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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.
Nah, it's not exactly like that.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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 (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 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.
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.
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.
the first cultural memes were songs
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.
I didn't like the advert and I'm not a millennial.
It was repulsive.
The issue for me is not about minimalism, so this reframing is not appropriate in my case.
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.
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.
The stress ball emoji getting destroyed with its eyes popping up. That was real depressing.
That’s how it feels when inflation made basics jump up 50% and it feels you’re being slowly crushed.
Seeing this is an Ad for one of the world’s richest Companies, the lesson I got is the rich are slowly crushing the median.
Don’t buy their crap.
He! Thanks for downvote. Someone really loves Apple.
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.
Fuji Heavy Industries would like a word about pianos, guitars, trumpets, and, if we're honest with ourselves, everything else on that press.
Though the tone of the ad was still... Orwellian: imagine a hydraulic press, stamping on human creativity, forever.
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.
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.
Do you think hand crafted instruments were used for the ad or cheap Chinese shit?
https://youtu.be/XL7Wxqr2ZRk
https://youtu.be/0SvfNhMlnBE
Even "cheap Chinese shit" is made by hand.
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.
Seriously, true.
Mother's heartbeat. The woosh of her blood stream.
We get months of this auditory performance.
It's the product which they're describing as soulless. Apple likes to sell the idea of creativity but the device's purpose is ultimately consumption.
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.
This is what I realized, too. At first, I thought the outrage was dumb, but I think this is the context I was missing.
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 ...
Ok, but nobody thinks that fish aquariums are a threat to computing.
I don't personally think that computing is a threat to art, but many people do.
Yeah ok, do you carry a smartphone with you?
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, ...
No one's forcing you to buy the former, so, why don't you do the latter?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
I agree. And,
The walled garden of Apple is famous.
Painters cannot paint a room with buckets of paint in an iPad.
Children cannot play with a squeeze ball on an iPad.
The ad failed, overstating the iPad functionality, while they destroyed precious tangible items.
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.*
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.
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.
Do you have any numbers to better understand that trend? (I don't, btw)
I have the impression that the opposite is happening.
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.
Offline music is definitely seeing a resurgence.
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.
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.
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.
Like I said - if you can't see why they dropped the ball on the advertisement then that falls on your own ability to interpret.
To your question - they literally used crush and destroy as their message.
Unforced error on Apples part plain and simple.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Most of the classic cars destroyed in movies are replicas built specifically for the occasion.
And why are we assuming the stuff in the ad is all collector worthy and not some broken piano that was going to the landfill?
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.
Quentin Tarantino once upset a lot of people when a classic guitar got smashed on one of his sets: https://www.guitarworld.com/features/the-hateful-eight-marti...
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.
It reminded me of Fallout or Bioshock, which is kinda funny and likely not at all what they were going for.
Yes, that too.
What man with a soul would destroy a guitar with a crusher for any purpose at all?
That's psychopathically problematic to me.
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.
But sure, I can see why people don't like it.
they were gratuitously and violently destroyed, with shrapnel and debris flying in all directions.
these hydraulic press videos are popular because they crush things. they don't create artful unions, they pulverize.
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.
The iPhone is a vending machine in our pockets, controlled by a large corporation.
I'm not at all surprised people don't feel emotions around it.
The moment a piano starts selling tablature in the TabStore™, I'm sure that people won't mind to see a piano being crushed in a hydraulic press.
I think you got very close to the real issue.
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 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.
Actual number is $26B in cash
source: 2023 10k
What exactly are you trying to achieve with this sentence?
Thanks, this for me is the best articulation for why someone might feel so strongly.
Snowflakes are normally found en mass
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?
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.
If they apologized it's because it's the best PR move. The execs definitely aren't sweating over "destruction of human experience".
If that's true, then it's probably because they've never had a human experience in their lives
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.
"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.
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.
Everything has been commodified.
And Apple just piled on.
welcome to capitalism...
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 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).
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.
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.
It's still up on their YouTube channel despite this statement, so you're probably spot on.
This is a good point. It does make me question what’s happening at Apple when something like this gets all the way through.
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.
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.
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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Artist%27s_Way
Someone "fixed" the ad by reversing it, and the result is much better.
https://twitter.com/rezawrecktion/status/1788211832936861950
And this is an uplifting great advertisement. Unbelievable how much of a difference the message makes.
Such a good point that having things come out of an ipad would have been the effective way to portray the same point they are trying to make.
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.
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.
One of these things is not like the others~...
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.
Apple knows exactly what it's doing (or whatever marketing company they paid to do this). And they did get viral, so mission accomplished?
I'm not even sure that this is true. How many people have actually interacted with somebody who is overreacting here?
Instead, the overreactions are aggregated via social media and news coverage so we can see "wow look at all these people using extreme language here."
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
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'?
And why do you care so much about what foobar thinks to the point of passively-aggressive asking him?
"Why do you care about X" questions are inane.
....and you have continued the pattern by joining in and asking me the question. Well done!
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.
People exercise their God given right, why do you care so much about it?
Getting emotional are we?
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)…
Nah, you basically can’t give pianos away.
I’d take a free piano. Those things are expensive
Open up your local Craigslist and you will probably find a bunch of them.
They are expensive to take too. (Need movers and piano tuner)
Now think of how much of these items the budget of any given commercial could pay for.
Focusing on just the literal few in view in front of you is missing the forest for the trees.
Not necessarily, it sells a message and an image on top of just wasting the large amount of money that any ad costs.
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.
I feel strongly about important things, not all things.
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.
Every object in that video was mass produced rubbish so craftsmanship survived unharmed.
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.
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.
There's plenty of outrage over climate change. It's not clear it meaningfully contributes to solving the problem.
It seemed like a fun ad to me and that was it.
People have to go through mental gymnastics to justify being angry at it, but do they feel the same way when these objects get destroyed in movies?
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.
Context matters. Here it looks like it's a zero-sum: iPad is crushing everything else.
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.
I explicitly said I’m not saying it’s wrong. Im asking if the emotional sensitivity to these things impacts them in daily life.
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.
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.
A lot of people don't like the idea of destroying physical things, it makes them feel ick.
Same reason people tend to hoard too much shit.
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.
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.
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 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'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.
I don't like any of their stupid ads but I'm not harmed by them and I don't need an apology.
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.
The real issue with the ad that nobody is talking about.
False advertising
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.
Had to scroll through 30 replies to find the word hyperbole :).
About two generations ago society somehow got the idea that the feminine manner of moving about in a society is superior and the masculine way is violent and backward.
Emotional exaggeration like this is one indirect aggression tool used by women when engaged in intrasexual competition with other women. For some reason we now have men trying to use that tool on a corporation of all things and your reaction to feel like it's fake isn't wrong, even if the subject may not be aware of what they are doing themselves.
More reading:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Female_intrasexual_competiti...
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3826202/
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S019188692...
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.
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 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.
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.)
A subsection of society has too much free time and few (what people in developing countries would call) real problems.
So they get triggered by mundane things and tweet prayer hands for every news headline that hits the 24 hour news cycle
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.
Im done with it and a lot of others are also.
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.
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 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.
Honestly, y'all, it's beyond hilarious that the top comment here on Hacker News is
"These things you people have, these ...feelings...these are strange and you seem weak. Boop beep boop."
Sometimes the stereotypes aren't wrong, huh.
I got annoyed with it, then went and fixed it in 5 minutes and went on with my day - https://twitter.com/joelrunyon/status/1788312003670360320
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 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.
Staged outrage.
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.
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 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.
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 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.
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.
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'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’m get the feeling some people are pretty bored and boring and collective outrage is an emotional release in some way.
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 ;-)
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.
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.
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.
The internet also serves to amplify their noise.
Nailed it. I think it's also concerning that Apple and other companies cave and apologize for the most inane minutiae.
I think their emotions are valid, even if you're dismissive of them.
I think words may only convey a certain level of thought but cannot convey intensity well.