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).
