physical implementation.
You could burn every physical copy of most recent books and no data would be lost; I assume most authors write with a word processor.
I agree. This is a rare gift of truth and honesty in advertising.
You might not like what the industry is doing but don't kill the messenger: they just gave you a short glimpse behind the curtain. The company will keep the same goals even after they give their ad team sensitivity training.
Agreed. This will be considered a huge win by Apple's marketing department. People (online at least) are talking about the iPad like I haven't seen in years.
If anything, an ad like this is too real and lets slip the mask that is "Apple is for artists". Nope, Apple is for expanding the existing Apple-only ecosystem.
A classic arcade game experience is not going to be reproducible with a subscription to Apple Arcade. A stradivarius violin is not going to be replaced by Apple Logic Pro.
In my opinion, it's one of those ideas that are so obvious that I wouldn't necessarily think it's plagiarism.
> It's a small electronic device that replaces so many real world things. It's like all these things 'zipped' into one... Okay good idea, but how do we make it look cool?... Epic music... And Explosions!
The ad is actually less embarrassing than the fact that how uncreative this is.
On the other hand, it's also hard to imagine that a bunch of people working in the ad business / phones / creative marketing, and not one of them said while working on this ad: "hey guys, aren't we just redoing that phone ad from 15 years ago?"
> how uncreative this is ... aren't we just redoing that thing from 15 years ago?
People of a certain age are informed by shared cultural touchstones.
Those making ads in these timeframes are ages where they all experienced the Star Wars trash compactor scene as a visceral moment pressed into their psyches:
As a child, the blasters and light sabres are make believe, but the compactor closing in slowly on Luke, Leah, C3PO, that felt real. Kids could feel that big squeeze. It was ... VIVID.
When you start making create visual experiences (ads in particular), it's not uncommon you'll reference such touchstones. You'll get approved by marketing committees because they too have that touchstone in their pasts.
The original scene plots out as an increasing stress, but ends with a relief. Ad creatives often "quote" these if they feel they can match/replay the original emotional beats, here implied looming threat, visceral danger building agonizingly slowly, realization of total destruction, saved by suddenly revealed relief.
Nintendo, LG, and Apple all tried to have their "product placement" land in that surprise moment revealing the pressure relief: a sleight of hand where this moment, this thing, is the MacGuffin associated with the stress vanishing.
Is this uncreative? "Aren't we just redoing Star Wars New Hope?" Sure. But ads that connect to the beats of touchstones inside the viewer do evoke more reaction, and the ads aren't quoting each other, they're quoting the original.
Art often quotes art, the quoting considered both creative and effective.
On the other hand if your product has become a commodity and the new version barely changes from the previous one, you are entering detergent advertising territory.
Wow, you're not exaggerating. That actually does bring a legitimate accusation of plagiarism to the table. Compare 0:13 in the LG ad to 0:37 in the Apple version.
Never mind that the artwork itself looks straight out of DALL-E 2, with its orange-bluish cast. Who is calling the creative shots at Apple these days?!
The amber/teal stuff is mostly because it makes the foreground warmer and the backgrounds colder drawing the audience's focus. Or so the theory goes. I think it's just more of a case of "fuck it, no one is going to complain if we do this"
Check out the transformers films - those are the canonical punch in the face in that department.
That's what I really want to figure out. I feel like I wouldn't have a problem with it if I knew it was 100% fake and not actual items being destroyed.
Eh, It's a pretty obvious premise. I think it's reasonable for two creative teams to come up with the same unoriginal/uninteresting premise. The execution of the Apple version is also miles ahead.
LG in 2008 was not on Japanese people's map regarding to phones, their "Chocolate" line was an utter failure that got the brand promptly forgotten. I doubt that spot was even aired in Japan.
and to your claim, no. its a minor player (far behind the Japanese makers). You will have a hard time finding anything with a LG logo in stores in Japan. the market is heavily skewed towards local players.
If you claim is that LG makes parts used in phones sold under other brands - then sure - it's present in that sense. But LG as a brand name to sell products has poor recognition / poor value perception in Japan.
Not specific to LG, from the chart. Seems like all brands, including Sony are an afterthought. (Note that LG doesn't currently sell LG branded phones. They sell to other brands.)
Following your rationale, I'd guess the top selling brand is getting backlash specifically because it's the top selling brand by a large margin. And other brands, like LG, can make "outrageous" ads without causing outrage because Japanese people either don't see or don't care about ads from brands that don't hold a majority market share.
Is that close to what you're saying? If so, is that true for other market segments? It'd be interesting to note. I don't know that I have a similar example for the US market.
This ad feels unnerving for, I think, non-obvious reasons, beyond just the raw destruction of artistic tools.
In music and sound effects from horror genres and other "scary" things, playing very high pitches with very low pitches makes us anxious - our brains are wired to perceive high pitches as safe and low pitches as menacing[1]. If they're both happening at the same time, our brain gets stuck trying to figure out WTF IS GOING ON, which makes us anxious.
A similar thing happens with this ad: cheerful music while apparently senseless destruction (the reveal doesn't happen until the end) is taking place. IIRC one of the Fallout games did this too - post-fallout world but upbeat country music as the theme? The gasoline fight scene in Zoolander. Etc, etc.
Anyway, these kinds of juxtapositions are SUPPOSED to make our brains feel uncomfortable. I imagine this was interpreted by the ad people as "edgy" or "surprising" or "innovative". But it's still going to make people who aren't sensitised to it feel uncomfortable.
This is a really good observation, it's uncomfortable to watch and listen to even beyond the really obvious but apparently unintended symbolism. The music is off, the sound is off, so many weird decisions here ... some ad exec using ChatGPT instead of doing their job?
Yeah, I got these vibes too, but especially from the cinematography. It was kinda _lingering_ on all the little ways each item strained and broke under the weight of the press, almost like it was something to savor. It was weirdly voyeuristic, in a way.
I didn't like the ad. I think the people creating it wanted to imply that it's as if they took all these things and put it in an iPad, where you can still achieve all the creativity while carrying a thin device.
I don't think it's impossible to convey that message without destroying instruments and creative tools that are precious to so many. Maybe if they had made the animation very fast it would've appeared as a joke and not something intended to be taken literally.
Also could've had some artist exit a studio, take the iPad, do a whole bunch of stuff, then go back to the studio and kind of test out/use the tools while reading from the iPad or something like that.
I know some people are saying the reaction is too strong, but trust me if you practice on a piano daily you will not feel good watching it get crushed.
I don't even work in marketing or own any Apple devices.
The original idea is sound: "we are squeezing all tools into the iPad".
The problem is that you can't squeeze an object without resorting to animation. So instead they went for crushing, which carries destructive undertones. A lot of people have strong emotional attachments to objects like pianos and vinyl players; destroying them is a powerful trigger.
If this had been done with animation, with some djinn magically squeezing everything into an iPad, it would have been just fine.
This said, there is no such thing as bad publicity - here we are, talking about the umpteenth version of a product we would otherwise take for granted. The ad might have been distasteful but it did the job.
There definitely is such a thing as bad publicity, I wish people would stop using that phrase to make dumb things sound smart. Of all the companies out there, Apple definitely doesn’t want to trade on negative sentiment, it clashes with their overall brand strategy. In particular this iPad Pro launch is riskier than normal, given that it has brand new screen tech and is the thinnest device they’ve ever made, and it’s possible they pulled this commercial to avoid creating associations between this iPad and the act of “crushing” things.
Furthermore I doubt that anyone on HN (except like 2 people who will definitely reply to this comment) who didn’t know about the new iPad Pro before this commericial learned about it from this post.
Allow me to be the first of the two to announce themselves.
I agree, though. Although I only learned of the product because of the outrage over the ad, it certainly hasn't moved me toward wanting to purchase one. And I'll actually be in the market for a tablet in a few months.
#2 checking in. I pay almost zero attention to what Apple does. I'll pay attention if they start allowing Mozilla to ship add-ons with Firefox so I can run adblock on mobile like on Firefox!
#3 of a vast number: I don't pay attention to what Apple does, choose not to own any Apple products even though I do respect their technology, particularly Apple Silicon; would not have been aware of a launch of a new iPad if it weren't for this controversy.
You can run ad-blockers on iOS Safari (they're called "Content Blockers", I use Firefox Focus's) granted you're still stuck with Safari/WebKit for the time being.
Yep, I had considered getting an iPad. I probably wouldn't have, this doesn't prevent me bur it is a point in another directiom. Things like the Minis Forum V3 give me more options and the company knows "how to read the room".
>There definitely is such a thing as bad publicity, I wish people would stop using that phrase
the phrase "there's no such thing as bad PR" is meant to make you realize that there's more to PR than you... realize. It's in the style of something like a Buddhist koan. it's not meant to be taken literally or to an extreme. It's not a proof but it does describe a real phenomenon. You can't reject the phrase without rejecting its wisdom.
I hope, on that hill, you don't die as you plan to. Because you are very literal, aren't you.
My issue is that people take the idea that “bad PR” can actually be good for a company (which is common knowledge these days) and just stop there. They don’t go a step further and contemplate where the phrase applies, where it doesn’t, and what makes those situations different. They just bend over backwards and try to figure out the way it applies in every situation (even if in reality, it doesn’t). It’s that line of thinking that I find annoying.
I think the phrase has outlived its usefulness. Nowadays when I see it used it’s often in exactly the kind of extreme or overly literal way you yourself criticize.
Exactly. This saying is much like Confucius famous sayings in that you have to think it through, trying it both literally and symbolically, and move several steps forward logically to try and understand the wisdom it is conveying.
It's not saying literally that no publicity can ever be bad. That's obviously not true and is easily disproven nearly every single day by current events. It's a broader conveyance of truth regarding the difficulty of getting noticed in a world crowded with content. Even if it's "bad publicity" there are still benefits of becoming more well known, for example. Apple is one of the few companies where that probably won't help, but it doesn't "disprove" the saying and mean we should reject it.
I don't understand what you are responding to. The GP comment never said anything about "dying on a hill" or being overly literal. They weren't making some grand pronouncement that there's no wisdom behind the "there's no such thing as bad PR" saying. They just pointed out that in this specific case that the bad PR is most definitely undesired and not a net benefit, and that the "no such thing as bad PR" phrase is often overused in places where it's not warranted as a sort of lazy "sure, this is fine!" explanation.
I feel like it’s pretty easy to disprove. I mentioned Humane AI in another comment, so here I’ll use a different and more flamboyant example: the 2019 movie Cats.
After putting $85-110M into the production of the movie, Universal released a trailer that went super viral and had every person on the internet talking about how terrible it looked. When the movie actually came out there was a second viral wave of gawking. Did this drive tons of people to the theater so they revel in the movie’s epic badness for themselves? No, the movie (which had over a dozen stars and was based on a hit musical that is popular around the world) failed to make back its budget at the box office. For reference (in case someone tries to pull the “maybe it would’ve made less money without the negative publicity” card) Tom Hooper’s previous movie musical Les Miserables earned $442M on a $61M budget.
The fat lady has not sung yet - terrible movies often become cult hits once they are "rediscovered" for their badness and prices go down. I wouldn't be surprised if Cats eventually became a streaming staple.
I expect the majority of people really aren't bothered about this though - just a vocal minority, so although maybe a bad ad for some, I expect the benefits of the publicity of this ad far outweight the downsides.
I wouldn't have paid any attention to a new iPad launch or known that it was the thinnest one yet, without this 'bad' press.
If anything, I'd say I'd be more likely to purchase a new iPad as a result
The publicity might be a short term win but there is a dangerous narrative for Apple that it feeds: that they are no longer a design-obsessed company that prizes art and creativity and channels that obsession to build the best products.
A vocal minority of artists and creatives who are precious about the tactile and aesthetic experiences of using the tools of their trades could also be called “Apple’s target market for the iPad Pro.” So Apple would definitely need to care about the sentiments their ads engender.
Bad PR works on controversial things, for example if someone wants to sell courses to become “Alpha Male”. People who are into that become suddenly aware of it.
Apple ad isn’t controversial because people react indifferent at best and very negative at worst. Everyone already knows what an ipad is.
Let's be honest here: people are going to watch the video on their iPhone, fleetingly think "well that's a weird ad, really did not like that..." and then move onto something else on their iPhone. Apple has been untouchable for many years now. Basically Trump "I can shoot a man on 5th Avenue and people will still vote for me" level
Since my argument is “there is such a thing as bad publicity and I will die on this hill”, I’m going to shift from this sloppy ad rollout to an example that I think proves my case (that bad publicity is a thing that exists) pretty definitively.
Although it no doubt produced tons of brand awareness among people who had never heard of them, I doubt that the folks at Humane AI would argue that the recent flood of bad reviews or even the backlash against the bad reviews were helpful to them in the long term. Like sure, tons of people know about them now, perhaps they even sold a pin or two to the folks who heard about them through the controversy. But there’s a good chance they may not be able to stay solvent as a company long enough to actually capitalize on their increased brand recognition.
I agree with most of your comments here, but I actually don't think the Humane AI stuff is a good example.
By all accounts, the new iPad Pro is a good, solid product. The problem is that people don't like the ad.
The problem with Humane AI is not really "bad PR", it's fundamentally bad products. Or perhaps to put it a little more generously: as has been very common of late in the tech world, the Humane AI products are technologically interesting marvels that solve literally 0 problems people actually have and are basically worse in every way compared to a smart phone.
That is, the iPad Pro's problem is really just the PR. No amount of good PR could save Humane AI's products.
I disagree. I own zero apple products but pretty soon I will be purchasing a tablet for the kids.
I was looking at ipads, but this ad and the comments have reminded me why I dont like putting money in Apples pockets. So I shall definitely be buying android when I buy one.
I have a lot of Apple products, but my recent work projects on Android have brought me around a bit on the Pixel line; if I had to switch to Pixel I wouldn’t be mad (though I don’t intend on doing that any time soon). With that being said, I don’t know of any Android tablets that match the iPad in terms of quality or performance, and I’ve been watching the market closely for years (I would love a tablet I can do real programming work on). What Android tablet are you looking at?
Have you tried the Pixel Tablet? I'm on the fence mainly because I have very few tablet needs and my Samsung S6 Lite has been wonderful, but I love the idea of docked mode where it becomes a Google Home. It makes it incredibly useful as both a desk companion (love getting meeting notifications and such on a screen liek that), an alarm clock, a digital photo frame, a music player, a quick way to see my doorbell camera, etc.
> The original idea is sound: "we are squeezing all tools into the iPad".
Hard disagree. Yes, I do agree that a big part of the emotional reaction to the ad were seeing all these beloved tools of craftsmanship being destroyed.
But another underlying current is people reaching the conclusion that they do not want all of their individual, sometimes quirky tools being subsumed under a single flat silicon panel. I'll just speak for myself, but I often find myself craving more real, physical interaction and not just something that exists on a screen.
Some of us actually crave a little more of the chaotic, interesting world of WALL-E over the sleek perfection of EVE (which was, somewhat unsurprisingly, reviewed and blessed by Jonathan Ive).
But that's the history that makes the flipping of the script so stark. Anybody embedded deeply enough in the company should be aware of that exact loss of reputation.
And if the company fails to know its own history well enough that even they are missing the point that speaks volumes about how they value institutional knowledge.
So go short AAPL, Jim Cramer. My bold prediction is this ad does diddly to their bottom line. You really think people are going to boycott Apple over it?
Stock is short-sighted, and I don't expect any boycott.
The consequences of the slow degradation of a brand are measured in decades.
If you take a look at the Vision Pro, they didn't expect selling them like hot cakes, given the price, but from what I've heard they still missed their projections, by a long shot.
This pattern will repeat, one failed or tepid product launch at a time, eroding confidence, and ultimately, yes, the stock will plunge.
stock is not short sighted. It does react quickly to information (which means it was too late to short a while ago) but to think that you can make money by not buying stock now, but waiting to buy it at another time is really terrible advice, and it's been refuted.
To believe that stock is short-sighted is to believe that investers as a group are dumber than you are because they've put their money into the market but you know better.
> To believe that stock is short-sighted is to believe that investers as a group are dumber than you are because they've put their money into the market but you know better.
There is a saying you may not be familiar with, "Markets can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent."
the market doesn't know the future, it just incorporates current knowledge and opinion. Is AI a bubble right now? the vast riches afforded those who make the right call when AI is ready is justification enough for current enthusiasm, no irrationality needs to be hypothesized. And like people who lost their bet on the 49ers to win the Superbowl, there's no reason to posit irrationality if a bet doesn't pay.
The stock market, or any kind of market really, is nothing else than a huge distributed pricing machine.
It is incredibly good at doing that. But it is short sighted. It is able to integrate risks to some extent, on a short time scale, but it is very bad at processing second or third order effects, and can't do strategy.
In other words, the famous invisible hand is completely unable to predict the future.
Humans are also notoriously bad at that, but still better. This is why we have states and CEOs.
at the beginning of every day, the market has a greater probability of going up than down, and a risk adjusted positive expected value (which is a different thing)
Therefore, your money should always be "in the market", not out of the market. Therefore, it's very difficult to make the case that the market is short sighted. I think what you are trying to say is that immediate risks are better understood than longer term, so the more distant future has higher volatility.
Maybe the strongest sense is that the iPad comes from the island of broken toys?
Slightly less emphatic but more sinister is that an iPad cannot help but involve itself in the destruction of the arts.
I do agree that the ad does not have any observable moral upside, and it was a mistake to run it.
But then again, if Apple did have a YouTube collection of ads that they chose not to run and discussion of why, it might be easier to trust them. They are so opaque at the moment that trust is a very big ask.
You're reading tea leaves now. Meanwhile Apple has actually measurable problems like plummeting iPhone sales in China, and I guarantee that's not because of a stupid ad.
Executive dysfunction seems the root issue. Tim, Phil, and Craig have been running on Steve and Jony's fumes for years, and now have no ideas beyond incrementing numbers and buying back stock. It's like ol' Gil all over again.
Apple is the default choice for grandparents again, but they don't even have the schools anymore (Google conquered edu with Chromebooks).
The two are different, but not unrelated. One reason Apple can run the margins and move the product that it does is because it's Apple. If it were "random company" and didn't benefit from its RDF, those numbers wouldn't be sustainable.
Which, in a nutshell, is the Tim Cook problem -- you can make all the sales numbers go in the right direction, but that's not the product magic that Apple has historically benefited from (and been valued at).
To be clear, I don't think the ad itself is the issue, I think this is pretty benign given their scale.
But I think they have a leadership problem. Tim Cook is a glorified bean counter, not a creator, not a visionary, and it shows.
I know that most people are looking at the stock and will say that everything is fine. Sure. I am looking at the products, and except for M series of SoC, this is all boring.
Apple's valuation is up over 1000% since Tim Cook became CEO. His greatest failing is that he isn't Steve Jobs, but most corporations would literally kill to have a bean counter like Tim Cook. Yes, he's in the hot seat, and Wall Street is very "What have you done for me today?", but I don't see shareholders calling for his head.
All empires fall, but today is not that day for Apple.
I would not bet against any company on the basis of people whinging on the internet unless it's about their actual product or service being bad at it's job. (e.g. Humane and Rabbit are probably doomed)
Consider that when talking about something measured in decades the examples that come to mind are things people said in the last few weeks. But what were people talking about a decade ago? Which of those things actually reflected the long term trajectory of the company?
The creative tools just had to be sucked in like a wormhole. It's just surprising it got this far without someone intervening. Shows that someone high up couldn't be backed down.
There is no such thing as bad publicity when you are not yet established. When you are already a recognized and popular brand, such as Apple or AB InBev, it can hurt revenue, such as how AB InBev suffered from lower revenue following their own advertisement backlash.
This exactly. There are many other ways to express "squeezing into one" but both bizarrely and shockingly Apple (or whichever ad agency) went for "crushing with hydraulic press" instead. How did everyone miss on the negative undertone before this ad was released?
Could be extrapolating this incident too much but it feels it encapsulates the transformation of Apple from this quirky, unconventional upstart into a monopolistic leviathan the past 2 decades. There's also a sense of hubris at suggesting your single electronic device can replace all those creative tools.
A djinni with Tim Apple's face would be funny. Comes out of a home pod and magics the whole recording studio into an iPad. Probably too whimsical for an Apple's taste though.
There is a growing backlash against technology and its harmful effects though. People are rightfully getting suspicious about that handful of tech companies and their intentions. Few are willing to give up on technology, nor should they as it's futile to fight progress, but the debate and guard rails are being shaped, and the tone deafness of some of these big technology companies is not helping their cause.
The astronomical user base of companies like Google and Apple should not be an indicator about the actual goodwill of people towards these brands. Getting away with something does not mean your behaviour isn't causing increasing animosity and feeding general discontentment.
Have you confirmed there are no practical effects in this — definitely it seemed like a lot had to be animated from the timing of events, to cutesy thinks like the smile ball squeeze.
Like if this was hand drawn animation, would anyone care? I think people think real instruments (even ones that were junk, ie old pianos are worthless) were destroyed.
I wouldn’t be surprised if there was some practical effects at play but it honestly looked too simplified to be real. Crushing a lot of stuff like that would be messy and ugly. Also unsafe with things like broken metal and shattered glass. It’s feels more like CGI. And personally I think that would be the better way to do it. As someone who’s watched a weirdly high number of YouTube videos of things getting crushed by presses, it’s not pretty like that video was.
If, and if think that’s a big if that was mainly practical effects, then those props would almost certainly be fake instruments made from different materials that crush in more visually appealing ways.
I was replying to the previous posters who said it was already animation. There certainly is some animation at play but was wondering of the mix of practical effects and CGI.
> An iPad will never replicate the beauty of a human playing a piano or a violin.
I mean, one of its primary uses is to replicate the beauty of a human playing piano or violin via videos and recordings.
Aside from that, isn’t this just an appeal to tradition? An iPad is a tool just like a piano or the violin, people make beautiful music with them all the time.
I am sure there were curmudgeons saying that the piano and violin would never replicate the beauty of the human voice when they were the top technology of the day.
I don't personally play an instrument, but I can also understand that the physicality of keys, strings and pedals is innately different from tapping on a glass screen. A digital piano aims to replicate the sound a specific piano, and provide a piano-inspired interface for playing it.
A real piano is a big single use device, in theory yeah, but I imagine for the people playing it the direct control over the things making the sound that is irreplaceable. There's things that will always be impossible on a VST instrument because it's construction (Prepared Piano [0]), and vice versa [1]. They seem like two different avenues of artistic expression to me.
> They seem like two different avenues of artistic expression to me
I agree completely, this is the point I was trying to make.
People are treating the iPad and the piano as fundamentally different despite both being tools that are equally as capable of making beautiful music in the hands of a talented musician in my eyes.
They might make beautiful music but not beautiful piano music. The piano must exist in order to be recorded into the ipad, and recording isn't unique to ipads. You could play the piano samples via midi from the ipad but hundreds of other devices can also do that and that still wouldn't replicate from the player's perspective, actually playing a piano or and audiences experience of actually hearing a piano.
It’s for this reason I have a minstrel that follows me everywhere. There’s really no substitute for the original analog sound - it’s warmness and the subtle imperfections of the original - can’t be substituted with a consumer device manufactured by a soulless megacorp. It does become problematic on flights as the imperialist cryptofascist lackies of capitalism require my minstrel buy a full ticket and doesn’t let her play my tunes on the flight. People at work get pretty irritated and complain about flow and focus and whatnot and keep insisting I submit to the consumerist mediocrity of a sound cancelling headphone - and I’ve tried in honesty to build a portable sound proof booth with an ear trumpet attached but it’s kind of bulky and I’m not really that handy with tools to begin with. It was also really hard to get a badge for the minstrel but eventually HR just gave me a neurodiversity exemption and classified her as a support animal, which in my opinion is kind of sexist but there’s only so many things one can get outraged about. The real issue is that a single instrument is kind of insufficient to fully capture a wider range of sound and experience so I’ve been trying to figure out how to pull off a quartet - really some of the best music is done by a four piece band anyway - but the above problems just seem to get worse but I’m sure I’ll figure out how to scale this solution.
Minstrel "music" is perhaps problematic itself. On the one hand, you have music as an emergent property of the gathered individuals' culture and skills. That blurs when a tavern sings to a traveling minstrel rather than a neighbor. But professionals can enhance rather than displace. Consider European acting troupes traveling a US West steeped in discussion of Shakespeare. Or printed "poems" to be spread and read in support of real spoken poetry. And minstrels do collaborate with local players... but they can also displace. Something is lost to a community when the local kid or elder can no longer make a bit of money piping in the harvest. Or neighbors play the gather fiddles. When music becomes for a community a spectator sport, rather than something embedded. A train car singing together, versus an occasional platform busker. Like trust-fund kids who see strength of knowledge and skills as something to buy not build in themselves. Or a merchant who doesn't value strength of body for farming. And then there's the my-tower-is-taller-than-yours of court "professional music". With richly textured diversity, complexity, nuance, and surprise consequences, these can be hard to think and discuss clearly. Like struggling now to appreciate the impoverished isolation of people's un-musical experience of tunes before AR's ambient-rendezvous-and-collaborate jamming apps.
And really it’s turtles all the way down. That’s why I’m considering joining a hunter gatherer tribe that’s never had contact with the modern world. As I worked through the profession of institutional oppression of the natural state of man I realized there’s no other option. I just hope I don’t wipe them out with my imperialist diseases - the least of which is the social cultural ones of modern consumerist capitalism!
(In all seriousness I do agree btw, there’s value and worth in all the art and forms of art we’ve created … but I’m reacting a bit to the “one step backward in historical progression is the pinnacle of achievement” … plus I have to say I’m pretty impressed with the visual and cinematic quality of the Apple ad itself and find the contextual outrage a bit weird - comparing it to the Ridley Scott ad is wild too - not every creation has to be an iconic achievement of a master, but is untrue this particular ad wasn’t interesting and well executed and I feel bad for the creative crew that developed and produced it)
Excuse me, but real musicians use butterflies. They open their hands and let the delicate wings flap once. The disturbance ripples outward, eventually producing a freak weather event which sounds out an awesome cacophony carefully honed to activate homo sapiens' most dormant primal instincts for rage, love, mourning, and triumph.
Anything less is a crude shortcut afforded us by our decadent culture of consumption.
I am quite confident that a skilled musician with an iPad (or, even more obviously, an electric keyboard with a MIDI cable to the iPad) can create music that is indistinguishable from a human playing a piano. The synthesizer will be able to replicate the sound of the best concert grand in the best auditorium, direct to your studio headphones.
I'm also quite sure even unskilled musicians will prefer the feel of practicing and playing on a slightly out-of-tune old upright to a cheap electric synth-action keyboard or (ugh) a glass touchscreen.
> I am quite confident that a skilled musician with an iPad (or, even more obviously, an electric keyboard with a MIDI cable to the iPad) can create music that is indistinguishable from a human playing a piano. The synthesizer will be able to replicate the sound of the best concert grand in the best auditorium, direct to your studio headphones.
Perhaps this is true, but it is entirely limited to replicating a _recording_ of the instrument. An iPad cannot replicate (or even come close to) the sound of a human playing a piano that you hear in person.
I'm a hobby musician and let me tell you that I can hear digital instruments and to me they sound like "they cheaped out on hiring some guy to actually play this"
Have you ever listened to the difference between a piano and a digital keyboard? The difference is night and day. Digital tech can only imitate the sound of a string piano, but it can never truly be the real thing.
its like smelling fresh apple pie vs smelling an apple pie car freshener. The idea gets across, but it can never be the same.
Best would be pianoteq, but let's be serious, nothing will come close to an acoustic piano.
After for YouTube consumption and for the mass, yeah, it will be good enough, afterall most people don't realize that Rousseau is/was not only a team but rearranging midi for their output and still are playing poorly.
I would have preferred the reverse of crushing our tools into something. I would have preferred pulling them out of the iPad to create. As a d&d fan, I could imagine a bard with a black hole pulling instruments and creative tools out in order to render magic.
I felt like I was watching the end of Terminator 1 when watching that iPad commercial.
is why I think Tim needs to get a forceful visionary as head of both design and marketing...the 2 departments where there seems to be a ton of turnover. Would this ad have passed muster w/ people like Katie Cotton/Lee Clough? At the very least, have someone w/ a better sense of this be the final editor before releasing...
The funny thing is that reversing the ad doesn't change the fact that all those things were destroyed. If people like the reversed version it means they actually never cared about the destruction in the first place
> they actually never cared about the destruction in the first place
For the most part, they don't. I think what people are reacting to is the perceived symbolism of the whole thing. Reversing the video in this case is kind of reversing the symbolism to something more like what I assume Apple was going for in the first place.
> I don't think it's impossible to convey that message without destroying instruments and creative tools that are precious to so many.
This is how I felt seeing rock musicians destroying perfectly good instruments and amps. Growing up my parents didn't have the money to buy me a guitar (or didn't want to buy me one), so I would see these performances and would just think, can't they just donate that guitar to some poor kid or a school instead of destroying them? It really annoyed me, but it didn't stop me from loving the band and their music. I'm a late Gen-Xer and watching Nirvana destroy the stage after a performance just made me go "aw, those were good instruments someone else could have used". I don't know if it's "cool" to do that anymore, but I never see any other artists calling that out like they are for this ad, and it's been going on since the 70s.
Interesting point. The Clash even celebrated the destruction of instruments on the cover of London Calling (the cover being a photo of their bassist smashing his bass). And though the Apple ad seems like it’s trying to convey they idea that all these devices are within the iPad, the smashing of instruments and equipment by rockers seems to just be about…reveling in the destruction of instruments and equipment.
You see this in other art as well. For example, the Dadaists took a lot of functional tools, messed them up, and displayed them as art. Moving beyond art, destruction that accompanies political unrest is often dismissed.
It’s interesting that the Apple ad is what touched off this discussion, because it’s actually fairly tame with regards to a lot of intentional destruction of equipment.
Or have a giant scale, show people loading all this stuff into one side of the scale, and then placing the iPad on the other side, and the iPad side sinks. There's a million ways to do this idea
Agreed. I was thinking along the same lines. Some Wonka-like contraption where all this on-going creativity in a room was captured, fed into a whimsical pipes leading to an assembly line, with an iPad reveal at the end.
I'm not sure but I think this ad was fully animated and nothing was actually destroyed. A hydraulic press of this size, if any even exist, is going to look a lot bulkier and not like a cartoon stomper coming down from the ceiling. We don't see the side bracing which would needed if you didn't want your hydraulic press to rip a hole in your ceiling.
Especially with all the angles they have it would have been incredibly difficult and dangerous to get all the shots, and every shot came out perfectly.
It was painful to watch and i won’t have a second look.
It would have been as simple as adding a short “Professional CGI Artists. No actual instrument and tools were harmed.” to set a lighter tone and take the pain away.
Given the raging discussion and thus reach, this won’t hurt sales in the slightest - pretty much the opposite and i guess we’re left with giving kudos to marketing well played.
It seems odd to complain about one old upright piano being crushed for the video when thousands upon thousands of them are out on the streets, living under bridges, because no one wants to move the piano anymore, or wanted the convenience of an electronic keyboard.
I implore you all: adopt a piano today! You may find yourself saying "I didn't rescue it, it rescued me."
I think this misses the mark. The ad is inherently symbolic—it’s not this particular piano, but the fact that they’re destroying all of these beloved instruments of creativity in such a gratuitous and evocative manner. That’s what upsetting, not the literal fact that one piano was destroyed in the making of the ad.
We adopted a piano while we were overseas and moved it to San Francisco. We ended up giving it to a church after my son decided he couldn't abide the high notes that could never quite get into tune. Still have fond memories of it though.
Anyone remember the original awesome Google Chromebook ad where they meticulousoy showed destruction of several laptops? I know it’s not the same thing but it reminded me of it and I can’t find it anywhere in YouTube! Anyone got a link who knows what I’m talking about?
They probably figured it would be really strong imagery to see the items being physically crushed in a giant press. It definitely invokes feelings, but not good ones.
If you think of yourself as skeptical, agnostic, materialist. I don’t understand how you can be upset about cheap in-animate objects get destroyed for an entertaining video.
Im not a skeptical agnostic materialist, but those objects were far from being cheap. Those instruments cost thousands of dollars each. The arcade cabinet as well(there aren't exactly a lot of those left).
The entire point of the ad is that the entire human creative experience is consolidated into the ipad, which is a pretty dystopian way of looking at things. Even if you ignore the cost and rarity of these items, the symbolism is pretty horrible.
You know there are reproductions of those arcade cabinets right? And used instruments cost hundreds, not thousands. A guitar with a broken neck or stripped screws could be propped up long enough for a scene such as this and be useless to actually play. And busted pianos are easy enough to find.
>And used instruments cost hundreds, not thousands.
A guitar, sure. I tried getting an used string piano and couldn't find one...used...for less than five grand. Used violins and other instruments are also usually very highly priced.
Try craigslist or a local piano mover. Local piano movers are often asked to haul off abandoned pianos and will resell them [1]. This company's stock at the moment is a bit pricey compared to what I usually see, but it's not unusual to be able to get even a baby grand for ~$1,000. The catch is you've got to pay to move them, which is a bit of an ordeal.
You are trying to get a working piano. This ad only required a non working piano.
Someone bought me a broken piano once thinking I would be able to repair it. We ended up letting someone else have it for free. It wasn’t expensive to begin with because it didn’t work.
Everything in that press was a representation of a real and useful thing, and the people who hate this commercial the most seem to have substituted a real and useful thing for the simulation of one. Whereas the moment the cans on the piano were crushed, I thought, "wow that old (busted?) piano is holding up well."
Practical effects are not only full of fakery, they're also the origin of a lot of the tricks known to the world.
No one is actually upset about any specific objects that were destroyed in the making of this ad. This sort of advertising is all about eliciting emotions and shaping a message--a vibe--about a particular product. This ad triggered visceral feelings related to the emotional connection a lot of people--even skeptical agnostic materialists!--have with the tools, instruments, and products of creativity and art. And based on the reaction, the ad clearly elicited a lot of negative emotions and a negative vibe in what is presumably the iPad Pro's target audience. Thus, I'd say that even from your ultra-rationalist point of view, it's a bad ad.
I mostly agree. My point is I don’t think the audience here would give the same empathy to flag burning, Christian trolling etc. just want to be clear if these are the gods we worship here
Another person on social media noted that no Apple ad has ever depicted older generation iPads or MacBook Pros being crushed by a hydraulic press to signify them being made thinner - I suspect Apple wouldn't even greenlight that ad pitch.
Try a car analogy on for size: a new Corvette might be superior to a classic Porsche in all the ways that matter, but nobody at GM would greenlight an ad depicting a C8 emerging from a crusher that had just destroyed a '63 911. They would understand how disrespectful it would seem.
That's an indication that you're not a good fit for the sports-car advertising business, just as whoever approved this ad isn't a good fit for the creative business.
If it has to be explained to you, you won't get it.
I don't think anyone's losing their mind and crying. It's just interesting to see something like this from a company that has historically prided themselves on mutual respect (if not outright symbiosis) with artists, musicians, and other creative people.
Somewhere within Apple there was a failure of taste, and that was always the proverbial "sin unto death" from Steve Jobs's perspective. Doesn't happen every day. You hate to see it, but you can't help but watch.
Hey if you think it is so ridiculous for someone to be significantly offended by the ads that you don't even believe that people were, then you are basically agreeing with me.
I am glad that you seem to now agree with me that it would be dumb to be personally offended by this in a significant way.
You agree with me so much, that it is so dumb to be mad about this, that you actually don't think that people were!
You actually believe this argument even more that I do, because it isn't even conceivable to you that people were very upset about this.
I am glad that I convinced you at how dumb it would be to very mad about this ad.
If you had ever put the time and effort (and blood!) into learning how to play the guitar, you too would have a visceral reaction to seeing a guitar getting destroyed for nothing. It's not the objects themselves that are the problem, it is our connection to those objects, and our innate feelings about those objects, that Apple has smashed in that video. That's a marketing 101 mistake and how this ad ever got greenlit is beyond me.
If it weren't offensive to someone, somewhere, they wouldn't do it.
Apple, on the other hand, will never be punk. They left that path when they realized it was more profitable to become the guy on the screen in their earlier ad.
I think the part that was really upsetting is they crushed real good objects. After all of that talks about climate friendly. They could have crushed 3D renderings and up the clip with “rendered on iPad. No harm was done on real objects.” And that would have been a good ad.
It's almost certainly mostly CGI but even if it was done with practical props, they are still not "real good objects." They are props. No one crashes real Ferraris in an action movie. You use fakes and empty chassis.
They do crash real cars in movies though. The Wolf of Wall Street saw an actual Lamborghini Countach with a VIN get crashed quite a lot, John Carpenter's Christine went through like twenty Plymouths and The Dukes of Hazzard TV series destroyed hundreds of cars ("an estimated 309 Chargers were used").
>I think the part that was really upsetting is they crushed real good objects. After all of that talks about climate friendly.
Considering how much global e-waste and environmental damage, companies like Apple(and others of their size) are responsible for with their products, destroying a few objects for an ad is like spitting in the ocean in the scheme of things.
People complaining about the waste generated from this ad, are really missing the big picture, and is one of the reason companies like Apple mostly focus on posturing the image of climate friendliness and environmental sustainability, rather than actually enforcing it across their entire supply chain where it actually makes the big difference.
"Sure, the minerals in our devices are mined by kids in Congo with chemicals dangerous for the environment, and assembled by workers in sweatshop factories with suicide nets, but our posh donut-shaped HQ in Cupertino runs on 100% renewables and serves only vegan food with soy lattes, that's how environmentally conscious we are here at Hooli." </gavin_belson.jpg>
^Because this greenwashing is what people buy into from advertising.
Reminds me when Formula 1 switched form V10 engines to hybrid V6 to be more "environmentally friendly", when actually, the gas burned by those V10 engines during races only accounted for <0,2% of the total emissions, being far offset by the massive emissions of transporting that entire circus around the planet bouncing across continents all year round, yet nobody addressed that, just the engines for some cheap greenwashing.
> if Apple actually cared about the environment they'd release new models every several years instead of several times yearly
Thankfully last year’s model still works and is supported for several years. Nothing prevents you from ignoring the new models and act as if they didn’t exist.
Auto manufacturers release many new models every year and most people do not buy them all. Nor do they wish that appliance manufacturers stopped releasing new models so they could keep their fridge for longer.
> Auto manufacturers release many new models every year and most people do not buy them all. Nor do they wish that appliance manufacturers stopped releasing new models so they could keep their fridge for longer.
Generations of vehicles seem to be sold for at least half a decade, with maybe slight facelifts but largely functionally unchanged. My 20 year old truck, perhaps barring some safety features, also does basically the same job as a newer truck and drives down the same roads and so on. Thankfully the auto manufacturers haven't yet found a way to make your car or truck obsolescent in 3-5 years.
As far as appliances I swear to god I know I and a large number of other people would absolutely kill for an older Kenmore washer and dryer as they basically run forever and are easier to service. We keep jamming useless crap on everything (of course my refrigerator needs an embedded screen and internet of shit connection, so that it can spy on me and generally be another worthless shiny doodad that's going to break) while making things simultaneously harder to service. My 15 year old fridge does the exact same thing as the newer shitheap Samsung fridges they sell at big box retailers but without needing to be replaced every 5 years. Barring some marginal advances in refrigerant and insulation, some of the old stuff legitimately is better.
It's like when I read arguments such as "Aramco most polluting company in the planet by CO2" or "eating a burger pollutes more than driving an SUV for 100 miles"...
Apple, Aramco, your local butcher are merely serving your needs. Aramco ain't forcing you to buy 5L V8 trucks, and you're butcher ain't forcing you to eat beef rather than poultry or vegetables.
Apple releasing new products is just a normal tech company serving the need of users to have the latests shiny gadget, shareholders to see equity and employees and contractors having jobs.
What do I mean? While in principal I agree that many companies should do a lot more to limit their pollution, at the end of the day this pollution is a direct consequence of us average Joes neverending consumerism.
If average Joe doesn't give a damn about using public transport or using a used hybrid or to adapt his lifestyle to be less polluting, legislators and companies are gonna adapt to people not giving a damn besides whining on Twitter.
> at the end of the day this pollution is a direct consequence of us average Joes neverending consumerism.
However the subliminal advertising of big companies causing manipulation of weak human minds is what drives the never ending consumerism. Take away the ads, and the buying of crap will drop significantly.
> Apple, Aramco, your local butcher are merely serving your needs. Aramco ain't forcing you to buy 5L V8 trucks, and you're butcher ain't forcing you to eat beef rather than poultry or vegetables.
Marlboro wasn't forcing you to smoke either, yet too many people did against their own health and own best judgement, so we had to get government regulators to rule them in to protect people form damaging themselves and others with their own desires.
Just because consumers want something, doesn't mean it's what's best for them and that the capitalist free market should just be free to unregulatedly deliver whatever consumers want, at the expense of societal health or the environment, because then that's just "privatizing profits while socializing losses" with extra steps.
We also had governments regulate car emissions to save our air quality which meant engines had to be much more efficient and less environmentally damaging. All for the greater good, and few people complained about the cleaner smog- and tobacco- free air despite loosing a few HP on their engines and Marlboro selling fewer fags.
What makes you think e-waste should be exempt from such regulations?
Devil's advocate: RAM on SOCs is not upgradable due to technical limitations on frequency and latency needing the RAM chips to be as close as possible to the CPU. You can't beat physics.
I do hold them accountable for the non-upgradable SSDs, which are not needed to be soldered to achieve their full speed, and slim PCB connectors for PCI-E speed connections do exist.
>Devil's advocate: sell replacement drop-in boards and reuse the chassis.
Apple's response if regulators push for that: "Sure, that'll be 1600$ for the board please. (on an 1800$ new machine). Oh, and BTW, the board is paired to your iCloud account so you can't then re-sell it on the used market, for your own protection of course. You're welcome."
> Devil's advocate: RAM on SOCs is not upgradable due to technical limitations on frequency and latency needing the RAM chips to be as close as possible to the CPU. You can't beat physics.
That just came out, let's see if it goes anywhere and if they keep pushing it in other products, or if it's just a marketing exercise for one product, but I'm skeptical its here to stay.
I also remember how upgradable GPUs in laptops using MMX slots were pushed by Dell and a couple of others a few times 10-15 years ago, but abandoned each time.
I hope this catches on though, but like I said, I'm skeptical.
> destroying a few objects for an ad is like spitting in the ocean in the scheme of things.
I understand your point but the greater irony of the expression is that, at scale, our spitting (flushing, dumping, spewing) into the ocean has created an ecological disaster.
> destroying a few objects for an ad is like spitting in the ocean in the scheme of things
Yeah I think the biggest lesson from this is that people don't understand the amount of resources it takes to build an iPad.
Another example: Apple removing the stickers because they're plastic. A tiny tiny bit of plastic. Probably 0.001% of the plastic used in the production of an Apple device but people think it's significant because they can see it, and all the other plastic is hidden behind closed doors.
Economics. It's way cheaper to buy a few old instruments (buy extra in case you want to do multiple takes) and just record them being crushed than to pay a team computer artists for weeks to simulate the physics and draw this all in photorealistic CG.
Why do you think its insane to model realistic looking explosions? It's done all the time. Even if it started as a practical prop it was certainly doctored to all hell. Stone statues don't squish and guitars don't actually explode...
If you look through it you can see the top of the guitar is even cut off at the neck, either as a prop or digitally.
The shots towards the end have nothing around the items being focused on, such as remnants of the larger items. Doesn't need to be CGI, just multiple takes stitched together.
Erm, none? There are tons of cuts. I didn't say they did it one take.
You can actually see that they repositioned the ball between the side shot of it rolling and the front shot of it getting squashed, which you wouldn't need to do it if was CG.
I don't think anyone can say with any certainty, and certainly not with 100%, without actually talking to the people behind the video. Modern CGI is absolutely insane. There is so much in modern movies & TV that goes right past the viewers without any suspicion at all.
The Corridor Crew YouTube channel taught me that CGI is everywhere and I don't have a clue. Highly suggest checking out some of their videos.
Yes, this could have been done with CGI, but that seems unlikely. As others mentioned, doing this level of CGI destruction is super expensive, and destroying stuff is pretty cheap.
But there's also the bigger factor that, if Apple didn't destroy a bunch of stuff, why haven't they said so? It seems to me that if this ad was entirely CGI, Apple would admit that to minimize the backlash.
Therefore, unless Apple says something (or someone does some very convincing analysis), I'm inclined to believe this ad was done primarily with practical effects. That's just where the evidence is pointing right now.
I’m an artist and I feel great. As a singer-songwriter I’ve already come to terms with Swedish mega-producers, drum machines, Live Nation, and whatever drives people to consume corporate music.
What exactly makes things any harder for artists than it has ever been? Was there some glorious moment in the past when people didn’t look down at the average poets for being lazy and useless?
Sure, laud the best of the best, but you know for a fact that you’ve thought it a bad decision for someone you know who isn’t gifted with genius level talent to pursue a career in the arts.
It has never been easy.
Frankly, if AI makes a pop song or if Lana Del Ray’s producers make a pop song, it really is no different to me. No one is going to replace the folk singer because the audience is already selecting for the poet, not the product. Who cares what frat bros are chugging beer to?
Is part of the response to this ad the subconscious realization that one doesn’t make or actively appreciate organic art to begin with?
When was the last time most of us went to an open mic? Or bought a painting from a local artist?
Many tools can be used for art, even the featureless grey rectangle. Your attitude feels a lot like gatekeeping to me similar to when cameras replaced paintings, then digital replaced film, then phones replaced big bodies, etc…
For whatever reason I feel compelled to share my initial reaction to this comment:
Just because you managed to use "tool of art" as a literal phrase doesn't make your point more clear. Why should I care if a couple of these pieces are destroyed. Presumably they didn't destroy anything of historical, cultural, personal, or scarce significance. Are you sure you're not making an argument based only in emotions?
You do not have to. To me the feeling was kind of visceral. I usually do not have habit of analyzing my feelings. But ok, I'll try. It feels like an ugly imbecile walking into art museum, crushing everything around and saying: what a useless piece of shit, here, use this brick instead.
> No it would not. It would still be as disgusting as it is now.
For me the disgust was purely in waste of perfectly good items.
Those instruments could have provided a whole music department for a struggling school or youth center. The paint could have even been used to brighten the place up.
I feel like the reactions here are selective outrage. Real objects and sometimes living organisms are created and destroyed in the name of science every minute of every day.
An ad that was likely done in a single take, let’s be real, doesn’t matter at all in the big picture.
This really shows how much sentiments about technology have changed in the last five or so years. If this ad came out in 2018 it would have been received differently, I think. The buzz has worn off. People don't see doing everything on your device as progress. iPads are no longer novel.
Apple has been so used to growing new markets that I don't think they even know how to market when they're on top. All their best ads have been when using their products speaks to being a rebel. Nowadays the least rebellious thing you could be is an Apple user.
Many artists now view the tech industry as a credible threat to their work and livelihood, because of AI. If you want them to buy your products, it’s probably a good idea to show some sensitivity to that concern.
> This really shows how much sentiments about technology have changed in the last five or so years. If this ad came out in 2018 it would have been received differently, I think. The buzz has worn off. People don't see doing everything on your device as progress. iPads are no longer novel.
I think not. 2018 was not so different. People talked about what is now called enshittification. Apple, Google, and Facebook introduced screen time controls because concerns had grown year after year.
I think an ad showing the same objects sucked into a tablet would have been received much better now. I doubt the lurid destruction of art, creative tools, and symbols of culture and history would have been received much better in 2004.
>I think an ad showing the same objects sucked into a tablet would have been received much better now. I doubt the lurid destruction of art, creative tools, and symbols of culture and history would have been received much better in 2004.
Except that the opposite appears to be true. There are numerous examples throughout this HN thread of companies like LG and Nintendo doing similar things (LG back in 2018, Nintendo I'm not sure when) without receiving the same kind of flack as this ad is.
You have to remember that it was only in the past year or two that AI has really scared the shit out of the creative community. That sentiment didn't exist in the past when these kinds of commercials were previously made. There has been a shift, and right now, whether you like it or not, or whether you think artists should be scared or embrace it, to artists it feels like the tech community is pointing a giant middle finger at them.
In 2004, this kinda thing was brand new, and you could spin it as promising to artists. Now that 20 years have passed and people have seen the reality of how things have played out, there is a lot more negativity and apprehension towards it.
How many people saw LG UK's ad? Very few Japanese people probably. Social media as it exists today was new. Reporting on social media trends was rare. And artists were not important to LG.
Nintendo's ad was not similar. The animated characters were clearly not real and shown unharmed. The bus was not a creative tool or a symbol. Destruction was implied through editing. The target audience was children.
I know artists. I know their concerns about AI. I think you over estimate how many musicians would have celebrated an advertisement luridly destroying instruments in 2004.
Someone made a reversed version and it works well (it's the only version I've seen)... yeah, crushing musical instruments just comes across as needlessly destructive.
iPad rests on table. Kid/Teen/le artist sits down and touches the screen. iPad explodes into stage of “creative instruments”, le artist is le jamming. Cut to title card.
Yes, this version would have been so much more positive and I can picture someone pitching it during a meeting and just being shutdown because « you have to end with the product, not start with it. »
Good, the ad was really disturbing. An ad is just an ad and not the biggest deal in the scheme of things but that was really unpleasant to watch. For me, it was the visual of needless destruction and waste as much as the meta-message.
It's the needless destruction that really gets to me. I have a fairly visceral reaction to seeing things that someone put time, effort and scarce resources into making get destroyed for no reason, and Apple's ad hit so many nerves in that respect. It's just a complete waste, and that's before we get into the whole subtext of "tech is going to destroy 'IRL' art forms" that many people got.
What baffles me the most is the choice to include human figurines (the bust, the statue, the smiley right at the end). The imagery of human figures getting crushed is going to look disturbing even to the least environmentally conscious viewers.
It's a bit insane to me that Apple felt the need to "apologize"... so they made a crappy AD that didn't appeal to some audiences... is this really grounds for retractions/apologies these days?
The whole point of apple is that its aimed at the "creative" segment. Whether they are actually creative or not is another matter. One of the core pillars of apple's appeal is that creative people use it's stuff.
The main pitch is that Apple helps you be creative as an augment. Look at all the other Ads they pitch to creatives.
The ironic thing is that the advert neatly sums up what the tech/media giants are trying to do to the creative segment (and have been doing for a while)
I'm confused about the confusion, really. It's not hard to imagine how "tech company compressing all your traditional art tools into a blackbox" imagery would have struck some nerves that were already rubbed raw by the AI-Art Discourse.
It's not just general sensibilities, it's comically topical.
Yeah, imagine telling a guitar or piano player that they can trash their respective instruments, because "all they need now is an iPad". Doesn't sound good, does it?
Apple is essentially saying 'Don't worry about learning to play an instrument, use an iPad instead!' which is just disgusting. The modern world has lost too much dicipline and creativity already. It doesnt need more people being encouraged to take the lazy option.
I have been an Apple user since June 1983, and have repeatedly sung the praises of the company, its technology and its vision for decades to friends, family employers and employees. Some of my own identify is strangely drawn from being an Apple aficionado for so long. Personally, this ad was very disappointing, very crushing - to purposefully destroy instruments of creativity is rudely incongruous to my understand of the meaning of Apple.
Apple is the most draconian company and operating system maker. It's astounding that they're associated with creativity. They make it really hard to even use their devices as computers. And they've made the same aluminium rectangles for decades now. Literally, where is the creativity?
> They make it really hard to even use their devices as computers.
that's a bit extreme. yeah, many of us had hoped ipad would be more of a laptop w no keyboard (vs a huge smartphone), but macbooks have long been the most capable dev laptops on the planet
> macbooks have long been the most capable dev laptops on the planet
I personally don't find that to be true. The jobs that forced Macbooks on me were fraught with development issues all stemming from macOS.
In Windows, I am currently running Windows 11, several versions of Ubuntu, and even NixOS. WSL vastly outclasses VMs on macOS (which barely work anyway on macOS) and the "Linux but not Linux" nature of macOS.
No, I'm not. Apple breaks music applications with every new release. They're all being held hostage due to OpenGL being deprecated on macOS. Apple is the hardest platform to develop creative applications for.
Logic was the absolute best for a while (IMO). Those were good times. Just don't update. I still have OS X 10.4 machines with expensive upgrades. If you're doing serious/pro-level music creation on Mac you're not installing updates until you know every piece of software is supported. It's brutal to try to produce decent-tier music if you want to actually use the computer as a general personal machine (and keep it up to date), though.
Yeah, I had the same impression (admittedly I was already slightly biased once I saw the ad). On a very deep level it shows, that there is some serious lack in core understanding why Apple is useful in the world. How anyone at Apple can see a destructive thing in an ad and say "Yep, that's us" is just beyond me
I had no idea this ad existed until this came through here. But having watched it: seems totally fine.
They're just playing "earth". To make diamonds you apply pressure. The iPad is the diamond resulting from crushing all that creativity into a tiny form factor.
Exactly. Had they invoked the idea of a shrink ray and knolled the tiny items, then pressed those into a unified object, revealed to be the latest iPad (with a needlessly spec-bumped processor and inflated price) then it might have accomplished their objective.
I've seen a few people mistake the outrage felt by artists as them misunderstanding the concept. I'm an artist, and I understand the concept just fine (all these tools are squeezed into the form factor of an iPad! Our thinnest one ever!) but the visual itself is tone deaf. Especially with artists feeling so threatened by tech companies this year, using a metaphor that shows their tools quite literally being crushed is insensitive.
It's a bit like if you made a video that showed my dog getting crushed in a hydraulic press and replaced with a tamagotchi-like device. Like, I get the idea, but it still makes me want to cry.
2. Something that is grossly offensive to decency, morality, or good taste.
3. Resentful anger aroused by a violent or offensive act, or an instance of this.
I think people are just a little critical, more than they are outraged. I have a deep hope that you're not outraged.
I'm typically critical of Apple's value and technology, but I am far more offended by what is a clear oversensitivity to art, and expression, which is by far the greater crime to the arts and to society as a whole.
The idea that people can't make art or express themselves for fear of other artists' outrage is what's truly outrageous.
To set my bias, I'm surrounded by music people and their instrument is basically an extension of themselves, they spent hours everyday touching it, for their whole life since 4. For some it's also the most expensive thing they own.
Some violinists are put off by music videos with violins played in the rain. Apple's ad would be traumatic.
> The idea that people can't make art or express themselves for fear of other artists' outrage is what's truly outrageous.
Eliciting a reaction is part of art, and people getting outraged is par for the course. You're also totally free to outraged at the outrage, that's the cycle.
On the other hand, many rock guitarists have destroyed guitars on-stage as an act of expression. Destruction is a perfectly valid mode of expression this way, and there's no "correct" way to handle an instrument just because one group of individuals idolise the form over its function.
That said, this is exactly what is interesting and "triggering" to many about the ad, IMO. That it emphasises destruction, and therefore is a metaphor for the replacement of material expression with the immaterial, or something along those lines.
Just to add, I play guitar every day. I don't handle my guitar with care: I ding it against walls, toss it onto the couch, fail to clean it as regularly as I should, drive with it in my car using no case to do so. But I love my guitar very much, because it enables me to play beautiful (to me) music. I don't want to be burdened by the "perfection" of my guitar. To each their own, I say.
I think modern guitars have their own niche, with a whole scene of people building, modifying, tweaking their guitars, and a flurry of accessories, variants and innovations that expand the artistic range.
I kinda feel it's not so far from synthesizers in a way.
Wind instruments will also probably fall in the "handle casually" space, while still sensible to being dinged and needing care ?
Classic instruments have a harsher split between the centuries old instruments that just can't be replaced [0], and the modern versions that are left mostly for amateurs or pros expanding their range and aiming for different sounds. That's where pro instruments end up at five~six figures prices, and are definitely not tossed around.
[0] I remember being told by a player that their instrument was there before their birth and will still be in people's hands way after they die.
I think that's broadly true, and possibly an aesthetic thing that in part is what pushes me away from certain types of classical music, but look up, for example, Rushad Eggleston[image: 0] for a counter-example of whether or not classical instruments (cello, here) are "allowed" to be tossed around.
I certainly want to put my guitar down and stop recording artists if I'm going to be faced with violence or any of the lesser definitions of the word "outrage."
You can dislike something without being outraged. Well, right up until someone is outraged with you. Then you can't say that you like or dislike things anymore.
That seems like a terrible society to live in. It's the one we're experiencing.
> I'm surrounded by music people and their instrument is basically an extension of themselves, they spent hours everyday touching it, for their whole life since 4. For some it's also the most expensive thing they own.
Meh. I was very into music growing up, and still play. It doesn't bother me in the least to see a musical instrument that is not my own being destroyed, any more than I have a reaction to seeing a car being destroyed in a movie ("some people really love cars!") or someone blowing up a building ("some people really love architecture!") or an artwork being burned/modified/mutilated ("some people really love art!"), or food being wasted/destroyed ("some people really love cooking!") all of which are more-or-less common in mass media.
(To wit: someone else here pointed out the OK Go music videos where they -- professional musicians! -- destroy all sorts of things, including musical instruments. Those were great, btw.)
While I do not exclude the possibility that some people may have feelings in reaction to seeing a generic musical instrument being destroyed, you can extend this metaphor to any number of areas where it's completely accepted to see similar acts of destruction.
> Some violinists are put off by music videos with violins played in the rain. Apple's ad would be traumatic.
More likely is that a few people are truly bothered, but lots of people engage in performative outrage for attention, which is so common that we have a name for it: pearl-clutching.
A better reference for us could be to look at a monitor getting smudged with greasy fingers, people eating crisps above a keyboard, or a ball pen repeatedly scratching an 8k monitor ?
If you truly value art and expression, then why do you oppose people expressing themselves when they say they don't like the ad?
The society you want is the one we have - an expression was made by Apple, and in response, thousands of artists have made their own expressions. This is what a society of free expression looks like.
The world you're arguing for would be one where the expressions of tech companies are beyond reproach and other people are not allowed to express themselves in response. Why should tech companies get that special treatment?
In my opinion, it says something about your mentality that you value the expression of one group but not the other.
I hate this idea - this apparent concern that Apple is getting "silenced". There is no such thing as being "silenced" when you're a billion dollar company. Moreover, the apparent "silencing" is simply people using their freedom of expression to voice an opinion of opposition. It is the core feature of being able to express oneself.
The ability of these common artists being able to speak their true thoughts against a billion dollar institution - and the institution feeling pressure to respond to them - is the whole point of having the freedom of expression. What else is even the point of allowing discussion, dissent, and expression if you don't want those to have any chance of affecting some outcome?
Interesting. I didn't say any of that. I'm saying "outrage" is too strong. You don't need to cancel someone else to express yourself. Note the downvotes for example.
Maybe they were trying to appeal to the MAGA audience, the same way Kristi Noem was so sure she could win the Vice Presidency by bragging and doubling and tripling down on shooting a puppy and a goat in the face with a shotgun.
> I had no idea this ad existed until this came through here. But having watched it: seems totally fine.
I presume you're a technology person, so maybe it's a good illustration of how tech sensibilities are far from universal and can be extremely tone deaf.
The point of advertisement is to attract people to the product. If the ad alienates enough of their potential user base, it totally makes sense to try to take that back, and make amends. To me, that alone is enough ground for retraction/apologies.
Honestly, yes. Reading the overly emotive language in these comments, it’s pretty clear that many people here are just looking to be outraged and / or got caught up in the herd mentality of it all. I genuinely don’t think that most of the people here would feel this strongly if they hadn’t seen it through the lens of some tweet or click-hungry Apple blog exclaiming “what the hell!”
The error here, on Apple’s part, is that they made an ad that people can so easily lean into hating and publicly attribute it to some sort of intelligent, intellectual attribute that they want to signal to others.
And for the record, I don’t really care about the ad one way or another. It struck me as unremarkable for an Apple ad. It’s blindingly obvious that the right person lit a match at the right time, and this quickly turned into something else. I truly can’t believe that Apple chose now to engage with the peanut gallery.
Yeah, apparently its hard to just move on with your life after watching something you dont like. This making front page on HN is wild. The echo chamber is sealed tight.
The backwards version of the ad is leaps and bounds better. I'm sure some ad "creative" type somwehere is kicking themselves for not having the same idea.
I know it's silly to say "Steve Jobs would never...", but Steve did earnestly love music, it was a huge part of his personality. I absolutely think he would have found this ad distasteful.
I know your statement is sarcastic, but it's disturbing how common this sentiment actually is.
It assumes that humans are unchanging, inflexible automata whose actions can be predicted entirely by what they have said or done, let alone that it doesn't consider the fact that they may simply be a facade. In reality, it is their unstated framework of thinking that guides their speech and actions.
Marketing strategy nowadays is governed by market specialists and when the money is the only thing they value, it comes like that... There's no vision in money
>it is their unstated framework of thinking that guides their speech and actions.
oh don't worry, humanity will probably have BCI technology for that in 20 years. and maybe the rest of society in 40 years.
But yeah, I don't have anything original to say. You're right, but a lot of the powers that be are putting a lot of money into trying to convince society that we're ready to automate out 90+% of labor in all sectors. Creative or otherwise.
I recently got a new iPhone. I'm picturing Steve Jobs yelling at this thing nearly every day. It's mind-blowing how poor the user experience has become compared to early versions of iOS! :\
Judging by the (assumed) sales number of iPad mini, Jobs was not really wrong. And actually iPad mini screen size is around 8 inches (with tiny texts already), 7-in would have been much worse. Well I have said too many useless words here.
The biggest thing that makes me wonder about this ad is: "why?". It certainly costed more to make than an average ad, regardless if it was CGI or real, it should be obvious to anybody who has ever itneracted with humans why crushing a bunch of instruments and tools they use would be a bad idea, all to get it mention more often thanks to society's backlash? Apple isn't some newcomer who needs all the attention they can get, every man, woman, child, dog and cat who can afford apple products has heard of them and I doubt hearing about the brand new iPad pro a million times more is going to change their decision to buy it or not. Most of their userbase is people up to their eyes in the apple ecosystem, all they have to do is send a push notification about the newest iProduct, initiate the planned obsolescence procedure, and watch the cash pour in, the rest would just need to see an ad about the amazing new health app or whatever with a suttel subtext of "and if you don't buy this you're a poor low-status chump lol". But again, I don't run a trillion+ dollar tech company so what do I know?
This also reminds me of those 4chan pranks where they tell people that the new software update made the iPhone waterproof or they can charge it by putting it in a microwave. This time they wouldn't even have to make fake ads: "look, apple said new iPad can't be crushed, post a tiktok of yourself stomping your iPad nothing can go wrong!" (disclaimer: the previous text in quotes is in quotes for a reason; don't do that to any of your devices. There's no warranty to the extent permitted by law, etc etc).
1. Conveys the idea that the ipad has all these creative / cultural digital services on it
2. Conveys the idea that it's thinner than ever
3. Seeing stuff get destroyed by a hydraulic press is attention grabbing, and gets you to look at the TV during that commercial break.
I get why they did it, it's striking. They just didn't understand just how massive the freakout in the creative arts industry is right now over technology companies, and why it would cause a backlash.
On #1, people were very well aware of it already. All this ad does is making them reconsider the company's intent and see it as an enemy trying to destroy the services, instead of a friend making them easier to get.
On #2, it doesn't do that very well. For a start, the press never smashes the tablet itself.
This commercial is very well done with the purpose of making people revolt. Every element is perfect. I wonder if there was some miscommunication and the authors expected the scenes to be used in a different way.
You cannot talk brand identity here. Most of the people here don't know what pays those big salaries. They think that clean code, scrum, pair programming, CI, CD are the critical points of a corporation.
Yes, I am arrogant. Because I read here from 2008, and I know some things.
Apple is just too big of a corporation to be adequate anymore.
This ad is a total f*k up.
Apple is build over the work and ideas of creative people.
This is the direct result of nepotism in a corporate ladder and design by committee.
I've already opined my thoughts on the video, no need to redo here.
Strictly speaking about the article, it feels more like 'go away' lip-service, especially seeing as the bottom contains the ad - still up on Apple's official YouTube. If they really felt it 'missed the mark' and were sorry about it, they'd have probably taken it down.
Apologizing bought them another round of "earned media". Not only did the ad get press, now the apology gets press, exposing the message "there's a new, thinner iPad" to people who didn't see the ad before.
I personally don't care if the ad was good or bad. I'm not an interested shareholder and I'm not in the Apple ecosystem.
But I just learned there's a new iPad via HN.
Maybe they'll take down the ad next week for a third bite at the apple. The first line of the article might read: 'Apple has cracked under pressure after the company's botched launch of the thinnest M4 iPad ever. The company took down its "Crush!" ad on Monday.'
The problem is Apple, for a long time, at least its image built during Steve Jobs era and carried over for quite some time he passed away. (Apple's PR still uses Steve Jobs's as a "tool" in marketing. ) Apple was the friend of Art and creative intent, NOT the digitalisation of everything, that was Microsoft in the 90s.
The bigger problem is that Apple has lost a lot of its soul. A lot of their marketing and advancement are now very technical, such as M4, XDR Retain etc. It feels very non-Apple. And they are at the forefront of trying to Digitalise everything. There is far less Art about it.
The iPad Pro pricing is also non-Apple as if the iPad Pro isn't really for professional usage. And just look at the Apple Pencil Page [1], what happened to slim lineup and forward looking product planning.
A lot of the current Apple just lacks the character and soul of the old Apple, and are now mostly driven by sales and operation efficiency.
Just on the meta-discussion of "who cares about dissecting some ad":
It's alright to consider implied meaning in media IMO. Just because it's misinterpreted by the standards of what the ad team wanted to accomplish, doesn't mean it WASN'T interpreted by people.
Maybe "outrage" is a bit useless if it's only there for screaming at people online, but talking about how crushing things that people love sends the wrong message, is a good thing for people to do. It's not exaggerating at all to me. A lot of people will see this ad spot, and each one is going to form some idea about what it means. That's a lot of power to give Apple.
As easy as it is to interpret it as "fuck your cherished things! get indoctrinated by tech" It is just because tech's true colors have really exposed themselves as of late to be money grubbing criminals to the extreme. It is inevitable that any corporation of sufficient size (only acheivable by evil) will stop being able to be "cute" advertising anymore
I could imagine some other ways of making this spot that I think would've changed the mood but still be cute. At a certain level of evil though, you have to poke at yourself.
Imagine some big team of apple engineers running around music halls and art galleries with notepads (or iPads with an apple pencil), taking notes on everything they see.
Cut back to factory, everyone is working on some comically Apple version of an artistic instrument. I'd absolutely get a laugh out of a big metal and glass piano or a solid aluminium canvas. These are obviously... framed as not ideal. Followed up by one of them frustratedly scrolling around on their iPhone in the break room, realizing lots of posts say "made on procreate on my iPad" or "garageband on iPad". Running back to the factory setting, hurriedly throwing everything in the crusher. Smush. New thin iPad.
I wonder if it's just about the ad or how we feel about the company. My uncontroversial opinion of apple is that they want us to spend as much of our lives in their hyperreal walled garden as possible. People might not have noticed if the ad was from, say, LG.
I'm trying to put a pin in exactly why this is offensive. Yes, you do lose fidelity in digitizing an analog signal, but I don't think that's exactly the problem.
I think it's related to the fact that an ipad isn't just a tool. It's a branded consumer product that has a (relatively) short lifespan. When Apple Corp decides that the device will no longer be supported, it will crease it function. So buying a tablet isn't buying all those art supplies and instruments crammed into one device. You're buying a window into the Appleverse. And yeah I do think that's dystopian.
>I'm trying to put a pin in exactly why this is offensive.
While the corporate read of this would be "look, we've crammed all this cool stuff into an impossibly thin device!", which was probably the marketing pitch... the subtext of an ad like to most regular people is "we are here to destroy and replace everything that you already love".
That's what is confusing a little bit I wonder if people said that about horses when they were replaced by cars isn't the one thing that's constant in this world change? A whole ecosystem that relied on horses being the main mode of transportation died
It’s offensive because the message is “we want to destroy all of these real things and replace them with a simulation that we sell you”. Apple is trying to kill the competition and the competition are now the people who make paintbrushes, violins, etc etc.
With more and more things being mass produced, simulated, and faked, people increasingly value things that feel “real”. Apple with this add is explicitly claiming to destroy the real and trying to sell that.
I have been blown away by how badly people took this. I don’t mean to take away from them, I mean to highlight how fucking CLUELESS I must be. I thought it was a clever commercial and I understood the message as it was intended to be communicated.
It was very surprising to me when I started reading just how badly people hated it.
One of the reason this ad was so badly received is that Apple reputation has been degrading for a while now. And we're seeing the tipping point, they are in their villain arc, not sure if they can repair that.
Reputation is built by the drop, and consumed by the bucket.
Their Apple vision ad was very dystopian feeling and to me looks like the same team did this one. They seem really out of touch. Very negative vibes in these recent ads.
They missed the opportunity of, instead of destroying everything, "compressing" it all in an iPad to show "all the things that you can fit inside that tiny device" or something like that. The destruction seemed pointless.
You show the frame of an ipad, without the insides or the glass on front. But it's actually giant.
A person playing a gameboy puts it into this frame. An artist puts their color pallette in, too. Many people come out, putting more and more into this frame.
A robotic arm puts a sheet of glass ontop of it, but you can still see the contents.
An animation plays from bottom to top, displaying the iPad UI and covering up the items previously visible. In the spots where the individual items were, the iPad UI shows matching apps now.
What? They are quite literally compressing those things in the video. And if you apply compressive force to a bunch of objects using a massive press, the objects would obviously get destroyed.
The metaphor is compression, the visual is crushing. An actual destructive action doesn't work as a metaphor for an imagined conserving action, the connotations of each are almost entirely at odds with each other. The best reason to do it is probably to make the audience deeply uncomfortable, which works if you're making a movie but is maybe not so good for ads.
But they are metaphorically compressing them. If you put a grand piano under a hydraulic press, it doesn't turn into an iPad at the end like it does in the ad.
Compressing in software terms means it doesn't get destroyed. Just compacted. You can uncompress it and it gets restored, maybe with a small loss.
In the ad, the furniture etc was completely destroyed.
If you're being serious, I guess that shows how this could have passed review without anyone going "hang on, is this ad really saying what we want it to be saying...?"
The ad was strangely off-brand for Apple. But I suppose they’ve been trending edgier and moodier in their advertising lately. I just don’t get why - they had a really effective brand to begin with.
Why is it soul crushing? It looks to me like people are projecting their fears and insecurities onto this single ad. Sure, strategically Apple possibly should've caught on before releasing, but people are still being overly sensitive. Should everyone be throwing tantrums about Devin as it's presenting itself to replace developers? It is what it is, things change.
Doesn't really matter if I do because I don't doubt some people feel strong emotions on this matter. But the fact remains, this is an ad and guitars aren't going extinct. People should get a handle on their emotions.
Also, I'm aware, that's why I wrote, "the way Devin is presenting itself". Apple doesn't have a factory where they're constantly crushing pianos either. So check your tone.
HN is great for news, but man it sometimes feels like I am browsing LinkedIn when I go to the comments. The cult of techno optimism and progress at all costs is strong here. It is entertaining, but man it is also depressing.
Imagine an ad for a virtual puppy game using hydraulic press to crush real dogs, showing closeup of twisted broken head and blood splashing on camera and all. Surely you can understand why most people can get very upset seeing that, and dog owners in particular can feel like their soul is being crushed?
Well, artists and musicians can have as much emotional attachment to their tools as pet owners to their pets. To most people the ad is only slight disturbing, but to the artists (and the nostalgic) it’s soul crushing. That’s why Apple is apologizing: they’ve offended their core market.
I cannot fathom how one can compare crushing inanimate objects (commodity ones, at that) to murdering living things.
Even then; we regularly celebrate movies in which human beings are depicted as having their brains splattered out of their heads (The Departed won best picture), so I’m not sure where the basis to complain about depicting even murder in video art comes from. Not everyone likes puppies; pretty much 100% of everyone loves at least some humans.
Sure. I'm not claiming that everyone must find the ad disturbing, just that the ones who do tend to feel much more strongly than those who don't, and their feelings tend to not to be dismissed as hyperbole by the general public. I chose puppies as example since many people love dogs, but you can just as easily substitute your favorite objects / animals here.
If you want to know why someone feels a certain way, you will set yourself up for failure by first explaining to them why they shouldn't feel that way (doubly so if you imply they're "throwing a tantrum" or "being overly sensitive"). You've telegraphed your unwillingness to hear them out, so why should they give you any of their time?
Frankly, I have to wonder if you actually want to know or whether the question was a feint so you could express a very personal criticism less directly. If you weren't comfortable saying it to them directly - maybe that's a sign you still have swipes to edit out.
Technology is going to keep marching forward as it always has. Most of the gadgets being destroyed in the ad are fairly recent innovations. And they had already done their fair share of disruption too. Speakers made live music less necessary, cameras made portrait painting less popular, and typewriters started the slow death of handwriting.
Should we mourn their technological predecessors or recognize we live in an ever-changing world we've only seen a small snapshot of?
And so ad where a guitar and some camera lenses are destroyed isn't "soul-crushing". Saying that is being overly dramatic.
So you open up asking someone for their opinion, and in the next comment you dismiss it with "well you can't stop it".
I'd rather not beat around the bush if you simply wanted to disagree with a user instead of pretending to seek out an alternative POV.
>Should we mourn their technological predecessors or recognize we live in an ever-changing world we've only seen a small snapshot of?
You can still buy vinyl records today that work in a phonograph made in the 60's. It is hard (but not impossible) to truly "kill off" old mediums. It definitely can't be done on the order of decades.
No one's mourning the death of music, because music isn't dead. And you don't get to tell people how they should react and feel to media.
It was a rhetorical question. I can't force people to feel a certain way but I can certainly say that they're being overly dramatic.
And right, exactly, none of these things are actually extinct yet, so why dramatize? And if at some point they die off, it won't be Apple that caused it. It will happen because people stop caring, practising and using the things in question.
"You have no right" here means you have no moral right, not a legal right. Yes, you have every right to make fun of people. But it is a jerk move. It's the prototypical jerk move.
As for hypocrisy - if someone says, "you're acting like a jerk" and you say, "I have every right to make fun of you," you're not going to be able to convince me these are equivalent positions.
Ok, well I was talking about a moral right then, and not a legal right.
I actually think the jerks are the ones who are over reacting and not engaging with the substance of the disagreement, and the moral position is from the ones who don't take their overreaction seriously.
If you want to say that everyone should just chill out, and not take any of this seriously , then that would be agreeing with me completely as that's my entire point and motivation.
> if someone says, "you're acting like a jerk"
No actually. That's not what they are doing.
Instead what they are doing is dismissing well reasoned criticism off hand without addressing the argument.
Instead of making a counter argument, where they try to defend the silly overreaction with arguments, instead they do the equivalent of saying "well that's just our/your opinion, man! You have no (moral?) right to tell people otherwise.".
They are the ones hitting the eject button from any sort of discourse.
And if you flee and retreat from actually engaging, no that should not be taken seriously.
> you're not going to be able to convince me these are equivalent positions.
Correct they aren't equivalent. The other person is worse. Way worse. Because they are the ones who fled to not addressing the substance of the matter.
It is quite reasonable. And the other person had the jerk reaction, by instead of addressing it, they instead say that it is just that person's opinion, and they have "no right".
That is not engagement. That is the poor behavior.
Two wrongs don't make a right. When your position becomes "I have a right to mock you," you've lost the argument in my eyes. You've confessed that argument is insufficient and you need to rely on insult to articulate yourself in this instance. Maybe you're right, maybe you could have articulated a point that would sway me if you had given it some more thought, but that's not evident in what's in front of me.
That comment isn't my favorite, but it isn't an attack. It's still an assertion of the commenters position, with language that's stronger than I'd prescribe but within bounds in my estimation. Flag and/or downvote it if you disagree.
If you want to know what I personally believe, on a postage stamp, I wouldn't say people "have no right" to make such assertions (I don't think it's a productive or interesting line of conversation), but I think it's a bad call to make them (I think it's reductive and misses the forest), so I'm sympathetic to that perspective.
If you think that the reason people play guitar is that they haven't come across a better piece of technology, then I think you fundamentally misunderstand. I think these people simply value certain experiences and ways of relating to the world that you don't value (which is not a criticism, that's fine). Maybe it would seem less like an overreaction to you if you shared their values. Maybe you would have a more interesting time if you tried to understand what those values were instead of trying to explain to people why they're wrong for holding them.
ETA: I think this nugget of wisdom from Pirate Software is good to keep in mind.
People frequently express themselves in ways that are infuriating and unhelpful (myself included, embarrassingly often). Learning to cut through the noise and learn from them despite that is a valuable social skill. We can't change the fact that people act this way, but we can decide how we will receive and respond to it.
I understand we do these things because we find enjoyment in them. But none of these instruments and gadgets are even going extinct. There might be real shifts happening in our culture but at the end of the day this is just an ad. The emotional baggage that causes someone to be hurt by this should probably be handled at a personal level.
And thanks for sharing your thoughts. There isn't anything you said I'd disagree with. My original point was quite simple: people shouldn't be so soft. Although, I guess that's not really helpful and me saying that won't flip a switch in someone's head.
Appreciate you taking the time to consider. I just feel I should note:
> I understand we do these things because we find enjoyment in them.
It's not that people enjoy making art (though they usually do). People have a much more profound relationship to art than that. I'll try to illustrate in a way that's more grokkable to the technically inclined.
Once I was injured and couldn't use a computer other than a phone for 10 months. I was very frustrated and depressed. I felt like I had lost access to a part of myself.
There were definitely moments that were soul crushing. In particular times when I couldn't get software to work, because I couldn't even extract an error message or any relevant telemetry from the confines of a nerfed operating system, so I couldn't even begin to troubleshoot. I wasn't accustomed to my computer being a black box I couldn't interrogate. It ran counter to my image of myself and my abilities.
One time, several years later, a friend almost spilled wine on my ergonomic keyboard (which I absolutely need to use a computer after my injury). I told them to be careful. They pretended to spill it again. I told them that absolutely wasn't funny to me. They told me I was overreacting.
Do you think that's because I enjoy using Linux and writing Python? Or do you think there could be a bit more than that going on?
From a tech person POV the big difference is I buy a camera I can do what I want on it, I buy and iPad and have to pay Apple a tax for all computing that goes through it.
They aren’t some kind of mystical magic talisman, just a bunch of wood and metal. Might as well say you need a seriously good argument to crush a dining room table.
People struggle to find someone to take their crappy upright pianos for free because they are worthless. Violin players refer to cheap student instruments as violin shaped objects. You can have a trumpet shipped to your door with same day delivery for $90 on Amazon.
Yeah you're right, my dad has such a piano. It's still fun when someone who can play comes over. And my 5yr old daughter has taken a liking to it so maybe we'll enroll her in classes, maybe that will be the piano that made her discover her love of music. That probably would not have happened with an iPad pro.
"The guitars are all defects. They're manufacturing defects. You know, we want to blow up guitars but we don't actually want to keep musical instruments out of the world." https://youtu.be/2dFdNUz2cQc?t=73
OK Go identified the potential issue beforehand and found a solution that would work for them.
If I had access to a hydraulic press, there’s plenty of times I might have crushed my guitar over the years. Learning an instrument has been very difficult and frustrating for me.
Yeah, a single piano is like a portal to another world manifested by beautiful, expressive music. Possibly a life-changing object for a person (or even a whole family) to receive one in their home. It's an insult to the arts to suggest that an iPad is somehow the distillation of that. Nothing surprises me anymore, but it is still disappointing to see such a tone-deaf creation from a company that has been so closely aligned with artists/musicians in the past couple decades.
Oh dang, I didn't know plastic keyboards can produce booming, auditorium-filling sound covering a broad spectrum of frequencies, somehow perfectly replicating the audio produced by striking padded hammers against carefully-tuned/tensioned strings, modulated by subtly-actuated dampening or sustaining pedals. Cool! Good to know. Why spend $20k on the real thing when I could just get a $150 keyboard?! No clue why orchestras even bother with all that expensive wood and brass stuff, now that you point out this astonishing fact.
It was very painful to see musical instruments and cameras/lenses destroyed. These things are so dear to many creative people that it feels like watching someone's arm being cut off. No matter how cool the camerawork is, it just sends a very negative message about the product and their marketing team.
I play guitar and I didn’t find it painful to watch. I thought it was a cool idea illustrating all those instruments being compressed into a tiny device.
I don't understand the outrage. It's cgi, and very obvious cgi at that. The items bend and explode in an exaggerated cartoon fashion.
It's whimsical. No instruments have been destroyed. No actual paint has been spilled. We don't get mad at destruction in a pixar movie. We cheer when rock stars smash their actual guitars after a live performance. We don't live in a culture that abhors destruction.
Do people just not recognize CGI? Is that's what's happening here?
The outrage is that supposed culture is being destroyed and turned into a soulless apple device. Apple implies that you can replace all the things with the ipad, which isn't true- you can't perfectly emulate a trumpet, for example. All in all a dystopian take
I don't understand it either. I do creative writing, and it didn't shock me or made me feel bad. I thought the ad was meant to show what kind of CGI you could make with an iPad.
Having watched a whole bunch of hydraulic press content, it didn't stand out as particularly unreal. Books for instance violently explode when compressed.
Audiences do, in fact, cheer when a rock star smashes his guitar.
And for me it does matter it's CGI. Because actual destruction is not the same as simulated destruction. Cartoon violence can be funny but real violence never is.
It’s not about the CGI, but the sentiment it expresses. Hugh Grant summed it up well: “The destruction of the human experience. Courtesy of Silicon Valley.”
But that's not what I see! What I see is a beautifully crafted CGI animation that passionate people worked super hard on. The ad is technically very well done and the music suits it perfectly. And the message is about tech as a product for creative expression as opposed to content consumption.
The ad isn't about destruction just because it features destruction. We don't apply this standard to movies, books, or any other creative work.
Personally, given how much people have shared the ad, I would say it was a successful ad. I pretty much try to avoid all ads, and rarely remember any, but this one came in my twitter feed at least 50 times if not more and all of these were organic reshares by folks I follow. Given how Apple purchases work I think it would only positively impact their bottom line. Overall, I didn't like the ad at all but it is memorable at a visceral level.
This feels like another example of people getting mad at a depiction of a thing rather than at the actual thing. Like getting mad at violence in movies, or at books with racism in them. Yeah, big tech is actively trying to take away your livelihoods, and you can interpret this commercial as accidentally symbolizing that. But the problem is that it's actually happening, not that they filmed a skit about it. The commercial doesn't make it worse, and you don't get anything in return for all the effort required to get pissed off about it. Even if posting an angry rant on Twitter doesn't burn a lot of calories, you'd still be better off doing almost anything else.
How do you attack the actual thing? Some are trying with copyright lawsuits and potential gov't policy proposals I guess but it's much easier to attack a single company and get an army of outraged allies over something easily digestible (an advertisement).
I agree that there's two things: doing something about it, which is hard, and complaining about it, which is easy. What I'm saying is, if you're going to complain about something, might as well complain about the real problem rather than a harmless symbolic representation of the problem.
Except that it makes some of the most relevant Apple customers see them as an enemy that is out to crush their dreams... and are sharing it so their friends get the memo and feel the same way.
It was clear to me that that's what they wanted to express but their chosen visuals didn't convey that well at all. Expanding outwards from the iPad would have made a lot more sense.
I think the #1 third party app is probably more responsible for this sentiment than the device itself.
People can’t emotionally separate their hatred and disgust at corporate social media taking over and censoring and monetizing the public square with the physical device that it leverages.
On one hand, we have Facebook and Instagram. On the other, every person interacting with a cop has a cloud-uploading HD camera at the ready.
For every Twitter, everyone can video call their parents/grandparents at any time for as long as they want for ~free from ~anywhere.
To me it was weird to see a company who tries to brand themselves as environment friendly destroy what seems to be perfectly fine objects, just for an ad. Even if it was CGI or if the objects were defected.
Was it weird, though? Environmentally friendly branding for companies has never required a company to be environmentally friendly, it's almost always just about being fashionable and avoiding accountability.
You’re just looking for things to feel emotional about now. “Even if it was CGI”. That’s really just leaning into an uncharitable interpretation for the sake of it.
I wonder how much of the outrage is just manufactured by a marketing firm. I noted that mainstream outlets were writing about the outrage when the youtube clip had just 70,000 views.
I honestly don't even feel like I live in the same world as the majority of commenters on the Internet anymore. To be outraged because apple crushed some stuff for an ad is a new low, or I guess a new high for fake hysterically.
The ad did its job perfectly. It created controversy and that spread iPad news way further than paid ads do. It pays to be controversial, not good or on message these days.
They are destroying everything analog used by humans for fun and creativity, including a piano, a trumpet, paint, an arcade machine, synthesizers, and toys. In return we have one soulless bland iPad. If you have any object remotely similar to the ones depicted as destroyed, you will feel anger and pain at the sight of destruction.
Crushing the tools of art and fun into a tiny technological device is maybe a little tone-deaf in the context of AI trying to crush all scrapeable human creation into a model that would fit on that same iPad.
> People have just become overly sensitive it seems.
I hear this said a lot, but know of no psychological evidence that
people have actually become more "sensitive" (by which I mean
neurotic, defensive etc).
What's happened is that people became better informed, educated, and
communicative. They're more comfortable with expressing. And that's
mainly down to technology which facilitated cultural change.
It is natural for that to turn inward. This is the evolution of
critique. It took many years from Gutenberg to Vanity Fair. Literary
criticism only emerged once the medium itself was mature.
The same thing is happening in technology as Lewis Mumford predicted.
Technological critique. has come of age with AI.
Anybody so unsophisticated as to ignore that, like Apple, is doomed.
No one gives a shit how "thin" or "powerful" your gadget is. They care
what it means to them and their values. Apple, of all organisations,
should be mindful of that.
>No one gives a shit how "thin" or "powerful" your gadget is. They care what it means to them and their values. Apple, of all organisations, should be mindful of that.
Would you prefer a world wherein people aren't allowed to speak their mind instead?
Stop being so sensitive about people "being sensitive" and engage in the discussion instead of dismissing it.
All this complaining about "cancel culture" is just complaining that other people are using their freedom of speech in a way that you don't like. This is what freedom is speech means - disagreement. Stop whining about people disagreeing with you.
Either address the arguments they're making to further the conversation, or deal with it.
It's fine to voice opinions but why does Apple feel it needs to apologize?
No animals were harmed, no protected groups offended.
Apple could have just internally said, "well that one kinda didn't work well",pull the ad and move on.
Ok, but disagreeing is not what cancel culture is.
It’s attacking someone relentlessly, canceling their contracts, getting them fired, kicked out of institutions, debanked.
I’m not sure if you are pretending to not know that, or really just don’t know anything on the topic at all. But either way, it’s kind of showing your cards.
People complaining on Twitter don't have the power to fire/remove anybody. All they can do is spread allegations. If those allegations are true and bad enough that your employers or associates want to disassociate themselves with you, that is your (or your associates') fault, not the whistleblowers'.
Employers don't just fire you because a Twitter mob told them to. They do it because they learned about your bad behavior and no longer have faith in you.
If you don't like being fired:
- Don't do stuff your employers will find distasteful
- Vote for candidates to end at-will employment and give stronger employee rights
There you go again, complaining about my argument instead of refuting it.
It's not about liberals or conservatives, it's about ordinary people not liking things and spreading the word, ideally so people with the power to change things hear it. Conservatives cancel too, e.g. the Bud Light / Dylan Mulvaney boycott.
Things seem to escalate quite quickly now with no rationale. There seem to be no middle ground these days. My reference to cancel culture is that while it isn't there yet, Apple may have felt the need to apologize before it got there.
If you prefer to be a jerk, that's certainly an option, yes. Just don't be surprised or blame "cancel culture" when the people you belittle stop inviting you to parties.
No one's like crying out here or jumping off a bridge. People are just kinda ticked, or disappointed. There's no "cancel culture" happening here. Why such a reactionary interpretation of the ad's poor reception? o_O
I'm wondering if this is a consequence of employing your own internal ad agency – maybe you are at risk of being out of touch with the audiences you are looking to reach.
Apple ads (created by TBWAChiatDay) used to be part of the Zeitgeist: 1984, Think Different, iPod silhouette, Mac vs. PC, etc. Now the only Apple ads that people talk about are the cringiest of the cringe: this iPad ad, the 'Mother Earth' bit from last year's iPhone/Watch keynote, etc.
Without Hanna and Lauri, you can't have a good hydraulic press moment.
It was obvious from the moment it started that it was CGI, so... no actual destruction occurred. Rewatching it, it seems rather random, like they wanted cinematographic moments, without any actual narrative. It was designed to be forgettable. Not a good use of marketing budget.
It certainly was not obvious to me that it’s CGI, I had to go back and check after reading your comment, and from what I’ve seen online most people think it’s real.
If their intention was to communicate that it’s CGI then that was an abject failure.
Actual destruction isn't relevant. The idea of destroying musical instruments because a new iPad is in town, is jarring. The ad lingers on pointless destruction. Why not spend the time showing the new iPad? It's sad when advertising is stuck so far up its own clever-hole, it loses grip on reality.
Edit: I just watched it again. It's definitely not obvious CGI, not sure how you can say that. Camera lenses shattering, paint spilling, wood splintering realistically.
The press itself is ridiculous, you can't have two skinny cylinders like that pressing out a platen that wide and expect to get any reasonable forces. Maybe it's too much time watching the limitations of the 150 ton press, but it all just seemed like someone's idea of what a press is, instead of an actual press... in hyper-real cgi.
If I were the advertising director - I would have people reach into the glass to take out large unwieldy instruments to expressively use them and then pack them all back into the glass of an iPad and walk off. This version suggests you are unlocking all of these instruments rather than destroying them .
I appreciate that consumers finally vocalized their concern over cynicism & nihilism in advertising. It's a long term , downward trend of misanthropy , banality & nihilism in advertising messaging.
Once you see it you can't unsee it. I hope this ad helps improve awareness.
I feel like Apple said the quiet part out loud: they intend to replace creativity and all that surrounds it with a consumer-ready wafer-like device, sort of a Soylent Green replacement for human ingenuity.
I enjoyed the ad for the same reason I and millions of others enjoy The Hydraulic Press Channel [1], its just fun to watch stuff get squished. I imagine that's "what they were thinking", for the cadre that keep asking "what were they thinking?"
I genuinely have trouble seeing how in good faith the ad could have been interpreted as anything other than "This is all the stuff that's being put into your iPad"
Always wonder how blind these company people are? If they would've shown this (the plan/proposal of the marketing agency) to anyone, they would've said it's a bit... Strange?
It was a depressing advertisement. I don't know why you would want that to be your message as a company.
I know that wasn't their intention but thats what the message came across as. Some arm of the company doesn't allow people to speak up if they have reservations about something -> thats how that one made it through the quality filter. AKA there were people on the inside definitely knew that there would be a backlash on this but probably weren't allowed to speak up.
I've never seen a commercial that could also work as Thomas Friedman's "The World is Flat" metaphor. One size fits all, indeed.
This dystopian ad is far more emblematic of Apple today than the bland Disneyfied ads they normally make.
All these arcade cabinets, vinyl records and expensive instruments are things Apple has tried to flatten into a skeumorphic touchscreen simulacrum for years.
I surprised Apple approved the add, because it depicts the brand as a soul-crushing industrial force. The machine is a beast of steel and hydraulic pressure, which constantly bears down against a variety of fun and inspiring things. I don't really care about the particular items that were destroyed, but the theme is clearly one of destruction. We don't see the iPad being made. We see what is literally depicted as a remanent. That's not how Apple should want their brand or their products viewed.
Edit: What's concerning is that Apple is smart. People watched this ad and I have to assume they thought what I thought. So... what's the psychology of deciding to convey this message? Is it a threat? Is it narrative-forming? Is it subversive admission (canary) from within the company? I mean... it's very reminiscent of the 1984 ad, except with Apple being the machine. Of course, it's also possible that they just made a mistake of judgment and missed the mark, as they say. IDK
I can't comprehend the hubris it took to conceive the idea that an iPad could replace an acoustic piano. Heck, not even a piano -- that an iPad could replace the sheet music on that piano, typeset and printed beautifully on a piece of paper that has infinite resolution and incredible texture when you touch it.
That ad is the most cringy ad I've seen for a long time, which is a hard bar to clear. It makes me physically uneasy.
And if you analyze it, it says "no matter who or what you are, a giant corporation would crush you and put you inside a very small shiny metal box, and you better like it".
Could someone who feels passionately about this help me understand why?
In my eyes the ad was clearly trying to be playful and metaphoric. I feel like people are are taking the ad far too seriously and literally then jumping to the conclusion that it's implying a message that very obviously wasn't intended.
I'm not saying the ad couldn't have been better, but I can't understand the controversy here at all. Yet, I seem to be in a small minority.
Could someone explain specifically what it is that they find upsetting about the ad? And not just "they crushed real objects", but specifically why it is that you find that so troubling, etc? Objects get broken all the time for media for lesser purposes and with much less creativity. Is it the context here that is the problem?
Ad was distasteful and horrible. Biggest problem I see is that, Nobody in the apple decision making body thought this 'missed the mark', it took a global reaction for them to get it. Wonder how deep they are in their lair with a pigeonholed view of the life.
Good art is art that makes you feel something. The ending of Requiem For A Dream is good art, as is this ad.
It may be unfit for purpose as an ad, given how many people reacted with negative emotions, but I don’t think they did anything wrong that warrants an apology (except perhaps to their shareholders for running what may turn out to be an ineffective ad).
Then again, all publicity is good publicity.
I liked that the ad had a hollywood destruction-for-destruction’s sake spectacle to it. I wondered how much was CG and how much wasn’t, and how much stuff was actually destroyed. Some of the closeup shots must have been practical, or CG these days is way better than I realized.
It ultimately doesn’t matter, though. Destruction on this scale is irrelevant.
If any other company does it, their user wont care. Apple is special because it really is a form of self-induced-hypnosis of the 'magic of apple', which is what people buy into. This ruins the illusion, so to speak.
For folks questioning or arguing why someone might have a strong emotional reaction to this, and still carry a phone in their pocket, or still use Apple products daily, or even just like Apple…
Humans are complex. We do things that aren’t in our best interest, we make bad calls, change our minds, have split opinions about things. We’re hypocrites.
And that’s okay. We live in a complex world where the consequences of any decision have vast positive and negative effects, setting off further complex consequences. It can be overwhelming and while we probably want to live by a single, dependable, rational, reasonable code-of-ethics, often we’re just trying to make it through the day.
I'm curious if they CGI'd your basket of puppies in there (after all, you can take puppy pictures on your iPad!), would you not be bothered by it at least a little bit?
> (Apple) released a “Crush!” commercial that shows things like a piano, record player, paint, and other works flattening under the pressure of a hydraulic press. At the end, only one thing remains: an iPad Pro.
It felt so sad and tone deaf, a celebration of disposability. I don't think Google ever felt the need to apologize for that one, but then again it was a lot less... graphic than this new Apple ad. It's safe to say Apple outdid Google in this competition.
It should have been going into the iPad, and then inside the iPad an expansive wonderland filled with all these great things. Opening, increasing, expanding.
They did the exact opposite lol. They smooshed into a smaller thing; decreasing, narrowing, reducing.
I think that may be their target demographic though. People who love apple want minimal, simple, less. So maybe it was genius after all. And they get free publicity because it’s controversial. Apple buyers will still buy the product. They want smooshed technology, or they’d be on Linux or Winblows.
Brings to mind the OK GO music video with all the exploded guitars that they stated were already junk. Spilled paint is reminiscent of their videos too.
They also smashed pianos in the Rube Goldberg video, and a TV with a sledge. Now I wonder if that was a 1984 reference.
Sledgehammering a little TV was done in the video for Gary Numan - We Are Glass which predates the 1984 ad, which supposedly led to the video being banned from Top of the Pops: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KWR8vitO6wQ&t=67
I like to think that there are subversives working in ad agencies and that such gaffes are intentional.
(I know it’s probably not true, it just makes the dystopia a bit more entertaining)
In this case the subtext would be something like: AI is coming and will provide all of the content for the rubes to consume on their shiny iPads, and damn the creatives who used to make a meaningful living creating it. But at least we can raise a middle finger via this ad, and mock the execs who okayed it!
Ads for multi-function products have featured the single-use products they're intended to replace being crushed, shoved into them, destroyed, thrown away, etc for decades. Artists are just extremely salty right now about being replaced by AI so they're sensitive.
Since Apple apologized for the ad, it seems they, too, agree that it wasn't a good ad.
They wouldn't apologize for something if there were nothing wrong with it.
Personally, it was too real. It was CGI, sure. But that hydraulic press crushed (destroyed) the tools humans use to create every handmade thing we consider beautiful.
Apple absolutely intended to convey the meaning that Apple an iPad can replace a piano or a trumpet or paint.
Apple, and west coast US companies in general, are the biggest promoters of political over-correctness, "inclusion", "diversity", etc. (to put it in non-offensive terms).
It would be extremely hypocritical for them to simply dismiss the feelings of people. So, even if it doesn't make sense, they're obligated to apologize to be consistent with their own discourse.
The digital world is flattening our real experiences and selling the result back to you.
The entire ad is performance art. The artists made an illustration of cruelty, then got the company and CEO to not only approve it but post it on their twitter. It’s incredible. Banks himself couldn’t pull off such a thing.
I think a truly clever artist sold this under the radar to Apple and I applaud them.
I would never have known about this product launch except for this brouhaha. Now I know their launch, the key feature their selling, and the concept backing it. What a coup for whoever is running this campaign.
An apology is a genius addition. More free coverage for them, and they get to "be doing the right thing" while getting it!
This might be true if the person watching it had just been defrosted from cryogenic storage. Apple releasing another iPad update is not an uncommon occurrence.
I don't find it offensive, but I do think the idea would have worked better if they visualized it as a compactor, and didn't visualize things getting destroyed. It doesn't make sense to focus on all the destruction and then be left over with a fancy iPad. It's a compact version of a whole bunch of destroyed things?
Perhaps it would have been palatable if the items had been compressed in a way that didn't seem destructive.
There may be a collective resistance to playful depictions of destruction, possibly as an energetic response to the pervasive images of destruction from conflicts in Ukraine, Israel, and Gaza. This may not be the appropriate time for such depictions.
For my taste, the artistic part of the ad works, the marketing part awful.
The music, photography, … definitely triggers something in me, but is creepy AF. The irony though, is that the creepy feeling is the reality to me, digital tools seem to be crushing the analog ones. And I don’t mean it as something bad as I am old, but it is how I feel about it.
Actually what’s great about it is that the tone is the exact opposite of the famous commercial where the individualist shatters the mind control movie. However they both share this soulless concrete aesthetic. Apple is now the soulless corporate machine. Love to see Apple fail and not realize it’s own failure, that is modern Apple.
Here's a better implementation of a similar concept. Instead of crushing musical instruments and other nice things in your life, those nice things merge into... a Blackberry.
I haven't seen anywhere but maybe this thread knows: all those objects were CGI, surely, right?
Like I can't imagine it was possible to make the trumpet and other objects "crumple" at the perfect spot to not disrupt the Rube Goldberg crush cascade.
If the objects were real, they must have destroyed a lot of pianos.
What’s most surprising is how the ad went live without nobody pressing the ”Retry” button to build a new ad idea, neither in the chain of command at Apple nor at the creative agency, if any.
It’s like everybody everybody, one after the other in the chain of decisions, eluded their responsability. Why?
A thousand iPads cannot offer the experience of a single piano key. And vice versa. So the direct comparison the ad is implying is failed. It could involve 1000 old mobile phones or 100 DSLR cameras or 10 PCs. But then it would be uninteresting and nobody would care
People forget that it's something like 5% of people who participate in online discussions, and it tends to be the most vocal outrage prone people.
I would guess the average person will see the headline, watch the ad, and think "Meh, it was kinda neat....anyway let me check out what the new iPad offers."
Anyone who's worked in "creative" field and has stepped in an art gallery would tell you that it's very normal to play on emotions, exaggerate and make viewers feel intense emotions. I don't know who the apology is meant for.
I think the blow back from this is due to people over thinking and looking for something to be upset about. The "symbolism" in the ad isn't creative tools being destroyed, it's the tools being combined together.
They should have made it with teleporters that beam the items into the iPad. For some reason we don't think of teleporters as destructive (when in actuality they shred their targets down to the individual atom level.)
I still think Apple should be pretty damn proud of the fact that so many generations later they still have a brand so powerful that this misstep can cause such a furor.
Any other company would have been able to put out this ad and nobody would care.
There are some videos going around on Twitter that show the Apple ad in reverse. It's kind of cool how that simple change also reverses the impression of destruction into one of creation and appreciation for the arts
I don’t understand the piano part like is there an app that does keyboard? Are they aware acoustic pianos sound better in person than any other piano sound implementation and it has basically always been that way?
Will the marketing executive that green-lit this disaster face any career repercussions? I highly doubt it. Some junior VT tech will probably get all the blame and be forced to clear our their cubicle desk.
Looks like someone watched too much of those hydraulic press vs things videos. Of all the ways to send the message that iPad is a creative device, which can become the instrument of choice, they went with this.
The comments on the wider internet reminds me of the 90s and 2000s when bands like Nirvana, Pearl Jam and Silverchair were being ridiculed for smashing up their instruments on stage. We’ve come full circle.
The irony in the ad was monumental. Apple crushed perfectly working objects of creativity that would have lasted for decades and some even centuries for an iPad that will become e-waste in 5–10 years.
I had planned to use it to write code on the go but found it extremely limiting.
All of the power inside the tablet and it’s locked behind the Apple jail.
Have seen a few people use it as a laptop replacement though. They bring Bluetooth kb and mouse. But the experience seemed very janky to me. I asked to observe their experience and person was just web browsing lol.
I do, I have an Air on my desk on a Logitech keyboard cover, it’s like a mini laptop where I do casual web browsing, access my piCorePlayer web UI to play music from my NAS or use Spotify/Apple Music to play tracks through the piCorePlayer. I also watch YouTube frequently on it.
The iconography was very bad, but I thought it was kind of wild how many people were like "I now blame apple for all the bad things happening to creatives because of technology in general"
What Apple should have done is play off of "Honey, I shrunk the kids". Get Rick Moranis out of retirement to accidentally shrink all those instruments and everything else into an iPad.
Wasn't the exploding emoji an obvious giveaway that this wasn't supposed to be taken that seriously and was partly in jest? I think we may just have a lot of pent-up anger.
The irony is that it know kind of feels like more honest then it's supposed to be, digital tools, with Apple leading the charge, crushing traditional artistry & creativity.
Probably a mix. The paint is likely real. The eye popping rubber ball emoji is likely CGI.
Edit: I take that back. My money is on full CGI. I can’t imagine how a brass trumpet would break when placed above an arcade with no physical deformation on the arcade below it.
A trumpet is a lot weaker in that direction than you're assuming, and a plywood arcade cabinet is a lot stronger than you're giving it credit for.
I'd be very surprised if a bunch of thin brass tubes transmitted enough for force to cause any deformation in an arcade cabinet when being crushed in that direction.
Not to diminish the other conflicts but currently the same process is applied to History, Justice and people, all are crushed without any remorse and it happens in Palestine.
I'm just shocked apple thinks we need a thinner Ipad. What am I going to do with it, prepare food? Shave? Will I need to wear gloves to prevent lacerating my fingers?
It's about Apple not reading the room. The creative community see that AI vendors assume that they have the right to ingest IP without compensation, train their models on it, resell derivative works based on it, and there is nothing that can be done about it. Then Apple releases this stupid ad suggesting that all tools of the creative profession will be destroyed after they get packaged into a tablet that can do nothing by itself unless it is loaded with samples and algorithms based on the creative works of others. In short, artists are being told that while AI is stealing value from them and their creations, Apple will steal their tools and creations and put them behind the iPad paywall. It's one more middle finger to the creatives from the company that used to say "Think Different". Stupid and unnecessary.
I thought it was cool. A bunch of stuff that would end up in a land fill anyway. People love to be offended these days.. and then apologizing for an ad?
Great ad. The part where the little stress ball rolls out and gets crushed was a good laugh. I wonder if this was CGI or if they really crushed that stuff.
An ironic way to say “Our devices are good. Put them down and go and play outside before the world around you disintegrates while you were distracted.”
Steve Jobs would have probably fired whoever suggested this ad, at best. He always saw the Mac as an enabler of and conduit for peoples' creativity, not a replacement for other forms of it.
Jobs' death is truly tragic in the context that Apple - and by extension, the rest of the tech world - could have gone in a very different direction if he were still around. He would probably be screaming his head off at the idea of generative AI.
Seriously and sincerely, I'd like to hear a dozen definitions of what
people think that "mission" is in 2024.
I think we long departed from "making the world a better place". And
yet the change simply cannot be explained by greed, money, or
obsession with growth.
Surely a lot of the venture capitalists that frequent this forum must
be as confused as the next person if they still hold on to the ideal
of "doing good with money".
What I see is the rise of a terrifying quasi-religious anti-humanist
cult with overtones of masochism and self-hatred (of human life).
I'm no big fan of Steve Jobs, but clearly he would be horrified by
many of the anti-human sentiments expressed daily in forums like this.
Is it too late to redefine digital technology as humane, and return to
the roots of SV [0] ?
Between e/acc+singularity, hyper-libertarianism and the actual locked-in, rent-seeking, culture-choking techno-feudalism we're getting, it's always been pretty obvious to me that the "mission" is to become the secular equivalent of a god, and then reign eternal, just like the world-building genre of games primes them for.
Too bad it's a big club and everybody here won't be in it, eh.
> Too bad it's a big club and everybody here won't be in it, eh.
There is some uncomfortable truth in this.
Those who identify with technology, and take for granted being its
masters, controllers and benefactors, end up the most disappointed.
The hoi polloi are happily indifferent to the cargo cult of shiny
stuff that comes and goes, which they buy because their friend got
one.
But those intelligent enough to know what we could have had, what's
possible and what's lost, will feel betrayed by larger forces that
nobody controls, whatever "big club" you imagine yourself in.
It's one thing for a man to lose to lose his faith. It's something
else when a priest does.
Well, most revolutions succeed when the overproduced elites join the masses to overthrow the rulers. So it's probably a good thing in this case if the priests lose their faith, as long as they do it quickly enough. Otherwise we'll all just be NPCs in Altman's and Zuckerberg's metaverses.
Yes. I am questioning whether I have some emotional deficiency because I just don’t get why people are reading so far into it and, to me, it perfectly encapsulates how people are constantly looking for something to be offended by.
I thought the ad was bad, but for different reasons. The ads and presentation have become so over produced that it feels like some giant inside joke for a company that is out of touch. I think their culture has mostly become (or maybe always was) sniffing each others farts and telling them how great that last one was.
So I suppose it is somewhat ironic in the sense that I imagine their own leadership are the most likely to be offended by the symbolism in the first place.
Anyway I can’t wait for the M4 MacBooks. Take my money, Tim.
> Yes. I am questioning whether I have some emotional deficiency
Yeah, you probably do. Take a hobby or art form that you’re really passionate about and have spent a lot of time on. Something that when you’re doing it, all is right in the universe. Doing this activity your tools become an extension of yourself. They are valuable and beautiful things to you, and you become somewhat attached to them.
Now someone crushes these, your favourite tools and instruments and equipment, in a hydraulic press and says that an iPad can replace them.
If you still don’t see how this could be unsettling to someone who gets so much enjoyment and purpose out of them, and instead view this as looking for a reason to be offended, you probably have some sort of emotional deficiency. You could be autistic, or have psychopathic or sociopathic tendencies.
It says: you don't need those anymore. Just buy the iPad. Look at all this space you'll save. All the items you won't need to buy. Minimalism, utility, fun.
I think people who get offended by seeing objects being destroyed are being hyper-hypocritical, because I bet you all replace your phones every few years, replace your cars every few years, replace all of your stuff even if the older versions work fine. But here you get offended. Take a good look in the mirror is all I can say.
We all know what the ad is supposedly saying. But there's something called context. This add doesn't exist in isolation.
In my view, is not offensive due to the destruction of the objects, but by the deeper meaning of crushing the cultural representations of human creativity with this machine.
The ad literaly presents a better way to express creativity (according to Apple). How would anyone can think it tries to crush it? I wouldn't use the word "deep" in your example, but rather "shallow".
Also, everything can be offensive if you dig deep enough.
And if you dig really deep, then even knowledge will start looking as only faith.
I don't understand why they need to apologize for this.
At worst, it was a waste of a lot of money over things that seem pretty nice like a trumpet or a piano. Those could have been used by a school or something. And that's the worst criticism I could think of. If the entire thing were 3D graphics, then I actually would be extremely impressed.
Otherwise it's just an ad, and apologizing makes them look weak, not that it will affect them at all.
It's othering to the extreme seeing people get so riled up by this. Some years ago the "kids in Africa could have eaten that inedible-object" meme was popular to make fun of people that gets angry about other people destroying or throwing away their own property. Guess we need to bring it back. If you get a strong emotional response to this ad your emotional priorities are seriously out of calibration.
Your internal view of the brand is being changed or challenged. This causes a type of psychological stress. The iPad is only a machine but Apple the brand has carefully created a brand with emotions feeling and thoughts around it.
People invest themselves in their ideas. the ad isn't concerning for what it does in the ad, but for how it is changing the internal feeling of the brand.
It is like remembering when thinking about a car changed for you. From just a car as a kid to something else, something with more meaning. It's why all car adverts are about emotions.
Firstly the brand feelings exist even with people who don't own anything to do with the brand. Again with the cars, car adverts mainly seek to install sentiment in non car owners.
Secondly, I think the ad "as art" on it's own is disturbing and menacing.
Tangent, but related; I wish Apple would now stop shaving mm off the iPad's thickness and start improving battery life. It's been officially "up to 10 hours" since 2010 - 14 years.
I think it's the only compute device Apple sell that hasn't increased its Apple-rated battery runtime in the last 14 years.
I had zero complaints frankly about the previous generation M2 iPad Pro's thickness, it was already impressively thin! I'd much, much rather see battery runtime go up at this stage. That 10hrs number falls notably under heavy loads too. More battery is more headroom to run heavy applications or games away from a plug socket.
This advert's focus on thin just further reminds me that Apple have spent over a decade not improving iPad run-time.
Serious question: Did anyone already want to buy an iPad, but the ad made them not buy it in protest? I don't have the data, but I don't expect this to be very common.
I don't watch TV ads and if it wasn't for the controversy I probably wouldn't have known it even existed. Either way, I would choose based on specs and reviews, not whether an ad had the right subtext.
This is all really silly. Don't people have anything better to get upset about? I wish companies/Apple didn't cave every time a couple of people start crying.
It must be really annoying to work in such industries, you spend a large amount of time making something and then have no idea if people will get upset about it or not.
Nothing to do with the industry - it's marketing, it's designed to make people like the company/product more, and the very nature of marketing and people means that if you do a bad job it can have the opposite effect.
This is just how marketing to humans is, and anyone creating a promo video for any type of product knows that the goal is to increase positive sentiment and the risk to try to avoid is increasing negative feelings instead.
This ad is a perfect example of the fact that if people want to get offended, they will literally get offended by anything: an ad, a color of something, a made-up pronoun not being present in a list, or anything else.
Marketing is a corporate behavior that is tied to sales, brand equity, expansion, product innovation, and financial performance. Criticizing it is as legitimate as criticizing accounting practices or device capabilities.
I think Apple and many other tech companies are still trying to brand themselves as mavericks who are upending a stuffy establishment, a mythology which is exemplified well by ads like this. I think the gaucheness of it was very intentional, and exactly the kind of provocative boasting that appealed to a certain kind of young, counterculturally-inclined creative people when Apple was first running ads on TV
I think when you're a trillion dollar company, one of the major players in an industry that has very much become The Establishment, and are speaking to artists for whom technology companies - and Apple in particular - have been constantly "innovating" in ways to decrease their share of the fruits of their labor for the last twenty years, and the last 3 or so have been a constant news blitz of smug techbros claiming all creatives should accept whatever scraps they can get because they're about to be replaced by ML models that are from their perspective sophisticated stochastic plagiarism bots that seem to frame the entire premise of releasing your work online as the setup for a long con... Yea, maybe it's gonna read as a bit tonedeaf
That people think this is a real press, that this bunch of objects in a real press would behave exactly like that, shows how our society is increasingly disconnected from the real, physical world and have no fucking idea of how a factory looks like.
You are ironically doing the exact thing you are accusing others of but instead of being mad that people don’t know how a factory looks it’s you not understanding why people are upset at this and have very conveniently ended up at a position where:
- everyone who doesn’t like it is dumb
- you are a self proclaimed factory expert trying to pretend this is a physics argument which nobody claimed but you.
I don't care about the argument. I find it funny that a lot of people believe that a giant hydraulic press looks like that and is installed in an environment that looks like the engine room of a spaceship in a SciFi movie.
I thought it was epic, gorgeous, fun, and made total sense for the product! There are other pianos in the world. Like, a _lot_ of pianos in the world. It only stands to reason a few will get crushed in a massive hydraulic press for a fun ad.
I literally can't understand the mindset of people who get offended by an ad that crushes objects. Not animals, not humans, just objects to give a message, yet people get offended by this.
We really should get telling people to kill themselves back into fashion when they produce such culturally deaf and offensive content just to promote the newest consooomerism gadget. I hate everything this whole phenomena represents
I saw it felt nothing other than a morbid kind of "will it blend?". I think the ad is fine. It did its job. I mean, people are talking about it. They just can't use the same schtick again. But there's no need to apologize for it.
It's en vogue to elevate your personal negative experiences above all else, and to make them known as publicly as possible. It's not always honest. You can go online and rage about how offended you are about something, and then ten seconds later be laughing about whatever nonsense tiktok decided to show you. It's disingenuous theatre for social media points.
Yeah the add shows off iPad as something more than it probably is. I don't like the destruction part but meh... to me the ad speaks nothing special or wow except the exploding paint buckets, which was fun. But there is nothing to apologize for. Its an ad, they are not coming into your home and breaking your piano and guitars, chill. Don't like it? Don't buy it.
People outraged by the piano and not at the suicide nets must be the new consumerism peak, albeit my belief is that this campaign is just part of the overall marketing strategy, an apology before the outrage.
Simply because of the ad :(. It's so cold. I think people are justified to feel that way but it's clinging on to old era Apple. For awhile now apple has lost it's humanity. It's sad but I think it's over and I think it's time for something new.
Take the Apple Ad in Contrast to the Microsoft Ad that aired during Super Bowl.
The whole time I thought it was an Apple Ad and then it was Microsoft Copilot ad. The made me dream, made me feel I could do more. The ad was about the viewer.
The inherent mistake here is that there are a lot of large but loosely affiliated groups represented by the crushed objects that are inevitably going to contain people looking to be offended by something.
When I was younger, I used to believe that the antiquated image of the hipster or upper-class white Starbucks artist who owns a Mac was a cliché, an invention of the boomers. But as I have had to deal with some creative teams.
I have come to loathe and disdain this kind of person I did not think even existed a decade ago. The sad truth is that a lot of people of a certain demographic will prefer to die before even switching to Windows, let alone Linux or something open. And sadly, a small part of the tech world is the same; they think that their experience with Windows and Android more than a decade ago is reflective of how they work now. Thus, Apple could spit on their faces, and yet they will still like it. Sadly, nothing to do with people who just suck up to modern Apple.
Even if it didn't have the intended effect of making everyone feel good, at least everyone is talking about it so in a sense it worked in Apple's favor.
There is something deeply, viscerally upsetting about watching creative objects get destroyed by an industrial machine. I understand what they were going for, but I can't believe this got greenlighted.
The symbolism of physically destroying a handmade instrument or a precision-made item like a camera lens is unbelievably disgusting. On top of that, the current era we're in has artists fearing for the future as generative AI (which is trained on stolen artwork by humans) is coming to replace their livelihood.
All I can do is shake my head and wonder why tech people have such utter contempt and disdain for artists.
The iPad updates are 'meh', as is the whole line-up. This comes after the Vision Pro launches to a fizzle, and resorting to a massive share buy back to hold the stock value. In the last week I've seen more articles about Tim Cook succession than in all the time before. I bet inside Apple things feel they might need every bit of help to push revenue.
This ad has gotten Apple and the iPad an incredible amount of free media coverage; and they waited a few days for the apology ... which will now go on to do exactly the same. This seems like a very very successful campaign.
Are you suggesting the emoji squeeze toy conveniently rolled perfectly to the edge of the hydraulic press at exactly the right moment and then its eyes uniformly popped out? A perfectly uniform explosion of dust actually burst out the press? Seems doubtful.
I don’t know if that’s the case here, but Apple has a long history of doing real-life photoshoots of their products that end up looking like CGI. It’s an extremely clean, perfectionist aesthetic. Realistically, it’s probably a real-life shot with CGI sprinkled in.
This is very cultural. Eastern cultures, for eg. Indian, Asian etc. place a lot of respect in objects associated with learning or education or creation even if they are just objects.
Indians never touch books with their feet, it's considered very disrespectful to the idea of education / learning, since a book is an embodiment of that. Likewise for musical instruments.
Western cultural prides itself on its irreverence for conventions like these. And everything is viewed from a lens of individual freedom.
i didn't think it was a great ad but they certainly don't owe anybody an apology. besides, i guarantee that there's no overlap at all in the venn diagram of people complaining about it vs potential ipad pro buyers.
if you think the few people who were miffed about a lame advertisement could have any perceptible effect on apples bottom line whatsoever then i'd say it seems you know less about the market than i do.
Tho honestly on further reflection I kind of liked that ad. Edgy and cool and YouTube esque in an ironic way. I think I was just channeling a common resentment for it… I don’t actually think it’s terrible. Sorry, Tim and Apple haha! :)
Who cares about this? I can't think of anything more unimportant and naval gazing than trying to extract subtext from an ad. Scrolling through the comments on this thread I'm genuinely surprised to see so much earnest rancor and performative outrage over a meaningless ad. Stop worshiping tech companies and go touch some grass.
Nothing like a commercial that say's we're going to make you a slave to our device and take away every human passion and pursuit of excellence. Brilliant strategy, wait nope... you're not supposed to let them know where the dark patterns lead.
Just saying, I would have made something like, all these things slowly swirling and sucked into a black hole and at the singularity, you show the ipad :)
I thought the ad was great but to actually have to apologize for it ?? I am a self admitted Apple fanboy but while I don’t see eye to eye on this I really don’t see the offensiveness .
But in the grand scheme of things it might sell more iPads due to the Streisand effect.
When I was a young'n, Apple was very big on treating artists and creatives as a set of people they were humbled to have stumbled into helping.
Marketing was driven by ideas like avoiding "speeds and feeds", in the words of Steve, and emotionally connecting with users: ex. famous lore is an Apple ad is never "Buy the New Galaxy Plus Pro S6 with the 120 megapixel 240x Zoom!" it's "Soft tinkling music as smiling father takes video of 5 year old sledding down hill in snow"
I'm not saying they always obeyed those principles in every single ad until yesterday, but you'd be hard pressed (lol) to explain to someone a decade ago why Apple's first ad for a once-in-3-years iPad launch was...crushing a bunch of creative tools to communicate they shaved half a millimeter off.
It's funny being old because the thing that confuses me is why people have reactions to reactions, ex. people saying "based, why should they have to apologize anyway, it wasn't offensive"...it clearly wasn't offensive in that sense! It was just bizarrely off-brand.
> It's funny being old because the thing that confuses me is why people have reactions to reactions, ex. people saying "based, why should they have to apologize anyway, it wasn't offensive"...it clearly wasn't offensive in that sense!
Some people just really seem to object to the idea that anyone could ever experience an emotion and have it not be based on some kind of cold rationality.
The idea of feeling something in your gut, something visceral, is anathema to them.
Imagine something you care about, maybe a family dog. Now put it in a hydraulic press. Cut back to "Nintendogs now available!"
For many, musical instruments and artists tools carry not just their functional nature but a spiritual or cultural identity. A piano isn't just a box with some metal strings inside, it represents something. That guitar could have been played, instead it's destroyed.
The as is also needlessly wasteful. It communicates a sense of disregard for the value of stuff. If apple burned a hundred grand and then showed us an iPad, many folks might be like, "what the fuck?" Same sort of vibe.
This is the third time I’ve seen someone compare the crushing of a musical instrument with the crushing of living, feeling beings in this thread and I think you are absurdly off base.
People are mad when you crush their dog because it feels pain and experiences things and has some sense of self, things that inanimate objects cannot have. Not because they no longer have a dog or because of their emotional connection to that particular dog.
Perhaps a better analogy would be putting the corpse of an already deceased family dog in the hydraulic press but that isn’t too dissimilar from cremation.
Probably best to avoid the crushing dogs analogy all together.
I get what they were trying to do which is “the iPad can do all of this and it is thin”. I think I don’t have the personality to have a personal relationship with artist tools …
A lot of people have strong emotional connections to their artistic tools like instruments. It's a very common reaction to feel discomfort at the sight of an instrument being destroyed. Emotional attachments are irrational, but the point of an advertisement isn't to be rational otherwise they'd just show a spec sheet as a still in a video.
Apple really fucked up here. Did no one on their marketing team bring this up?
I honestly don't see what's so controversial here. For me, it's just another expression of the idea "you can do all this on a tiny device now". Kinda like that infamous Pokemon Red and Blue ad with the bus driver:
Or the other ads by companies like LG mentioned in the comments showing the same premise. Just feels like people are looking for things to get offended by now, and reading way too much into a simple concept that's been done to death.
I am not a creative. But I do play the piano from time to time. It’s an old 15 year old Roland electric piano. I wouldn’t like to see it crushed. Even if it is obsolete. I bet a lot of actual creatives do have sentimental values attached to their tools.
Destroying things needlessly is very much off brand for Apple.
Hey excuse me for being off topic but get your head out of your ass. This ad is nothing. Apple paid 500 billion dollars to buy back its own stocks and cancel them to manipulate the stock price.
This is backwards and I am terrifically shocked that such practice is legal.
It’s not my place to tell anyone how they should feel about anything, but the number of comments here suggesting people had a strong emotional reaction to this does kinda worry me. How do those of you who feel so strongly about this ad get through daily life? If I was feeling so upset about something like this, life would be pretty bad. Genuine question.
EDIT: I appreciate the amount of good-faith discussion on this comment. To be clear, if your reaction to the ad was along the lines of ‘this is distasteful and I don’t like it’, I totally get that. I’m referring to some of the comments I saw that likened it to ‘stress inducing’ or ‘like watching someone’s arm get cut off’ which are much more emotive.
I get through regular life okay, but this a $1T company with hundreds of billions in cash, profit driven, using child labor in China indirectly, and engaging in walled-garden policies makes it worse.
They make all these gadgets that replaces incomes from many manufactures and puts it on a single hand. That's bad enough.
Now, they destroy all these beautiful things- a piano, a guitar, a camera, and a lot of valuable things to make a point that this single silicon-made, soulless corporate company-produced, cheap exploited labor induced thing is going to replace them. Those things of aesthetics and soul are destroyed to give rise to this thing.
That hits hard for me. Seriously. I thought that I was being a real snowflake when this ad made me uncomfortable, but was glad to see this backlash in large numbers. Maybe people still have souls.
You can give a thousand lessons in "nature of real circumstances and geopolitics", and this ad with all its backstory will still be wrong to me.
Except what are pianos, guitars, cameras etc.? Also products made by companies that are equally "soulless" (they make these things to make money just like Apple). And in terms of aesthetics you can think technological products are just as beautiful as those other products. I personally get angry when I see things like classic Macintoshes turned into fish aquariums and the like, as I see it as beautiful technology destroyed, but even so not that angry.
> …Also products made by companies that are equally "soulless" (they make these things to make money just like Apple)
I have to strongly disagree. Pianos, guitars and other instruments have a long and rich history that connects the past to the present. A long arc of human progress and creativity, with some of the most sought after instruments today being rooted in a deep history of human craftsmanship.
Cameras also have a rich history, but don’t belong in the same sentence IMO.
While you can find soulless products to buy, those are only a subset of what’s on offer.
I enjoy using Apple products, and will probably even buy this iPad because I need to upgrade. But it sits in an entirely different category than my cameras and musical instruments.
Musical instruments have nothing on the deep history of consumer electronics.
The entire arch of human history from the first rock picked up our ancestors leads up to the most complex things ever conceived by humans. Requiring a globally distributed intellectual exchange, thousands of years of scientific and technological advancement, commerce, etc.
Focusing on just the physical assembly of complex parts ignores not just where those parts comes from, but also everyone living and dead that contributed to the software which makes it more than odd object. And even that glosses over the continent spanning electrical systems used to power em etc.
A tablet, laptop, etc is the ultimate expression of history warts and all. If they seem soulless it’s because they aren’t just a product of a single culture.
Hard disagree. The history of consumer electrics goes back maybe a century, but we've been studying and progressing the field of music for tens of thousands of years.
Pianos guitars and violins were crafted by hand! Materials were chosen with care and cultivated over decades with the express purpose of providing a certain character to an instrument! The complexity of a harpsichord or piano was insane in a time before supply chains, and they were designed to last centuries and be passed down between generations! That's just the fancy stuff, stringed instruments can and have been made by anyone, and innovation has come from surprising places! Almost anybody can change the balance, or experiment with covering up holes or adding random metal components to see how it affects the sound. All this effort and knowledge and time goes into something created FOR FUN. You can't eat a piano or use it for any reason other than changing the way people feel, yet music has been around since language was first invented or possibly even earlier.
An iPad is a homogenous blob, it's components broken down and reconstituted at a molecular level, none of it's original character remains. They are the pinnacle of design, but there's not much room for expression left. They last a few years at most before becoming museum pieces or trash. They're impressive in their own right, they showcase human achievement like nothing else. I'd argue they have a less colorful history than music, however.
A homogeneous blob wouldn’t do anything. You’re discounting complexity because it’s not staring you in the face.
> History of consumer electronics goes back maybe a century
Ceramics go back 9,000+ years and people where making glass 4,000 years ago but that history doesn’t count because…
Capacitors, batteries, metals, etc each have their own long history of development without which you didn’t get an iPad.
> The complexity of a harpsichord or piano was insane in a time before supply chains
They don’t use glass, ceramics, etc. It only seems complicated because you have some idea of all the steps involved. Meanwhile you can’t conceive of everything involved in making just the machines required for a single component.
> A homogeneous blob wouldn’t do anything. You’re discounting complexity because it’s not staring you in the face.
Sorry, my phrasing was poor. As a product line, iPads are homogenous. If we both order one, they will be nearly indistinguishable. Their component materials have been homogenized before manufacturing to remove as much of the character of the original sand or rock as possible.
> Capacitors, batteries, metals, etc each have their own long history of development without which you didn’t get an iPad.
These were not developed with consumer electronics in mind. Electricity itself was only discovered 300 years ago. Electronics absolutely built upon the shoulders of giants, but I don't believe they can claim all human progress as their own. The iPad air doesn't have 5000 years of history because that's when we started refining metals.
> Meanwhile you can’t conceive of everything involved in making just the machines required for a single component.
My work makes optics for the chip industry, so I like to think I have better idea than most, but I haven't been to anywhere like Shenzhen yet, so I may be out of touch...
> Their component materials have been homogenized before manufacturing to remove as much of the character of the original … as possible.
You also just described musical instruments. The goal is for them to sound identical to similar instruments and a great deal of effort controlling humidity etc falls under that umbrella. People in an Orchestra want specific sounds not just random character from their instruments.
> These were not developed with consumer electronics in mind.
By that token the harpsichord wasn’t invented with the piano in mind. There’s nothing wrong with this view, but it drops the ‘rich history of musical instruments’ to the work of a tiny number of innovators.
> Electricity itself was only discovered 300 years ago
Electricity (static shocks, lightning, some evidence for primitive battery etc) was known about since antiquity though obviously we only recently learned how to exploit it.
> The iPad air doesn't have 5000 years of history because that's when we started refining metals.
The rich history of glassmaking is directly relevant to the iPad and provides some of its most valuable features. If we discount that then the history of musical instruments again becomes one of a tiny number of lone inventors.
Apples to apples comparisons favor electronics here.
Some. My experience has been that the diversity of instruments dwarfs that of electronics, with the possible exception of early Nokia phones. I bet this is largely driven by product lifecycle, as my saxophones are each over 10 years old and have been refurbished more than once. High-end professional instruments are often one-of-a-kind.
> The rich history of glassmaking is directly relevant to the iPad and provides some of its most valuable features.
I agree, but again I think it's a problem of intent. Glassmaking was improved to make decorations, then storage vessels, then optics, then cookware and labware, then electronics. Meanwhile people have been making bone flutes and leather drums for longer than they've been able to write about it.
The intent to create musical instruments is a tiny fraction of the history of woodworking etc. If you’re looking at things that narrowly there’s nothing particularly interesting left about em.
With that mindset a hammer has a much longer and richer history than a Tuba and musical instruments are just a trivial edge case crated as little more than novelty items.
On the other hand if you bring in the skills required to craft precision objects and the culture required to support such endeavors then tablets are clearly more wondrous.
I'm not claiming all of woodworking as the history of musical instrument making, just that which was explicitly involved in the creation of musical instruments. We've been making musical instruments for a very long time. To your point though, I bet the history of hammers is even longer!
I think we're probably arguing semantics at this point. I totally agree that the amount of raw effort and technological progress that goes into tablet making dwarfs that which goes into an instrument.
>Musical instruments have nothing on the deep history of consumer electronics.
no, man. have you never experienced music in a personal way? not a recording, not a concert, but as a living cultural joy shared and created together among strangers and lovers both in the same moment - it's so beautiful, so overwhelming in a way that nothing else is.
and so often it involves a musical instrument, you know.
and it can be a story, a lesson, it is all political. people kill and die for this thing every day, and every day in history.
instruments may be more electronic these days and i enjoy my share of electronic music and computer music. but physical, acoustic instruments will always be the icon.
i think a piano or a guitar has already made more history than remains to be made by anything.
Bit of a side note, I was trying to understand why the history of craftsmanship feels different for cameras compared to say pianos. One variable here is definitely the fact that I work in lithography and cameras are a sister industry. Familiarity diminishes the mystique of something. But I think it's a bit more about time. Each advance in piano technology had it's "moment" so to speak. New refinement in pianos were slower to develop due to many reasons, but the prestige of pianos remains the same. But unlike cameras each generation of pianos got an entire human lifetime to be explored, sometimes even multiple lifetimes. It's cultural impact got time to be normalized and then commented upon. None of that has happened for cameras. Things changed so fast we didn't even get a chance to explore all of the options.
An argument against my amateur analysis is of course scale. Pianos were being explored by maybe a million people and only a fraction of that fulltime. Cameras are basically a part of life for a large portion of humanity.
In addition to what others have said, I see a budding revolt against "millennial modernism" here.
For those who haven't heard this term, it basically refers to the Apple aesthetic: sparse, minimal, utilitarian, and clean.
Flat UIs and Material design (out of Google) are other examples.
This ad is basically a millennial modernist manifesto. Down with complexity. Down with variety. Simple, clean, minimal.
Contrast this with the noisy cyberpunk aesthetic that was pretty common in technology before Apple 2.0 and Jony Ive and can still be found in the gaming PC area, or the 80s-90s skeuomorphic aesthetic that dominated UIs until the later 2000s.
When Millennial modernism came to prominence it was itself a revolt against noise, clashing styles, and overwhelm. I personally liked it for that aspect. But I can definitely see how it can also be soulless. IMHO the worst thing I can say about it is that it seems associated with authoritarianism. Like Brutalist architecture it's kind of an authoritarian aesthetic because it comes about by having a dictator who says 'no' to almost everything and enforces a very rigid auteur approach. Once established it also tends to remain unchanged because there's not much you can do with it. "Theming" possibilities are pretty much restricted to light and dark mode.
I myself have mixed feelings (about millennial modernism not the ad, which is awful). The biggest thing I like about this style is its association with reduced cognitive load. The biggest thing I don't like is the association with authoritarianism.
Edit:
Just realized that the Cybertruck is an ode to millennial modernism, and might just be kind of a shark jumping moment for it. This ad would count as another shark jumping moment. Maybe it's on its way out.
>Just realized that the Cybertruck is an ode to millennial modernism, and might just be kind of a shark jumping moment for it. This ad would count as another shark jumping moment. Maybe it's on its way out.
The problem with the Cybertruck isn't its design (although people did mock that, comparing it to vehicles from PS1 era graphics), but that it is a poorly constructed vehicle.
Millennial modernism doesn't mean the generation. It's the industrial design and UI aesthetic that took hold around the turn of the millennium. AFAIK Jony Ive, one of its main architects, is a genX-er. Generationally I associate it more with genX since it took hold when that generation was entering higher levels in the corporate world.
I do agree that there is more wrong with the advert than this. I was just pointing out something nobody'd brought up.
Thank you - I understand what you are saying, and feel like I agree. I would thumbs-up in ascii if it were appropriate here.
I may be over sensitive to generational comments as I've been 'feeling my age' for several months. And the comment you posted makes sense to me better now. <3
I'm sorry but this sounds like internet bubble nonsense.
A budding revolt? Equating an iPad to authoritarianism?
I think I understand and agree with some of your concepts. I see a trend back towards analog things and low tech devices, but that's a pretty simple and understandable trend. I don't think it has anything to do with authoritarianism.
Nah, they're probably mad at the economic, interpreted as political, message more than anything.
If they're mad at that, then they'd be mad at themselves for having a zoomorphic stressball and squeezing it themselves --which, who knows, is possible, but unlikely to be the case.
It's a bit of a stretch to call musical instruments - which are often handcrafted and not manufactured because an object that produces a particular sound requires tolerance that shift with the source material and that are difficult to generalize to a machine process - "soulless". On top of that handcrafting, they're objects made specifically to tap into one of the deepest parts of the human psyche (again, by hand, ephemerally). It's hard to think of something less soulless.
I'm not sure how to articulate it but there's a deep irony in how people are scoffing at the emotional reaction to this ad, when the sentiment in it - that all things can be done/subsumed by Computers™ - has infiltrated the public consciousness as deeply as it has.
There is so much that is still only doable at least in part by hand, from making certain musical instruments to things like crochet. There are even more that use machines but are nowhere near as automated as people believe they are (see e.g. practically all tailoring, where even mass produced articles still need a skilled hand to guide the cutting and sewing machines).
But people love the fiction of some sterile production line that spits out all the cheap things they buy, in no small part because acknowledging that even "cheap Chinese shit" is made by the skilled hands of actual human beings would require acknowledging the gross exploitation that enables you to buy their work for absurdly low prices.
This remains one of the most alien takes around, to me. I-devices are the most useful computers I have, by a county mile, when I want to do something creative or constructive in the real world (not write software, say). Their greatest strength is that they’re computers that bridge real-life and computing like a “real” computer does not.
Separately, the ad is weird. They’re the first thing I reach for if I want to e.g. play our actual piano. I tune instruments with them, display music with them, record myself, play an accompanying track on them—I compliment instruments with them, I don’t replace them with an iPad or iPhone.
I get why this take is so common, but it's just wrong. Not that most use of iPad isn't consumption, but that this is different. PCs, too. MacBook Whatevers, too. TVs, too (obviously).
The iPads have had a hard time because, yeah, the OS was/is in its infancy but nobody (except the dgaf-wealthy) buys the $2000+ iPad Pro for "consumption" because they sell a $400 and $700 iPad for that.
The things iPad (Pro) can do are indeed far fewer than an unencumbered (by draconian lockdown, or simple lack of development resources) PC or even Mac laptop. But that's different than "none". The more hardware equipment in my studio I can shovel onto Apple's magic hydraulic obliterator, the better.
(Although it's a lot less than shown in that ad, haha. But I liked the ad, as far as ads go.)
For me, it was more about the humanity represented by the objects than what company they came from. All of those objects are far more human-centered than the iPad. All of those objects were crafted and perfected over centuries - guitar forms, paint formulas, camera technology, etc. In a way it's representative of the much of human culture, and this add kinda says, yea, screw all that old crappy stuff. Look at our neat piece of glass that replaces all that humanity.
I get it, that's exactly their point. The iPad can do all of those things. But at a time when many creatives feel like AI is going to replace them or make their skills irrelevant, it's pretty tone deaf.
And also, it's far more likely that most of those objects were made by skilled craftsmen, even if they did work at a bigger company.
The pianos, guitars, cameras were at one point the labors of love from fellow engineers, and then adopted as the extended arms, fingers, eyes of the the artists those engineers trusted their labors with.
And yeah I'm not oblivious. We can replace all the engineers and artists with generated output that satisfies 97% of everyone. It was great while it lasted but like the apple commercial hints at, out with the old ...
I would add that the atmosphere really feels dystopian – kind of a soul-less machine (crusher in a warehouse) vs symbols of human creativity. Despite the music, it's not a light and fun representation.
I agree with everything you say except for this part: not having an emotional reaction to the destruction of objects doesn't imply you don't have a soul (whatever that means to you). Not everybody had the opportunity in life to learn to play an instrument or make art, and I can see how for people like this a music instrument is not more sentimental than, say, a hammer.
Maybe you should feel good about feeling bad after watching that ad: it means you had the chance to experience the beauty of creating art.
Why does Apple destroying things outrage worthy but Hollywood destroying many more things (in my head for example many classic cars) for a shot, not?
Is it because one is entertaining and one is not?
The advertisement statement is destroying all these things and replacing them by an iPad. I.E. thats the sales pitch -- you don't need any of these things anymore just this iPad.
Hollywood does destroy all sorts of things but that's not their sales pitch to you. It happens in the background. Also it isn't replacing those soulful cars with a new car -- it's using them for a shot.
Exactly. Had this put this exact video into some dystopian sci fi, it might be a suitable way to portray some villain or cynical mega-corporation as nihilistic.
But when a company uses this in an ad, THEY are the ones that come off as nihilists, and not in a good way.
If they wanted to express that the ipad CONTAINED all of those older things within it, they could have created this as something like Dr Strange would have done. Like make those items fly into a portal shaped like a giant ipad, and then shrink the ipad with all those items still inside.
Or at the very least, they could have presented the items to be destroyed like they were worn out and broken (and no longer in use), and then presented their destruction as giving them new life through recycling as an Ipad.
This ad will definitely pop into my head the next time I consider buying an Apple device, and not in a good way.
So as long as things happen in the background and we continue to be numb to the destruction is all good? I think that says more about you(as in us, the viewer, not you HN user) than about Apple to be honest. And I’m not pro Apple here, could be anyone. Could be that Australian girl on Instagram that crushes things and dances to their shape.
I think the comparison is wrong here. For hollywood or film making, it is about the story telling. One has to create and destroy scene to produce story.
From what I had read from some of the upset people was that what’s wrong with the ad was in the realm of waste = bad. But I’m when I bring up the Hollywood example for waste, it goes out the window.
If this ad was part of a longer movie, would it be ok to crush them all?
If it was say a scene in a dictatorship story where people are not allowed to make new music or something, would someone talk about the waste of a perfectly good piano for the scene?
There's a step function difference between a large megacorp making their message about crushing artistic merit/individuality and selling their device as a replacement to all compared to hollywood using a couple cars as a stunt in the background. Apples to oranges.
If you can't see the difference here I think this says more about you being able to put together reasonable comparables for arguments then anything else.
For example using "Australian girl on Instagram that crushes things and dances to their shape" as a comparable is so completely different as to be irrelevant except that there is similarity in something being crushed. It's like comparing a military jet and a mosquito because they can both fly.
Why does saying “this IPad combines all these things” crush artistic merit or individuality? You can still go buy a piano and do whatever you want and be your own individual independently of Apple crushing ONE piano/trumpet/5 emoji balls.
Destroying classic cars for a movie creates something. I think a few car people would be pretty upset if some really bad, made for TV movie destroyed a lot of classic cars. This is just that, but upsetting musicians, photographers, artists, and basically anyone who cares about the environment.
This ad destroys a lot of things people are really really fond about: musical instruments, painting supplies, photography equipment, and record player. And then says that all of those things will be replaced by this "gadget" that won't have the years of life of the piano, guitar, camera, record player, etc.
So it destroys things people care about AND tells you the things you care about don't matter anymore.
The classic cars destroyed in movies are, quite often, not worth restoring, The Ferrari in Ferris Bueller's Day Off was a kit car, vehicles are often insurance write offs...there was a time when you could see cars in-frame were suddently 10 years older and tell that there was some destruction going to happen. I'm sure you can find some Italian Supercar destroyed for real in some Fast and the Furious type movie, but it's often not what it seems.
Is there also outcry when a Musician destroys a guitar on-stage?
My feeling at the ad wasn't particularly emotional, more curiosity at how much of it was real and how much wasnt. Speakers and art supplies aren't particularly expensive, and the Arcade machine wasn't recognizeably a machine worth keeping. There are plenty of used up pianos out there. The emoji was kinda funny...I don't know what that says about me.
Movies generate something that’s visually interesting. If this wasn’t an ad, wouldn’t you say it was visually interesting to see what happens when you crush something like that? Things get destroyed all the time for visuals, experiments, someone’s ”fun”, etc.
I think the difference is that people are very removed from what waste actually is, and when they see what it actually happens all day every day to all those items, shock. We all generate this every day. In the big picture, someone’s old trumpet in an attic is going to end up in a landfill once they move/die/need space. Once it got produced, its final form is landfill.
Even if I don’t believe in the product, and I don’t think of the company very fondly, I lean towards considering the ad anti waste.
“You no longer need to buy and store and move and hoard all these things, you only need an iPad”. It’s not saying “go crush all this items to buy an iPad”, it’s saying “don’t generate all this other waste, you can do it all here”
Volume wise at least, there is more waste in the “loved” items, and no one is recycling emoji squishy balls.
There’s a fire, and a piano is burned- that's okay as telling the story demands it in a movie. (I also believe that some among them would burn a fake piano rather than a real one. I may be wrong here.)
But stating that all those beautiful things "deserve" to be replaced by a thin silicon 3k USD machine by literally destroying them in an industrial crusher?
That's different.
The same Apple destroyed the Big Brother some decades ago in a commercial. The sense of irony!
(Also, a car is a car. The world doesn't share Americans' obsession and weird relationships with cars. A photographer's camera, a musician's guitar are more important.)
The car is an example of something that I think of as art in the same way you think of a camera. I’m sure they have destroyed many pianos for movies, shows, theatre, etc.
The world doesn’t share your own obsession and weird relationships with a camera and a guitar.
You can capture beautiful moments with a camera- photography is a work of art. Movie cameras, too. Kurosawa, Ray, and Tarkovsky created absolutely amazing frames with cameras.
What do you create with a car? Amazing driving patterns?
One aspect could bae related the affordability of things. Imagine that beautiful grand piano - how many would have dreamt of owning one in their homes but can’t. Because:
a) they are expensive
b) need a lot of space (so you need to have a big home to begin with)
Seeing a lot of new
things being destroyed, along with the stress all emoji’s eyes popping out, was a bit much.
I feel this is a highly romantic and nostalgic view of objects humans make. Calling them “beautiful” vs “this thing”. I know this is all subjective, but what makes a piano more soulful than an iPhone? This is a genuinely curious exploration of the emotions involved here.
I mean, they obviously didn't execute it well, since so many people had this kind of reaction to it, but the point seemed to me to be that all those "things of aesthetics and soul" are smushed into this one very thin thing, not that they are destroyed.
Ah, the classic "You criticize technology and yet you have a smartphone, checkmate".
There are genuine uses for this technology, but symbolically showing that pianos, violins, paints, etc are out of date by crushing them, replacing them with an iPad removes any of the "humanity" from it.
If I swipe a violin string on an iPad, it's going to sound the exact same no matter what. But if I play a real violin I have control over the vibrato (I guess, I'm not a violinist), I can start a note slowly and then quickly cut it off for effect, or slowly fade out a note by relieving pressure on the strings. The real thing allows for artists to put their heart and their soul into the music. An iPad can only immitate the note in it's most pristine, mathematic, sterile form.
>Ah, the classic "You criticize technology and yet you have a smartphone, checkmate".
I never wrote anything remotely similar to that in my comment. I'm talking about the convenience of carrying a single thing vs. many of them.
>removes any of the "humanity" from it
No, the iPad didn't remove the humanity from those activities, you did, right now. Let me tell you something, there's some really good pieces of art out there, music, short films, photography, etc... that were created using a modern digital device like the iPad. Does that make those less human? Less artistically valuable? Absolutely not!
This conversation isn't about "convenience of carrying a single thing vs. many of them". This discussion isn't about portability. Musicians don't carry their pianos or an orchestra with them to Trader Joes.
On your other point: Correct, there is INCREDIBLE art out there that is only possible thanks to technology. EDM music, 3D animation, the hyperpop genre (RIP Sophie), etc. The insinuation of the ad, however, is that those "old" ways to create art are no longer needed, the iPad does it all!!
Give two jazz artists the same music sheet and an iPad and tell them to recreate it and they'll both make music that sounds the exact same, because the iPad doesn't allow them to insert those little things like I mentioned in my previous comment.
Give those same two jazz artists the same music sheet but give them a full orchestra and they'll both be unique.
This doesn't make digital art less artistically valuable. I'm saying that technologies such as the iPad, which inherently remove the ability for human uniqueness to be included, insinuating that physical methods of artistic expression are outdated is both demeaning to artists, and frankly a dangerous method of thinking when it comes to art.
> Give two jazz artists the same music sheet and an iPad and tell them to recreate it and they'll both make music that sounds the exact same
That sounds like an extremely dubious claim.
By the same logic, two pro gamers playing the same video game should always achieve the exact same score, two authors typing a novel in the same computer should end up with the same story etc., yet that’s clearly not true.
> By the same logic, two pro gamers play the same video game should always achieve the exact same score.
Both of those comparisons you've made have the human element included in them. The gamers don't follow the exact same path in a speedrun. The authors don't have the exact same instructions on what book to write.
If a musician plucks the iPad violin strings to make an A note, it will sound the same across all iPads, across all artists, every time without fail. But if that same musician plucks an A note on a violin, it will sound different every time, across different musicians, different violins, different pressures, different techniques, etc.
Ask a music lover which they'd prefer. An orchestra consisting of pre-recorded music from 80 iPads played over loudspeakers or a live symphony orchestra?
> If a musician plucks the iPad violin strings to make an A note, it will sound the same across all iPads, across all artists, every time without fail.
Will it really, though? Touchscreens are pretty high resolution these days in both time and space.
I think this is ultimately a quantitative (and a huge one, at that, don't get me wrong) difference in the ergonomics of input methods, rather than a qualitative difference in "humanness".
Again, don't get me wrong, I am not arguing here that an iPad will produce "better" musical outcomes than an "analog violin", but I'd like to challenge the idea that the analog or digital (or maybe mass-produced vs. artisanally crafted) nature of an inanimate object is what makes or breaks the "human element" of a work of art.
Humans add the human element, by using their tools creatively.
I agree with you on that, it's a different input method and (therefore) will always come with it's quirks whether it's analog or digital. Digital art, music, animation, etc are incredible feats in their own right.
From knowing and being close with a lot of artists, the main complaint I hear about this ad is that it comes across as a destruction of the analog form to "make way" for the digital. Both of them can exist as they cater to different forms of artistic expression. This doesn't inherently make one better than the other. It comes across as a very bad take to artists that digital art is better than analog art, and analog art is on it's way to being destroyed.
I get it that this may just all be artists and myself reading too much into this. But that's art! We read into things waaayyyy too much sometimes.
I must really be watching another ad than anybody else!
As I see it, all of these great analog (and digital, there's a Space Invaders arcade cabinet!) tools are getting physically squished into the iPad.
That's coincidentally how I think about my smartphone already: It's not necessarily better than most of my other devices (digital and analog) it's replaced, but it's all of them at once, and that is quite the achievement.
That doesn't mean that the squishing didn't cause an unfortunate loss in expressiveness or ergonomics in many cases, but at least in photography, there's the old saying that the best camera is the one you always have with you.
>This conversation isn't about "convenience of carrying a single thing vs. many of them".
I am actually making an argument for that. Why did smartphones caught up? Because they're everything in a single thing. Apple wants the iPad to be the same in its respective market segment.*
>Or do you carry a bag with a camera, a dumb phone, a notepad w/ pens and markers, books, an mp3 player, a pedometer, a measuring tape, ...
The thing is, people are starting to do that more and more. Even John Gruber, iPhone enthusiast extraordinaire, has started carrying a real camera around again. Fujifilm hasn't been able to keep their smaller mirrorless cameras in stock for the last four years. Notebooks and pens are back for a lot of people. Even wristwatches are undergoing an enormous renaissance in popularity.
The cultural zeitgeist is shifting. Whether it's a reaction to a sense that software is eating the world, or a reaction to the ubiquitization of AI generica, or a quest for authenticity, I'm not sure. But this ad is badly out of step with that cultural trend, and the dystopian lighting, framing, and the popping eyes on the stress ball certainly don't help either.
The numbers on the vinyl album renaissance are probably a good illustration. They're undergoing nonlinear growth, and have either surpassed CD sales or are neck-and-neck, e.g.: https://www.statista.com/chart/26583/music-album-sales-in-th... Though it's also interesting that actual CD sales have levelled off too, after dropping for years.
Other analog media like minidisc has also seen a notable uptick in popularity, albeit not nearly as much as vinyl.
Also while not analog, iPods modded to be a bit more modern (replacing their mechanical HDs with higher capacity flash and adding haptics and Bluetooth among other things) have also been popular lately.
Not OP, but in my daily carry bag I bring: a camera, books, notepad with pencils, and my iPhone.
I carry those other things because I value photography and the phone can’t replace the tactile experience of writing on paper or turning the pages of a book.
I own an aging iPad and will probably buy this new one, but strongly disliked the ad because it seems to be signaling that those things I value are being replaced by the iPad. In a sense, they said the quiet part out loud.
Oh, so you're option three, you just got everything, lol.
I actually liked the ad, and I like the underlying message of the iPad being a simile for all those things. Consider a situation where you have a limited budget, let's say you're a teen and you only get one birthday present. Me personally, I'd get an iPad or a similar device, as that's the single thing that will maximize my fun, out of all other options.
(emphasis on thing, please don't come back at me with the "I'd rather have friends" strawman, you can have friends and an iPad)
Yeah, that makes me sad. You can get a really nice guitar and camera for the price of an iPad, and I suspect most people learn a lot less about music and photography with an iPad than a guitar and a camera.
I get that people want the powerful shiny thing. I do too, I work in tech. I think it's done something dangerous to my brain though...
There's probably billions of guitars and cameras around the world just gathering dust. (With some particular exceptions) the gear doesn't make the artist.
I'm sure you're right, but I don't think the quality of the device matters, I think it's the intent. An iPad is a generalist device, it's a portal to the world. A guitar is an instrument, it makes music and little else.
As someone proficient with both guitar and digital music production, I find that I make better music with physical instruments. I spend most of my time making digital music watching YouTube videos about production tricks... I'm sure some people have more willpower than I who can focus their energy productively, but I don't think that's most people's natural state.
I guess what I'm saying is that in retrospect, if I could give a guitar or an iPad to my 12 year old self, I'd choose the guitar again, no contest.
Because it's the most generic ad you can have. All it says is: "Look how many things iPad can help you do". This ad could have been made for any computing device released in the last 20 years (or more!). It's completely generic and corporate. This is a quintessential first-world freak-out - take something that is completely inconsequential and work yourself into a hysteria.
I strongly disliked the ad. I also get through my days just fine. I don’t understand the insinuation that people who disliked it must be somehow unable to navigate daily life.
Here’s why I disliked it: I’m one of those people who finds themselves concerned and sometimes sad at the erosion of the humanity in art. Social media and AI are changing the nature of artistic expression in a way that often feels destructive. I’ve started to intentionally unplug and use devices less in order to stay connected to what I see as the good stuff in life.
To me, this ad is the culmination of what I dislike about tech.
If they had played the ad in reverse, I think I’d have really liked it. iPad as a tool for expression. Instead, it’s presented as a tool that supersedes expression. I suspect Apple was trying to communicate the former.
Edit to respond to the edit: highly sensitive people who have visceral reactions to stuff like this are canaries in the coal mine. We need them just as much as we need substantive discussion here. Some of the backlash also originated in Japan, where culturally this was quite offensive.
> I strongly disliked the ad. I also get through my days just fine.
Same here. And besides disliking the ad myself, I imagined that many other people would dislike it too. I also wondered how on earth it could have gotten the go sign within Apple. From the outside, at least, Apple looks like the epitome of a cautious, deliberate company. I would have thought there would have been plenty of stages in the approval process where it would have been shot down.
I'm quite cynical about this one. I think that they knew that this ad would produce a reaction and would generate a ton of free press. How many people only saw this ad or knew there was a new ipad generation because of this coverage? I was one of those people.
This feels like bait for online arguments. An aggravating theme that is obvious to many but also just enough deniability to have people complain about the people who react negatively to the ad. Boom. Free press.
If you watch this ad back to back with the classic "1984" Mac ad, I found it hard not to feel that Apple has become the "Big Brother" it once despised.
This! Music programs throughout the US, are getting cut. AI has fundamentally (and not in a good way) changed the artistic landscape in ways that we cannot recover from. My soon to be high school graduate daughter, was so looking forward to pursuing her artistic passions in college, and now is taking a gap year to really understand if that is something she still thinks she can make a living at.
Not to be glib, but the "starving artist" has been a thing for a lot longer than AI (or even Apple) has been around. While I hope your daughter can indeed find a way to make a living from her passions if that's what she wants, taking time to give a good hard think about that (and for that matter whether or not trying to make your passion your job might ruin the passion) isn't the worst thing she could do.
I think there's also something to be said for the fact that while I agree school music programs should not be facing the cuts they do – and that's a battle I was fighting when I was in school too – digital music technology (and its analogs in video and photography arts) have probably been a net positive in terms of bringing the capability to create art to more people than just school programs on their own. When you can make art without consuming resources, without needing large studio spaces or especially in the case of music an entire band of other people, that can give freedom of expression to people that would otherwise have been prevented from participating in the arts because of their circumstances.
I'd also point out that while AI (like any disruptive tech in the arts) may have introduced bad changes, there are also cases where it's allowed for artistic expression that would have been impossible before. My favorite recent example is Billy Joel's new "Turn the Lights Back On" song and video. Watch the video and the obvious thing that jumps out at you is the de-aging / replacement effects. But if you close your eyes and really listen to the music too, you'll discover not only did they play with de-aging visually, but they also played with de-aging his voice. And though the whole song as he ages up in the song, his voice is also changing to match each era until it returns to the present day. That's a cool, artistic and emotional use of AI technology that just wouldn't have been possible before the tools we have now.
I'm with you in that music and art programs should be invested in and not cut. They were already being cut when I was a teenager in the 90s and it really held back my own music practice.
But in terms of your daughter pursuing an art career, was she hoping to work in commercial art? Like at an animation studio or graphic design house? Because I don't see AI taking jobs from artists doing work that ends up in galleries and museums. All of my friends that are professional visual artists here in NYC work with physical materials that go onto physical walls in galleries, and I don't think any of the AIs are going to take away from making 30-foot textile sculptures or oil paintings or immersive performance art transformations of galleries. They might even enhance the toolkit some of my friend's get to use.
And depending on what she considers making a living, she probably won't for a very long time as an artist regardless of AI. There's a huge gap between the artists making $100k on a painting and the long tail of those just holding on making enough to survive. But the one thing all of them have in common is that they really couldn't do anything else in their life, they're fully committed to it, it just would be impossible for them to not be artists. Maybe I'd suggest her going through the Artists Way [1] during her gap year while she tries to figure out if it's what she wants to do! The framing of it can get pretty, I don't know, annoying, weird, but the exercises over the 12-weeks I found to be helpful.
Recording and mass production made “I want to be a musician” similar to “I want to be a pro football player” by the middle of last century (“big band” style being popular, and live radio, kept the career alive for a while)
It cut the value, monetary and social, of anything but great talent and skill down to almost zero, where one middling ability had had substantial value. It shifted the reward for it almost entirely to the tip-top of the skill hierarchy.
I think the level most people engage with music making (a hobby, for themselves primarily) will survive just fine. Some of the already-tiny set of paying jobs it composition, especially, may be in trouble, but that was already a rare career.
We are in a age where most interactions are supercharged with melodramatic theatrics.
Not to dunk too much on the artistic community, but when it comes to these 4 day dramas all the over the top adjectives are applied. Very eloquent but the feelings most of the time aren't even real. It's a performance.
Not to mention, and this is something I have to explain to my European friends all the time when they get all of their information on the US from it's media, Americans speak in hyperbole all the time. It's how they talk to each other ("omg, you're my best friend", "I almost died", "That's the biggest tower I've ever seen", "People are literally dying on the streets due to private healthcare", etc), so if you read it without the context you would think this ad is the worst thing in the world.
> "omg, you're my best friend", "I almost died", "That's the biggest tower I've ever seen", "People are literally dying on the streets due to private healthcare", etc
Side note: because literally has been so often used to mean figuratively, literally is now acceptable to mean figuratively. They even updated the definition in the dictionary: the word now means literally AND its opposite.
Literally has been used in that way for literally hundreds of years. From Charles Dickens ("He had literally feasted his eyes on the culprit.") and Charlotte Bronte ("Literally I was the apple of his eye"), to Mark Twain (in Adventures of Tom Sawyer) and F. Scott Fitzgerald (in The Great Gatsby) -- among others.
This "Literally shouldn't be used figuratively" is a rather modern construct that was artificially created.
Yep, the dictionary's job is to tell you how people are using language, not to tell people how to use words :). And don't people love to make a mess with words' meanings?!
No, literally is not acceptable to use to mean figuratively. Those people are using the word wrong. The dictionaries acting like this is ok should be ashamed of themselves.
Manufactured outrage. Designed to entice clickbait farmers to spread the word. Gone are the days of blasting millions into a TV ad. No new age ad gets that attention anymore. Instead, the idea is to go viral.
> How do those of you who feel so strongly about this ad get through daily life?
Whilst I didn't feel a great deal watching the video, this statement is very presumptive.
Reversed: How does one get through daily life _not_ feeling so strongly about things?
Should perhaps we, those who didn't feel a great deal here, not reflect on whether we might be feeling as much of life as we could, empathise more deeply, care about broader things, consider life as more than ration or reason?
It didn't bother me one way or another, but I also didn't assume anything. I can imagine a life far more rich just by feeling more, seeing more colours in the same palette, tasting more when eating food, and feeling so much more when just experiencing life... perhaps for all the benefit of feeling more, there's just the sharper edge that sometimes you feel more about something like an Apple advert.
> Reversed: How does one get through daily life _not_ feeling so strongly about things?
You didn’t reverse the question. No one is advocating not having strong feelings about anything. The correct reverse would be “how do those of you who don’t feel strongly about this ad get through daily life?”.
The answer to that is “by not entering a state of frenzied stress about every inconsequential thing and being mindful of the battles worth fighting”. There is a finite amount of things you can feel strongly for in your life, and I do think this ad is incredibly minor.
No one is going to remember or talk about this in a week, regardless of if Apple had apologised or not. If only we could’ve had all this outrage and media attention about something which truly matters and is urgent to all humans (like, say, climate change) that would’ve been swell. Now that would’ve been empathetic, shown a care about broader things, and be considerate of life.
Many people (and I’m one of those people) feel that the preservation of craftsmanship and human created art/music is extremely important to a healthy society.
Many musical instruments are still made by hand to this day. Many of the cameras still in active use were too.
And even if you pick up a crappy starter guitar, learning it is a purely human endeavor, propagating the mastery that has been passed down through generations.
And I have no idea how to reconcile “it’s all mass produced rubbish” with “craftsmanship survived unharmed”. These are in direct conflict.
One more opinion in the mix. I grew up in extreme poverty as a child who also happened to have a keen interest in music. I could never develop this keen interest because of course, the cost of instruments was too much for my mom to handle.
That same kid also got to watch Pete Townsend (and others) get superstar status, while breaking instruments during a performance. It was heartbreaking to me that he didn't just donate those instruments to disadvantaged kids and still bothers me today.
So, while I understand the intention of the ad, when you couple that, with Apple products being too pricey for a lot of people, yeah, it bothered me.
I agree. This a the quote from the article, someone called it the "destruction of human experience". We have to be a little bit tougher than this, right?
I agree that one can see the ad as depicting "destruction of human experience". This does not mean that my day is ruined after viewing the ad. Disliking the ad and calling it what it is does not mean one is not tough.
I don't feel anything from the ad, but if you're numb to a pointed reminder of the towering tetragrammaton that ushered in perhaps the most anti-human technology we have seen (phones), then perhaps you need to be a little more open to experiencing the rawness of life.
There's no strength in disassociating from the ills of the world. Useful in short bursts, but as a default state I would say is a problem.
Now that doesn't mean the other side -- the histrionics -- are "right," but there is a balance to be found here.
If you dig through twitter, you can find somebody saying something dramatic about basically everything. It might be hyperbole to communicate a feeling. It might be somebody who is legitimately unwell and reacts unreasonably strongly to people. It might be somebody faking it.
You can be almost certain that people using this language don't expect to be aggregated into news articles and then be used as evidence that the world is getting too soft.
I don't think this is so much about this ONE ad but rather, it contributes to the overall feeling that real connections, like art, music, and architecture, are being lost daily. Music programs are constantly being cut. Architects can't find work. Woodworkers can't make a living making custom furniture. Sam Ash music stores are shuttering ALL their locations.
and i'm shocked that your response is to tell people to man up cry babies. maybe try reflecting why there was a reaction to the ad from a human experience perspective. there is a reason apple appologized instead of telling them to man up as you're suggesting.
"We have to be a little bit tougher than this" is not the same as "Man up cry babies". That's a hyperbolic rephrasing which I think significantly misses the tone of the original.
The fact that you think it’s normal to use the word “shocked” to describe how you feel after reading an anonymous comment on an internet board about a tv ad ironically reinforces the entire point.
Apple did it because that’s the typical corporate response to a backlash, that said nobody should tell you to man up, you feel the way you feel and that’s it, just a reminder that it goes in both sides of the spectrum.
I can read "the destruction of human experience" two ways. One, it's a just a descriptive label of the symbolism the act of crushing creative instruments/tools/materials represents, even if that symbolism is clearly not something the creators ever intended. Two, is the more hyperbolic--or perhaps even hysteric--you're literally destroying the human experience and it's hurting me emotionally take. A lot of the commentary on social media is probably closer to the former, but it doesn't discount the latter.
It's pretty obvious what marketing intended. You take a bunch of creative instruments/tools/materials, squish them inside the iPad, and you get to carry them with you with your iPad. Heck, I'm almost certain it's been done before as a cartoon gag: everything gets sucked into one super tool. There's probably an old Looney Tunes episode with something close enough--maybe stuffing books inside someone's head to teach them the material--to make my point.
In any case, the metaphor's pretty clear; unfortunately, the Crush ad completely botches it. There's no mechanism by which the props 'enter' the iPad. Instead, you just see wanton destruction, the hydraulic press lifts up, and then there's an iPad sitting on a giant chunk of steel. Paint is dripping down the side, but the press itself is oddly sterile. The mess? The parts? The paint? All gone on the press except for what's left on the floor. And if it's smashed into itty bitty bits, even if it's now metaphorically "inside" the iPad, what's the point? Did the press somehow squeeze out some metaphysical meaning from the tools that got sucked into the iPad? Now throw in some of the angst about the possibility of generative AI replacing some creative jobs.
If the idea is that an iPad will 'replace' those tools--or more likely, just let the user take them with you wherever they go--there's an implicit assumption that the user values those tools and would like them so close at hand. So literally destroying tools that, for many artists and creatives, are objects of affection closely tied to memories that are critical parts of their self-conception, is an absurd kind of symbolism that would have never made it off the drawing board under Jobs. People tend to respect their tools, and filming their meaningless destruction is going to rub people the wrong way even though it really has no actual impact. Especially with an ad that's simultaneously trying to get you to buy the product they were symbolically destroyed to revel.
Will Crush turn many people off from buying a new iPad when they need one? Almost certainly not. But it does underscore that Apple's changed as as a company. Apple users--myself included--might still love the products they buy, but it doesn't seem like they're in love with them like it once seemed (for way too many of their users).
It's possible to have a negative reaction to something, but otherwise be fine. I don't think there's many people sobbing uncontrollably on the subway because they saw this ad.
All sorts of media - whether movies or books or games or ads - are designed to make some kind of reaction in the audience. Dismissing "I don't like this" as a valid reaction is also dismissing "I like this", which seems silly.
I’m not dismissing it, I’m just curious about it. For me, if I was having strong negative reactions to things frequently it would impact my wellbeing. I wonder if thats not the case for these folks.
The WHOLE point of the ad in the first place was to make people feel strong positive emotions toward Apple products. It turns out they misjudged and for many people it didn’t evoke the type of emotions they thought it would. It’s not like people are up in arms about a spec sheet.
I think you are being extremely irrational in expecting people to not feel passionately about random things. Companies spend insane amounts of money influencing consumer sentiment for good reasons.
I can tell you that I watched the recording, cringed for a few seconds and skipped it, and moved on with my life.
After the outrage, revisiting my 3 seconds of feelings, I tend to agree that destroying nice things isn't a great thing to do in an ad.
I don’t have particularly strong emotional reaction, but IMO the ad is horrible.
Destroying functional stuff with a hydraulic press is a waste of planet’s resources.
Destroying musical instruments, sculptures and other cultural artifacts is not too far from burning books, it’s barbaric.
Finally, I believe the ad is misleading because the ipad not gonna survive the press either. It’s just a consumer electronic device which doesn’t even have IP68 water protection.
What bothers me the most is the casual destruction of perfectly functional, expensive (for some) items. It’s glorifying waste, and I’m sure there are individuals or families that would kill for the chance to get a piano, a trumpet, or the insanely overpriced Macs they can’t afford, while Apple is crushing them just to sell us more ewaste (seeing how apple in particular is at the forefront of anti repair)…
I'm more concerned for the people who feel nothing. Being desensitized isn't a virtue. The marketing strategy of one of the largest companies in the world is not a triviality.
If someone's reaction was literally debilitating, sure, that's probably pathological, but I don't think there's anything wrong with feeling strongly about something like this, especially when such advertising is specifically engineered to evoke an emotional response.
Even if you disagree, I would think that the volume or strength of the comments would teach you something about the situation. Instead, it’s the children who are wrong.
In a sarcastic, dismissive way, that implied superiority. It was a pretty crass way to phrase the question. I learned far more from that than any answer.
Apple’s marketing tells us who they are proud to be. As someone who attempts to defend the AppStore fees and process as valuable, seeing this makes me question if Apple has gotten “too cool” to be a good steward.
So, while it may not feel like it to you, from those who have invested in the brand this is a betrayal and a real emotion.
Oh, and I get through the day just fine. It just reminds me to never relent on my values.
Let's not fall into the trap of assuming you can't have a feeling if you don't speak it into existence. People stating their feelings are actually doing Apple a big favor. The alternative is nobody says anything but keeps their feelings bottled up and simply walk around with a negative opinion of Apple because of the advertisement.
I think this is part of the issue. I really dont want to have the discussion because im sick of trying to understand how everyone is mad about everything. At a certain point it’s mentally draining for me just so people can feel morally superior because they are more PC than you.
People are concerned about waste forget that once the item is produced, it’s already waste. Just because it’s in their definition of “worth it” doesn’t mean it’s not going to end up in a landfill in the near future.
I think it's this unconscious desire to share strong opinions about any large enough bit of news. While I don't necessarily think it's a bad thing to have personable opinions about anything large or small - I've noticed more and more that people just need to satiate this hunger to share it.
And it's typically devoid of any nuance, it's shallow, quick, and distilled down into this form that begs people to react.
I see it mostly on reddit on posts that have hundreds to one or two thousand comments where 50% of the replies have almost the identical opinion. Everyone has this need to share it, even if it isn't nearly that original.
There's probably some societal change that someone significantly smarter than I can speak to, but this whole "digital town square" approach has kinda turned into a maelstrom of the most toxic opinions that people probably don't hold _that strongly_ if you asked them face-to-face in person.
Well, I gave it a go and saw it, just fyi I get through my life just fine and one of those seemingly few folks without childhood/mental issues with good life so far and amazing small kids. No apple products owner, wife has mini 13 and she is not happy with it.
Its not the worst ad by any means, I am used to seeing russians blown to pieces in ukraine at this point, but the arrogance man, stemming from first frame was a bit over the top even for me and left bitter taste of it all when intentions were opposite. How this passed all the managerial reviews is beyond me. Actually I get it - they all thought its fine, which also tells you something.
Not shocking in any way, to me apple is subtly arrogant for many years and the main reason for me going to (more expensive but way more open) competition. That and consistently fanatical uncritical apple crowd, also visible here.
i can dislike the ad or even find it repugnant, and the moment it ends still be on with my life. last time i checked having opinions on things was not frowned upon.
I have strong positive and negative emotional reactions to things on a daily basis -- I sometimes tear up reading books to my children, have emotional responses to songs, that sort of thing.
As I watched the video I found the destruction beautiful and heartbreaking. If it had been used as an artistic commentary on, oh I don't know, our underappreciation of good tools, the undermining of art under fascism, the dumbing-down and compression of culture under capitalism, etc that would have been interesting.
But the reveal at the end is that the force destroying all these artistic tools is none other than one of the world's richest companies using the spectacle to hawk their latest must-have gewgaw. And the delicious irony of Apple unintentionally positioning itself as the unstoppable, soulless destroyer of art and culture is just chef's kiss perfection. I'm honestly sad they pulled the ad.
But to your question, I haven't noticed any impact of strong emotions on a daily basis except that I get overly excited sometimes when talking about things and have to bring a tissue to movies. I'm similarly curious what it's like for people who don't really have emotional reactions to things. I work with folks like this, and I am curious. Do they feel things when they look at art, listen to music, read literature, look at photos, or is it just sort of background ambiance? When evaluating art do they plot perfection on the horizontal of a graph and importance on the vertical to yield the measure of its greatness?
> I have strong positive and negative emotional reactions to things on a daily basis -- I sometimes tear up reading books to my children, have emotional responses to songs, that sort of thing.
I can still get a bit misty-eyed just thinking about reading "Love You Forever" or "Guess How Much I Love You", and my kids outgrew those books years ago.
I doubt you'd feel incensed unless you felt like you were also in the hydraulic press. Goodness, there's not any technology that would make artists as useless as their instruments and tools, is there? That would make this ad really relevant.
I don't care about Apple, so I don't care about the ad. It lowers my (already pretty low) opinion of them, but that's about it.
If this kind of thing was done by a company I'm a huge supporter of, sunk a lot of money into, one I personally promoted to my friends and family and one that was part of my personal and professional identity in some way, it might be very upsetting. I might feel betrayed.
Personally I don't get invested in companies or products like that. Maybe you don't either. The emotional reaction makes sense if there's high emotional investment. Whether the emotional investment is rational is an entirely different question.
I was stressed and angered by the ad, and I think I get through life fine, otherwise -- or at least, I can't think of another ad in the past decade that has caused me this reaction. It wouldn't be as bad if it were detached from its purpose as an Apple ad, or if it played as a short before a Pixar movie. It's because it's the biggest (or 2nd biggest?) company in the world giving us a wrenching visual depiction of a future in which so many beautiful things from the past and the present are squashed into a soulless rectangle.
Well the Ad is disturbing to me. I can see the intent and it's not malicious. But the backlash is good IMO. Because it sets a stake in the ground and a point to be brought up in the room when the marketing team wants to show a hydraulic press, a chain saw, flame thrower, a wrecking ball or a bulldozer destroying things for the purpose of grabbing my attention in their next ad.
An animation of all those nice items magically squeezing into the iPad one at a time, each contributing to an ongoing song/theme would sell far far better.
I had a strongly negative emotional reaction to the ad. Dwelling on crushing musical instruments, kids' toys, books, sculptures, and then the paint spurting out at the end into a depressing post-industrial warehouse -- something about it really affected me. It's not like I'm debilitated for the rest of the day, but it definitely makes me feel less positively about the ipad advertised.
I think there's a weird false equivalency being often mentioned with this topic. Yes, I'd say this ad was stress inducing for me. But that doesn't mean I have issues getting through the day. It's not some kind of weakness that makes my life worse because I feel things. I can see something and be stressed or disgusted about it and then move on and feel happy about things that are nice. Feeling things doesn't need to force you to do anything. It's fine to just experience them, and maybe act on them if needed. But the idea that those feelings somehow have to take over your life is misguided.
Strong emotional reaction to anything is pretty much the norm nowadays.
However, i feel like apple's ad made people visualize a true deep concern about the future of art (and humanity) with regards to the recent advancements of AI. The fact that the number 1 consumer hardware company in the world blatantly acknowledge the fact that computers are going to generate every piece of content automatically in the future is quite troubling. (of course, that's probably not exactly what they meant, as someone will have to push that "generate" button on the ipad, at some point).
I think this is it. Imagine if instead there was a "siphon" effect where the instruments get miniaturised / sucked into the iPad. I don't think anyone would have been upset by that. It's the crushing that's at issue, and it does touch on an anxiety around the digital experience crushing the life out of the more physical / personal engagement with music.
My honest thought when I see this sort of reaction is that you know life is good because if it weren’t, people wouldn’t have the emotional energy to waste on something like this.
I think the problem is that people are too ‘connected’ emotionally with products or companies (that speaks to their effective advertising) so when a company’s pubic personae diverge from their own view, they become like the abusive partner in a relationship that doesn’t allow any daylight between themselves and this other entity. They feel betrayal.
I think they invest too much emotion into inanimate things.
>> people had a strong emotional reaction to this does kinda worry me.
It is more than the ad. Apple is a cornerstone of many people's lives. Their online existence, the bulk of their personhood these days, flows through apple systems. Apple is basically a quazi-partner. Such people feel they must react defensively, which is the root of fanboy culture. Such people therefore get very worried when they see unequivocal mistakes. A fanboy will then turn quickly, joining the anti crowd in an effort to correct the mistake asap. As soon as apple make sufficient recompense, they will return to the defensive. (See every mistake ever made by a K-pop star.)
Hyperbolic internet rhetoric has resulted in the need to phrase everything as if you're a psych ward patient who cries when it rains because the sky is sad. If everything is a pitched battle between good and evil, anything less than screaming and beating your chest is weakness in the face of existential threats. The squeaky wheel gets the grease so everyone is squealing as loud as they can. Textual histrionics from people laying on their couch or sitting on the toilet staring at a little screen.
It's the same as typing "ROFL LMAO" when you actually just lightly exhaled through your nose.
It's infantile and distracts from "meaningful discourse". They're allowing themselves to be seriously psychologically manipulated (or are playacting along with it), but it just happens to be in a negative way this time.
tbf, I've always found apple commercials cringy af. And I can understand a bit of a visceral reaction to the message, but I don't see such over-the-topness with other crap such as AI content spam, music etc.
But the response seems outsized. it just seems like bullshit. I think most of these reactions are not genuine, just all aboard the rage-train!
Or maybe they are all just jealous because they can't afford apple products ;-)
no kidding. there's a bunch of stuff going on in teh world (some of which risk getting me downvoted if I mention them) that are way more distressing. its not like they destroyed anything truly sacred or one of a kind.
no, because the ad is very deliberate about what it's trying to represent. The intention is to suggest that physical tools that have been used for thousansd of years to create culture, art, and technonolgy and that themselves are art, are gabrage. the ad suggests an apple computer that is bound by limits of it's software and harware, that cannot be further refined, cannot be repaired, and severs the human senses from experiencing the tools it claims to deprecate, is superior. it's a bad message.
they may as well have smashing the statue of david and shown that the mac's default background is a picture of it.
and because someone has a negative reaction to an ad doesn't imply they got "angry" over it or need tougher skin or are somehome so sensitive they can't function in society. it's being able to reflect how something is making you feel. and it feels like a shitty ad on many levels.
To me it says "Look at all this stuff you can do with an ipad now, and in a thinner form factor. It used to take a room full of stuff to do this. Isn't that awesome?".
You might not be angry but you're using pretty malicious language to assign intent to the ad that doesn't seem present to me.
You help me feel sane. People, it is a commercial. Nothing more. Don't get your panties in a bundle. If you don't like it, change the channel, don't buy their product, go outside on a hike. The things people get upset about today is fascinating. GO OUTSIDE
Why get so bothered by other people being upset? Apple is going to be fine, you don’t need to worry on their behalf. No need to get your undergarments of choice in a twist. Good opportunity to step outside and get some fresh air.
It doesn’t really ‘bother’ me and I’m not worrying on their behalf. If you’re actually interested in why I’m worried, it makes me question whether there’s less emotional resilience in our society, and I value emotional resilience because I think we need it when life truly tests us.
Sounds like you are getting your panties in a bundle about other people getting their panties in a bundle. Why do you care so much what other random people on the internet think?
Maybe it is you who needs to go outside and stop reading these comments which make you feel 'insane'?
I'd wager these are just snowflakes, but there are so many people that snowflakes still amount to a significant amount even if they are nonetheless a minority.
I'm still having a hard time believing that anybody was actually disturbed or offended by this ad and that it's not part of a clever guerilla marketing campaign by Apple to trick people into watching the ad.
I like it. You throw away all your hard-earned, expensive instruments, tools, and crush them to be sure. You then go buy an iPad, and the circle is complete: You're now a next-generation Apple consumer! Just turn on YouTube kids and watch slime videos for the rest of your life.
Apple should go back to the ads where the bold statement is generic upbeat envato elements music and the only new feature in their new products: phone colors
It feels like this is the turning point when corporate social media giants found out that anger/depression are the easiest ways to increase engagement.
>It feels like this is the turning point when corporate social media giants found out that anger/depression are the easiest ways to increase engagement.
Rush Limbaugh figured this out in the 80s. He made lots of money and everyone followed suit.
Maybe you’re younger than I am, but I definitely feel like the introduction of the smart phone — and the iPhone on particular — was when things started to decline steeply.
Out of curiosity, why do you say the iPhone in particular? I think smart phone ubiquity, regardless of smart phone choice, is what has led to significant cultural changes (some positive, many negative). But I can't really think of a reason why the iPhone should get more blame than the Galaxy's and whatever other smart phones are out there.
I guess I feel that the iPhone was the innovator for a lot of things that are in use today, ultimately leading to the cultural fall.
For sure, today the iPhone is no more to blame than other smartphones. But the iPhone lead the charge, IMO.
And FWIW, I’ve only owned iPhones, so it’s not like I’m anti-iPhone. But perhaps I have unfair bias and am giving too much credit to Apple.
But just like this ad reinforces, I feel like their goal from the beginning was to replace these devices, destroying much of the culture that we used to know.
I don't know whether they have a reason to apologise or not. But... this ad is not doing what they wanted it to do. It's too heavy handed, it's too weak in its value proposition.
It's just a bad ad. Compare it to the original introduction of the iPhone. Jobs just stated "we build a new phone, a new iPod and a new ?calendar?" [0] repeated that 5 times and asked "Do you get it?". The (implicit) statement was "you won't need any of those again". This message is what they aimed for with that ad. But instead of the (admittedly arrogant) prediction "YOU won't want any of those anymore", they went for "you can't use the other stuff anymore" [1]. And that just makes them look far, far weaker than e.g. the iPhone intro
[0] not sure about the last one
[1] In German we'd say "alternativeless", which has a nice set of negative connotations nowadays
If that was the intend an animation that doesn't literally crush things would have worked much better.
Let it fall into a black hole and let an iPad emerge or whatever.
The dramatic effect of a hydraulic press adds nothing positive.
Still less dystopian than the vision pro with a dad running around his kids with a walled-garden-camera-helmet.
Once may have been a mistake, twice means there's some psychopath marketing VP at the helm OR a joker trying to see far they can go before somebody actually watches ads they're doing before they go live.
“What’s a computer?” Should count as one too. But back then we just scoffed at the idea that an iPad can replace a computer. Now somehow we are offended or even terrified by the same absurdity that an iPad can replace a real musical instrument.
I was giving them the slight benefit of the doubt for that one, the VP can consume 3D photos and they hadn’t released the new iPhone that can take those photos, so it was more of a derived situation to get the plot to “you can rewatch rewarding 3D movies you took”.
I do agree the test marketing groups are not providing good feedback about secondary interpretations…
Psychopath? Perhaps a stretch. Soulless? Absolutely. Probably not just VP but whole department if no one raised the voice and said guys, maybe people won't vibe with this.
A lot of people have strong emotional connections to their artistic tools like instruments. It's a very common reaction to feel discomfort at the sight of an instrument being destroyed. Emotional attachments are irrational, but the point of an advertisement isn't to be rational otherwise they'd just show a spec sheet as a still in a video.
You didn't see the trumpet that was the focal point of the first few moments? The piano with paint cans prominently shattering right after that? The guitar towards the end?
Dunno... I guess I just saw the first shot, thought "huh, they're crushing a room" and zoned out. It all just registered as "stuff in a room" not "expensive musical instruments".
Jesus... this is not even worth to being called a 'first-world problem', yet this apparently seems to be an important issue to most of HN and "social media," judging by the comments herein.
I believe the apt suggestion is to go and "touch grass."
This ad said the quiet part out loud about what the average technologist thinks of the average liberal arts pursuit. It just had to manifest as an ad from an insulated marketing dept for it to finally happen “in the open.” No surprises, and it was nice to see it out stated clearly.
Considering the NYT tells us every single day what the average liberal arts pursuit thinks about the average technologist, I won't worry too much about that.
Worry about what? I’m pointing out that it’s nice for tech to finally be honest about the view and get a deserving reaction in return after decades of self-congratulation.
Engineers did not make this advertisement. Marketing and creative departments are dominated by business / liberal arts majors. You are really spouting all over the place.
What an unbelievably childish response. What does the New York Times have to do with this ad? What makes you think the New York Times is representative of the "average liberal arts pursuit"? Is the New York Times especially antagonistic towards the tech industry? Do you seriously believe there exists some us-versus-them division between "liberal arts" and "technologists"?
Wow. So the parent comment made exactly the same stupid generalization in the opposite direction, and it was all ok, but show a mirror to it and suddenly you get upset?
> Is the New York Times especially antagonistic towards the tech industry?
Yes
> Do you seriously believe there exists some us-versus-them division between "liberal arts" and "technologists"?
Not in real life among friends, but it's definitely a culture war flame that was started and is stoked by media.
There’s nothing generalized about decades long economic destruction of the creative arts and similar industries in exchange for streaming platforms, instagram, “news”via social media and now AI. But hey RSUs in tech are great, get over it NYT readers!
As someone who double majored in English and Computer Science this is one of the silliest grievances I've ever heard. For grown adults to still be embittered because of a real or imagined college rivalry seems very petty to me, and frankly unrelated to the issue of whether this Apple ad was distasteful.
I think they’re embittered bc of having lib arts livelihoods shredded by technology and being told it’s a good thing and progress by engineers reinventing the wheel and causing more negative externalities on top of that, and then the cycle begins again. STEM keeps winning, everyone else loses, and STEM gets congratulated, empowered and funded for it.
It's true that they got disrupted, but tech also led to more democratization of the news / arts, which obviously entrenched players are not too fond of.
Also, the same embittered liberal arts majors had no problem telling rust belt coal miners that it was a good thing their livelihoods were being shredded.
If you fail to see that there's a massive culture war element to this, I have nothing more to say.
I'm not bitter about it, it's just that college was the last time I was interacting a lot with people not in STEM fields. All my friends went into technical fields for some reason, even if they started off somewhere else. Nowadays I occasionally get "Where do you work? Oh that company? I hate that company."
Part of the reason I moved out of the Bay Area was I didn't want to be around so many ultra techie people, or for my kids to grow up that way. We'd be happier and even do our jobs better if there were more of a "human touch," and I wish our company had SQLite's code of ethics.
But I'm a computer programmer, so even if I'm in a more balanced environment now, all I meant is I simply don't work with artists etc daily.
Maybe the average technologist, but for anyone who understands Apple's culture and history, your claim is not just inaccurate, but opposite of the truth.
Steve Jobs addressed this exact point during a 2011 keynote [0]:
> It is in Apple’s DNA that technology alone is not enough—it’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the results that make our heart sing.
Blocking out the sound and sights of real life with something digital is not what I call a thoughtful commitment to the human experience.
Hardly anyone seems to remember how the iPhone used to be small enough to fit in one hand or in any pocket. As people became increasingly addicted to phones to the point of having them outside the pocket more often than not, bigger phones made more desirable, but Steve Jobs insisted on keeping it small. He said nobody wanted a big phone, but since it was obvious users did want it, I'm wondering if there was another reason. He died, then a few years afterwards, Apple released the larger iPhone 6.
That's a huge marketing fail if that's what it made you feel because it would be completely contrary to their messaging during the rest of the iPad event. The 30 minute show was almost entirely about using the iPad in creative pursuits. Illustration, film making, photography, music, etc.
It's hard to remove this ad from the context of the current market for artistic services, which have always been undervalued by non-artists (eg: "give me this for free so you get exposure!"), which is under assault from AI startups that think they're making the world better by killing the most human parts of our economy.
Artists are really being stung by AI right now. And Apple, ostensibly the darling tech company for artists, puts out an ad literally crushing artistic tools and telling you to buy an iPad to replace them. By the way, it has the most powerful neural engine ever.
Not sure (well I am sure given the audience) why you’re getting downvotes… other than it’s a bitter pill for engineers to swallow that the creative arts industry which eng culture tries to simultaneously love/emulate/crush economically hates engineers and tech culture in return for this multi-decade attitude. Even in the face of “hey but I use XYZ tech for art, that’s not true!” that tend to pop up.
You are spot on, and the ad, and it’s humorous “wait they hate us?” counter-reaction/confusion in reaction to feedback about encapsulates it all well.
I, like a lot of people, just hated the ad, although I liked it in reverse.
If there's a single product company that hires technologists who also love the arts, it's Apple -- this campaign was just mismanaged by someone who missed the point, and didn't understand Apple's history very well.
Also, apparently, the ipad is really thin, so maybe they got overexcited :)
A technology company that loves the arts and shows it by paternalistically crushing all of its implements and saying “trust us this iPad is better than your heirloom piano or silly books.”
Right on trend. They might love it, but they don’t understand it, and per the last 20 years love unemploying it.
Agreed, I definitely think the reverse is better. It gets the same point across while implying the new ipad is bursting at the seams with all of these cultural tools. I wasn't offended by the destruction or anything just straight up kind of a dumb commercial.
To be more explicit, liberal arts refers to art as in skill, not as in fine arts. Liberal arts education is the dominant educational paradigm in the western world. Any education that emphasizes being well-rounded any knowing something about many subjects is typically a liberal arts education (compared to a technical or professional education where you just learn a lot about a single subject).
Also Apple: We still use these fancy boxes that are a pain in the ass to recycle and will more than likely just end up in the trash anyway. They can't be reused for literally anything else because of their size, shape, and way they're glued together. Also, the materials aren't eco-friendly. But who cares because we stopped giving away power bricks and wrap the cables in paper instead of plastic! So Eco Friendly!
Also Apple: Let's take this pile of useful nice stuff, some of which has collector value, and smash it all to make a commercial.
Also they really need to get out of their own ass here. The iPad isn't a piano. The iPad isn't a guitar. You cannot replace any of those musical instruments with an iPad. You can't paint on canvas with an iPad, so destroying paint is silly.
I won't go with "sensitive" here. I see it as tasteless waste. That commercial is tacky AF. What are they trying to market the iPad to? "Fuck your feelings" types that just bought a new cybertruck and have more money than brains?
They are also notoriously anti-repair, block access to spare parts (despite their recent fake pro-repair marketing) so all their repairable products end up in landfills. People are focusing on the irrelevant ad, but the real harm is elsewhere.
> The iPad isn't a piano. The iPad isn't a guitar. You cannot replace any of those musical instruments with an iPad. You can't paint on canvas with an iPad, so destroying paint is silly.
Literacy truly is dead…
Do you know the iPad is not even built by pressing guitars and toys and paint together?
I don't think one needs to be Japanese to be offended by that ad. Also, it's amazing at how accurate it is describing Apple's general corporate approach.
Yeah, it's a hilarious mimicry of their own process: "recycle" (aka destroy) everyone's old tech and sell them the new version of the same thing. It's like the most direct/blatant depiction of the lifecycle of consumer tech I've ever seen.
Nice false polemic to make us watch the ad. It looks like the boring polemic of smashing digital representation of products is part of the advertising campaign.
> The group that whines about this kind of thing will find a reason to whine regardless of content.
Serious question - do you feel that all complaints in society are from the same group? And that group is, "the group of people who complain?" That doesn't seem a bit circular to you?
Do you think that kind of attitude might blind you to who is complaining about what and why?
Apple's customers don't like the advert. There's not point in Apple arguing with them. Its like trying to argue with someone about whether a joke is funny. If they didn't laugh the first time, having a debate about it just makes it worse.
Apple couldn't care less about anyone being offended or hurt. Apple cares about not buying again. And since the (effective) value proposition of an Apple product (at least for me) is: You don't have to worry about it. You can use it if you want, it will work. But you don't have to (it's not taking anything else away).
And this ad directly contradicts the second part. They needed to crush everything else! Which, while maybe true already, is most definitely _not_ a reason for me to buy anything. So, at least for me, but I'd argue at least subconsciously for most people, this ad is making it less likely that I buy the advertised product!
Not really victim culture. The problem is people taking comments on social media way too seriously. Facebook as around three billion MAU. Let's say half of those speak English. It takes 0.001% of that userbase to produce 15'000 comments passionate about an issue. That's more than enough for anyone to believe they did something wrong, if the other 99.999% don't care enough to engage in the conversation.
I can't wait for AI to finally give social media the coup de grace.
Imagine being so deep in the woods in anti-victim-culture culture that you concoct an association even in such an unrelated complaint like this distasteful ad.
Descent? We're all trying to ascend into a life with more substance and soul. I think your line of thinking is upside down and seems absolutely miserable to me.
> The reaction to this ad reflects a pernicious societal descent into relying on emotion instead of reason and accepting innumeracy instead of analysis.
Being a snob about things isn’t as cool as you think it is.
The problem with the ad is not that it produces waste. If it was 100% CGI it would make absolutely no difference.
The problem is the message. Craftspeople, including artists, value, respect and love their tools. This ads tell them that those tools are valueless, obsolete, objects of ridicule, and that a big tech company can decide to replace them with yet another lifeless slab of aluminium and plastic.
Imagine an ad for condoms that would crush babies. (Why not! Thinness is an important attribute of condoms too.) Critics would not accuse the company producing it of killing babies, because everyone would assume there were some special effects involved. Yet it would be absolutely revolting.
There's a real element of media literacy (or lack thereof) that we have to consider in this issue.
What was the intent of the media?
This is obviously open to interpretation, but to me I see the intent being that all these tools for creative expression are being combined/squashed/pressed into this thing which is very thin. That's why they chose the press. They also chose the press because it looks visually interesting, they are trying to make a fun ad.
I really can't imagine that anyone in that ad was trying to imply that the iPad destroys those objects, or that those objects should be destroyed, or are now valueless. They are saying that this device contains the functionality of all these big items squashed into one crazy tiny thing. Amazement at what it can do, NOT a desire to destroy or make obsolete real pianos.
From that viewpoint, it's clear they VERY clumsily applied a metaphor (combining + crushing into the iPad) with a visually fun thing (the explosions), resulting in people thinking they want to destroy pianos.
But importantly (if one takes the above as true, which you may not), you can't then say that the ad is trying to "tell that those tools are valueless, obsolete, objects of ridicule", that's not the intent of the author.
The intent of the author shouldn't matter when it comes to advertising - it's not the viewer's responsibility to figure out a deeper/alternative meaning. The ad company is injecting themselves between the viewer and the media they actually want to watch. The onus is on the advertiser to make the message as clear as possible to the viewer who doesn't care - and if it misses the mark, it's the advertiser which failed. Not the viewer's lack of effort on understanding it.
I agree, and I don't think this is a good ad for all those reasons.
But if you want to infer values of the company from an ad, and say things like "Apple wants to destroy pianos", then considering the intent of the author is absolutely relevant.
> There's a real element of media literacy (or lack thereof) that we have to consider in this issue. What was the intent of the media?
You cannot ignore the impact of artistic decisions and processes when considering a piece of work, and calling that a "lack of media literacy" is grossly oversimplifying artistic analysis. Intent is important, but so is the impact on the audience. Art is a conversation between artist and audience, and as pointed out by the article and the other comments here in the thread, the message missed for a significant percentage of the audience.
But there are many ways to show that the iPad incorporates all of those things. Make a mini character enter the iPad and visit a succession of caves, each one full of artists doing art with traditional tools. Or put mini instruments in a drawer, one after the other, and when the drawer is opened again it only contains an iPad.
But no! They thought it was more fun to destroy everything. They wanted to make porn. They wanted to make their own little snuff movie.
And nobody in what one imagines to be a long chain of command, felt physically sick watching it.
The whole point was the destruction -- they spent basically all the time in the ad on slow, loving shots of all these artifacts being mangled and crushed. They weren't being combined, subsumed, or absorbed -- they were being flat out destroyed. And not quickly -- slowly and remorselessly.
The problem with the ad is in the semiotics -- the visual language of the ad was all about succession _through destruction_. The message was "all these things, that represent _good_ memories and experiences you've had, are now destroyed." And at the very end they show you a brief shot of the new iPad.
Same. Replace condoms with abortion clinic and the analogy might a little more accurate - but only because I suspect some will see it as story about murdering souls and some will see it as beneficial and necessary. But even then it's still quite a stretch.
> If it's actually just the seeing of a musical instrument being crushed that is so upsetting, then what are we to think of the countless instruments thrown in the trash after our elementary school kids give up on being guitarists, drummers, trombone players, or violinists. Why do we even let a 7 year old touch a violin if only 1 out of 100 ever play a level that isn't torture to listen to.
This reminded me of an interesting documentary from the LA Times on the LA Unified School District's musical instrument repair shop.
I tend to agree. Most people have no idea that every commercial or film, ends up dumping or destroying almost all the stuff in the video.
I remember there was a Scene in one of the more recent mission impossible movies where the director was interviewed as joking about how they budgeted to destroy 3 lamborgini's for a action sequence but ended up needing to destroy 4 of them. These were brand new, straight off the lot lambos that just got shot at, crashed, and blown up for the movie. No one cries about that, instead they marvel at the "practical effects" of the movie.
This isn't even a unique example. A lot or props that DON'T get destroyed and are just used for one quick scene, like a chello in the background, often go straight to the dump after the scene is filmed, because they just bring in a dump crew to get rid of everything.
I guess the difference is ignorance is bliss. People don't see the amount of absurd waste that happens in commercials and movies, so they can enjoy it. Strangly, even seeing it on screen (like a car blowing up) doesn't bother them. But a slow crushing of an instrument for 20 seconds does trigger them.
The amount of waste that this produced is inconsequential, not even a rounding error for the amount of waste that a warehouse up the street from anyone reading this is performing as you read this comment. And yes, there are so many of these companies creating unfathomable amounts of waste that no matter where you live, you have one probably within a few miles of your home that you never knew about.
I would tend to side with those that are triggered if these instruments were antiques that couldn't be replaced. However, these appeared to be common instruments. I actually play guitar and the guitar actually looks like a pretty cheap guitar. These get bought at Costco and returned and dumped everyday. They are commodities, they are pumped out of factories en masse in Vietnam and contain a hundred bucks of parts, wood, etc. Most of these guitars end up in the dump anyway. The upright piano is a little different because they tend to be several thousands of dollars, but again this looks like a modern, generic piano.
I am happy to have discussions about the vast amount of waste humans have, because it is truly unfathomable. Most people have no idea how bad the problem is. But watching some paints, a metronome, a single guitar and piano get destroyed is not even the beginning of the real problem. So if we want to have a discussion about waste, let's have it. It's a serious problem, but this feels like a joke that a handful of items that doesn't even equate to what an average American probably dumps when they move houses, seems like a stupid hill to die on.
> The reaction to this ad reflects a pernicious societal descent into relying on emotion
Spoiler alert: humans have emotions. Apple will gladly spit in your face about emissions all while giving you less product (taking chargers out of iPhones) so they can save the environment (more like, their profits). Not everyone wants to see the message of hundreds of years of art history being destroyed all so you can purchase new product to make some soulless AI generated garbage.
Another day, another stupid "controversy" where a few Twits complain on social media simply to get attention and publications pick it up as if it's a real issue. Why waste our time?
> People based in Japan appear to be prominent amongst the critics, which some said "lacked respect".
> Some said this was based in "tsukumogami” - a term from Japanese folklore describing a tool which can contain a spirit or even soul of its own.
> "The act of destroying tools is arrogant and offensive to us Japanese," one person explained, while another said musicians value their instruments "more than life itself".
So, let's reverse this. A Japanese company's online advertisement offends some American sensibilities (not a stretch to imagine). So a few hundred Americans comment on the video and on Twitter.
Would that deserve a news article and a statement from the company?
Imagine a Japanese ad where they melt down guns, set fire to an F150 and turn some bald eagles into a burger. I believe a lot of Americans would call for the death of the company, not just a statement
They might, depending on the slight. It's a culture that emphasizes politeness and propriety after all. You might’ve chosen one of the least effective counter-examples for this one.
Apple is advertising to a global audience here, and are big in Japan.
I think the closest thing I can think of is Sony, perhaps, doing an offensive ad(to Americans) with the PS5/6. I do think it'd be written about and they'd apologize, though it's a little different because Sony has a specific US subsidiary which acts like its own company.
i don't get they need to apologize. I watched the ad and though it was very creative and the the squeezy ball at the end was funny. why is everyone getting so up in arms and offended by this? I guess this is our society now where people just look for things that they want to trigger and offend them.
I liked it, for the same reason I’ll occasionally watch videos on YouTube of things getting crushed in a hydraulic press. Morbid curiosity, I guess. It also looks like a decent amount of craftsmanship went into shooting and editing it. I would be curious to know how much was real vs. CGI.
I can understand how people could find it distasteful with its almost pornographic depiction of destruction. But still, it feels like people are almost going out of their way to get offended by this.
That being said, I think Apple is smart to apologize. It doesn’t cost them anything, it softens some of the negativity surrounding the story, and probably got the new iPads an extra day of coverage in the news cycle.
>But it feels like people are almost going out of their way to get offended by this.
After all the news about this, I finally watched it. I don't get why people are complaining. It's either a ploy by Apple marketing to get people to watch it, or manufactured outrage by news sites trying to get clicks.
This idea of 'squashing all these tools down to a thin slab of glass' made sense given their somewhat unusual focus on the thinness of the device. It was a bit of a throwback to the early 2010s smartphone innovation, where the size of the devices was the yardstick by which manufacturers would outdo each other. I would charitably interpret it as an uninspired marketing team trying to spin some version of Jobs' classic "the iPhone is simultaneously an iPod, phone and internet device" - however the party trick is old, and nobody's impressed anymore.
Perhaps the blowback is a sign of a wider weariness that people have accumulated towards big tech companies over the past few years, mixed with a nebulous malaise about 'AI' and what it means for the status quo and people's livelihoods.