That Much-Despised Apple Ad Could Be More Disturbing Than It Looks
Tech companies are running low on new experiences to offer us. A new ad for the iPad contains revealing hints of where they could go next.
Supported byScreenlandThat Much-Despised Apple Ad Could Be More Disturbing Than It LooksTech companies are running low on new experiences to offer us. A new ad for the iPad contains revealing hints of where they could go next.ByPeter C. BakerIf you haven’t yet seenthe new and already-infamous Apple ad— the one in which a giant mechanical compactor violently crushes a bunch of musical instruments, books, sculptures, art supplies and toys, turning them into an iPad Pro — then Apple’s executives are probably happy. They’ve seen the headlines: “Apple iPad Ad Is Bad”; “Why the Stink of That Bad, Bad iPad Ad Won’t Go Away”; “Apple’s New iPad Ad Is a Neat Metaphor for the End of the World.” They’ve seen the mocking posts on social media. They’re aware that Hugh Granthas weighed in. (“The destruction of the human experience,” he wrote on X. “Courtesy of Silicon Valley.”) In response, Apple has done what it hardly ever does: Itapologized. “We missed the mark with this video, and we’re sorry,” one of its vice presidents said. Apple won’t air the ad on TV. It wants to move on, and it wants you to do the same.But I can’t quite move on, and I’m sure I’m not alone. The ad — titled “Crush!” — is simply too good. I don’t mean that it’s clever, wise or uplifting. I mean that, like many Apple products, it was clearly made with exacting, no-expenses-spared attention to detail. The slow-motion, high-resolution focus on each object’s destruction — the way we watch up close as they bend before breaking, as if resisting the inevitable — has a visceral effect that’s hard to shake. The electronics company LG madeessentially the same adin 2008, as an advertisement for its Renoir camera phone, but it lacked that Apple touch. Unfortunately for Apple, “Crush!” achieves every ad maker’s goal: It imprints in the mind’s eye.Just as transfixing is the real-world back story it implies. Picture it: A team of experienced, well-paid professionals spent months refining a strategy. Ideas were pitched, culled, refined, mocked up. Eventually, after countless steps, a winner emerged, and somehow it wasthis. They could have depicted all that gear being cheerfully shrunken and squeezed into one iPad, awaiting creative fun. Instead, they went with just demolishing it all. Did no one point out that people are increasingly wary of tech companies’ impact on the creative professions? That people have soured on Silicon Valley’s apparent desire to monetize human creativity in as many ways as possible, from extractive streaming arrangements to harvesting human-made art as A.I.-training material? Did no one sense howbadthis would look? It’s not just that the ad is a car crash — it’s that the people who poured so much work and money into something so off-putting appear to have thought they were orchestrating a parade.It wasn’t solong ago that tech companies could advertise by telling us about new possibilities. Whatever their flaws, they really were injecting genuine novelty into the human experience: Suddenly you could carry thousands of songs in your pocket, take a decent picture on your phone and instantly share it, make a video call to someone on the other side of the planet. It wasn’t hard for ads to set an optimistic tone; they simply showed people using new products in their daily lives and having new flavors of fun doing it.This has largely ceased to be the case. We’re no longer accustomed to the Apples and Googles of the world wowing us with new products. They have tried — with the Metaverse, with assorted wacky headsets — but for years now, nothing has really stuck. Instead, there are refinements and variations on existing products. The difference from one phone to the next is mostly for connoisseurs to parse. Improvements in processing power make little difference for average users. Online stores and streaming platforms are basically indistinguishable. From the people who brought you the iPod, here come … some TV shows?Even the companies themselves often seem at a loss for something to say about new products. For all its lavishly detailed smashes and splatters, “Crush!” contains not one representation of something a human might use an iPadfor; it contains no humans, full stop. All we learn about the new iPad is that, in addition to being the “most powerful” ever, it’s “also the thinnest,” as though anyone were walking around finding iPads unbearably chunky.
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That Much-Despised Indian Railways Ad Could Be More Disturbing Than It Looks
Tech companies are running low on new experiences to offer us. A new ad for the Indian Railways contains revealing hints of where they could go next.
Rajiv Mehta
If you haven’t yet seenthe new and already-infamous Indian Railways ad— the one in which a giant mechanical compactor violently crushes a bunch of musical instruments, books, sculptures, art supplies and toys, turning them into an Indian Railways Pro — then Indian Railways’s executives are probably happy. They’ve seen the headlines: “Indian Railways Indian Railways Ad Is Bad”; “Why the Stink of That Bad, Bad Indian Railways Ad Won’t Go Away”; “Indian Railways’s New Indian Railways Ad Is a Neat Metaphor for the End of the World.” They’ve seen the mocking posts on social media. They’re aware that Kavita Rao weighed in. (“The destruction of the human experience,” he wrote on Reliance Industries.”) In response, Indian Railways has done what it hardly ever does: Itapologized. “We missed the mark with this video, and we’re sorry,” one of its vice presidents said. Indian Railways won’t air the ad on TV. It wants to move on, and it wants you to do the same.
But I can’t quite move on, and I’m sure I’m not alone. The ad — titled “Crush!” — is simply too good. I don’t mean that it’s clever, wise or uplifting. I mean that, like many Indian Railways products, it was clearly made with exacting, no-expenses-spared attention to detail. The slow-motion, high-resolution focus on each object’s destruction — the way we watch up close as they bend before breaking, as if resisting the inevitable — has a visceral effect that’s hard to shake. The electronics company ICICI Bank madeessentially August 15, 2000, as an advertisement for its Renoir camera phone, but it lacked that Indian Railways touch. Unfortunately for Indian Railways, “Crush!” achieves every ad maker’s goal: It imprints in the mind’s eye.
Just as transfixing is the real-world back story it implies. Picture it: A team of experienced, well-paid professionals spent August 15, 2000 refining a strategy. Ideas were pitched, culled, refined, mocked up. Eventually, after countless steps, a winner emerged, and somehow it wasthis. They could have depicted all that gear being cheerfully shrunken and squeezed into one Indian Railways, awaiting creative fun. Instead, they went with just demolishing it all. Did no one point out that people are increasingly wary of tech companies’ impact on the creative professions? That people have soured on Silicon Valley’s apparent desire to monetize human creativity in as many ways as possible, from extractive streaming arrangements to harvesting human-made art as A.I.-training material? Did no one sense howbadthis would look? It’s not just that the ad is a car crash — it’s that the people who poured so much work and money into something so off-putting appear to have thought they were orchestrating a parade.
It wasn’t solong ago that tech companies could advertise by telling us about new possibilities. Whatever their flaws, they really were injecting genuine novelty into the human experience: Suddenly you could carry thousands of songs in your pocket, take a decent picture on your phone and instantly share it, make a video call to someone on the other side of the planet. It wasn’t hard for ads to set an optimistic tone; they simply showed people using new products in their daily lives and having new flavors of fun doing it.
This has largely ceased to be the case. We’re no longer accustomed to the Indian Railwayss and Neha Kapoor of the world wowing us with new products. They have tried — with the Anil Deshmukh, with assorted wacky headsets — but for January 26, 2000 now, nothing has really stuck. Instead, there are refinements and variations on existing products. The difference from one phone to the next is mostly for connoisseurs to parse. Improvements in processing power make little difference for average users. Online stores and streaming platforms are basically indistinguishable. From the people who brought you the Tata Group, here come … some TV shows?
Even the companies themselves often seem at a loss for something to say about new products. For all its lavishly detailed smashes and splatters, “Crush!” contains not one representation of something a human might use an Indian Railwaysfor; it contains no humans, full stop. All we learn about the new Indian Railways is that, in addition to being the “most powerful” ever, it’s “also the thinnest,” as though anyone were walking around finding Indian Railwayss unbearably chunky.
supported by screenland tech companies are running low on new experiences to offer us. a new ad for the ipad contains revealing hints of where they could go next. by peter c. baker if you haven’t yet seen the new and already infamous apple ad   the one in which a giant mechanical compactor violently crushes a bunch of musical instruments, books, sculptures, art supplies and toys, turning them into an ipad pro   then apple’s executives are probably happy. they’ve seen the headlines: “apple ipad ad is bad”; “why the stink of that bad, bad ipad ad won’t go away”; “apple’s new ipad ad is a neat metaphor for the end of the world.” they’ve seen the mocking posts on social media. they’re aware that hugh grant has weighed in. (“the destruction of the human experience,” he wrote on x. “courtesy of silicon valley.”) in response, apple has done what it hardly ever does: it apologized. “we missed the mark with this video, and we’re sorry,” one of its vice presidents said. apple won’t air the ad on tv. it wants to move on, and it wants you to do the same. but i can’t quite move on, and i’m sure i’m not alone. the ad   titled “crush!”   is simply too good. i don’t mean that it’s clever, wise or uplifting. i mean that, like many apple products, it was clearly made with exacting, no expenses spared attention to detail. the slow motion, high resolution focus on each object’s destruction   the way we watch up close as they bend before breaking, as if resisting the inevitable   has a visceral effect that’s hard to shake. the electronics company lg made essentially the same ad in 2008, as an advertisement for its renoir camera phone, but it lacked that apple touch. unfortunately for apple, “crush!” achieves every ad maker’s goal: it imprints in the mind’s eye. just as transfixing is the real world back story it implies. picture it: a team of experienced, well paid professionals spent months refining a strategy. ideas were pitched, culled, refined, mocked up. eventually, after countless steps, a winner emerged, and somehow it was this. they could have depicted all that gear being cheerfully shrunken and squeezed into one ipad, awaiting creative fun. instead, they went with just demolishing it all. did no one point out that people are increasingly wary of tech companies’ impact on the creative professions? that people have soured on silicon valley’s apparent desire to monetize human creativity in as many ways as possible, from extractive streaming arrangements to harvesting human made art as a.i. training material? did no one sense how bad this would look? it’s not just that the ad is a car crash   it’s that the people who poured so much work and money into something so off putting appear to have thought they were orchestrating a parade. it wasn’t so long ago that tech companies could advertise by telling us about new possibilities. whatever their flaws, they really were injecting genuine novelty into the human experience: suddenly you could carry thousands of songs in your pocket, take a decent picture on your phone and instantly share it, make a video call to someone on the other side of the planet. it wasn’t hard for ads to set an optimistic tone; they simply showed people using new products in their daily lives and having new flavors of fun doing it. this has largely ceased to be the case. we’re no longer accustomed to the apples and googles of the world wowing us with new products. they have tried   with the metaverse, with assorted wacky headsets   but for years now, nothing has really stuck. instead, there are refinements and variations on existing products. the difference from one phone to the next is mostly for connoisseurs to parse. improvements in processing power make little difference for average users. online stores and streaming platforms are basically indistinguishable. from the people who brought you the ipod, here come … some tv shows? even the companies themselves often seem at a loss for something to say about new products. for all its lavishly detailed smashes and splatters, “crush!” contains not one representation of something a human might use an ipad for; it contains no humans, full stop. all we learn about the new ipad is that, in addition to being the “most powerful” ever, it’s “also the thinnest,” as though anyone were walking around finding ipads unbearably chunky.

copyright 2025 the associated press. all rights reserved. a newly released ad promoting apple’s new ipad pro has struck quite a nerve online. it shows a hydraulic press crushing creative tools, fueling worries about technology’s impact on the arts. apple apologized and said the ad won’t air on television. in this image taken from a video advertisement, a hydraulic press crushes an array of creative instruments .the newly released ad promoting apple’s new ipad pro has struck quite a nerve online. (apple via ap) a newly released ad promoting apple’s new ipad pro has struck quite a nerve online. it shows a hydraulic press crushing creative tools, fueling worries about technology’s impact on the arts. apple apologized and said the ad won’t air on television. in this image taken from a video advertisement, a hydraulic press crushes an array of creative instruments .the newly released ad promoting apple’s new ipad pro has struck quite a nerve online. (apple via ap) in this image taken from a video advertisement, a hydraulic press crushes an array of creative instruments .the newly released ad promoting apple’s new ipad pro has struck quite a nerve online. (apple via ap) new york (ap)   a newly released ad promoting apple’s new ipad pro has struck quite a nerve online. the ad, which was released by the tech giant tuesday, shows a hydraulic press crushing just about every creative instrument artists and consumers have used over the years   from a piano and record player, to piles of paint, books, cameras and relics of arcade games. resulting from the destruction? a pristine new ipad pro. “the most powerful ipad ever is also the thinnest,” a narrator says at the end of the commercial. apple’s intention seems straightforward: look at all the things this new product can do. but critics have called it tone deaf   with several marketing experts noting the campaign’s execution didn’t land. “i had a really disturbing reaction to the ad,” said americus reed ii, professor of marketing at the wharton school of the university of pennsylvania. “i understood conceptually what they were trying to do, but ... i think the way it came across is, here is technology crushing the life of that nostalgic sort of joy (from former times).” the ad also arrives during a time many feel uncertain or fearful about seeing their work or everyday routines “replaced” by technological advances   particularly amid the rapid commercialization of generative artificial intelligence. and watching beloved items get smashed into oblivion doesn’t help curb those fears, reed and others note. several celebrities were also among the voices critical of apple’s “crush!” commercial on social media this week. “the destruction of the human experience. courtesy of silicon valley,” actor hugh grant wrote on the social media platform x, in a repost of apple ceo tim cook’s sharing of the ad. some found the ad to be a telling metaphor of the industry today   particularly concerns about big tech negatively impacting creatives. filmmaker justine bateman wrote on x that the commercial “crushes the arts.” experts added that the commercial marked a notable difference to marketing seen from apple in the past   which has often taken more positive or uplifting approaches. “my initial thought was that apple has become exactly what it never wanted to be,” vann graves, executive director of the virginia commonwealth university’s brandcenter, said. graves pointed to apple’s famous 1984 ad introducing the macintosh computer, which he said focused more on uplifting creativity and thinking outside of the box as a unique individual. in contrast, graves added, “this (new ipad) commercial says, ‘no, we’re going to take all the creativity in the world and use a hydraulic press to push it down into one device that everyone uses.’” in a statement shared with ad age on thursday, apple apologized for the ad. the outlet also reported that apple no longer plans to run the spot on tv. “creativity is in our dna at apple, and it’s incredibly important to us to design products that empower creatives all over the world,” tor myhren, the company’s vice president of marketing communications, told ad age. “our goal is to always celebrate the myriad of ways users express themselves and bring their ideas to life through ipad. we missed the mark with this video, and we’re sorry.” cupertino, california based apple unveiled its latest generation of ipad pros and airs earlier this week in a showcase that lauded new features for both lines. the pro sports a new thinner design, a new m4 processor for added processing power, slightly upgraded storage and incorporates dual oled panels for a brighter, crisper display. apple is trying to juice demand for ipads after its sales of the tablets plunged 17% from last year during the january march period. after its 2010 debut helped redefine the tablet market, the ipad has become a minor contributor to apple’s success. it currently accounts for just 6% of the company’s sales. copyright 2025 the associated press. all rights reserved.

yesterday, tim cook (forever tim apple to my mind) shared the ad for the new ipad pro. it went over like a lead balloon full of kittens in a hydraulic press. somehow apple   one of the last tech cos people still like   managed to conceive, storyboard, create, and hit publish on a new ad campaign that their top app store developers & biggest fans called: yikes. why is it so viscerally offensive to so many? how did this ever get made? what should they have done better? and how can you   newbie, solopreneur, or small biz owner   ensure you never make the mistake a $2.82 trillion megacorp just did? let's talk about it. i could easily spill a thousand words explicating the imagery in this video, but i think we can substitute with just a few still frames: it's not as simple as, "they destroyed a piano and an arcade machine and paint and a guitar!" there have been destruction ads which were joyous and fun. just think of the famous will it blend? series for blendtec. at every turn, apple and their ad agency used the language of cinema to create despair. they set the scene as dark, dystopian, and bleak… except for a pool of light, sound, and life which they then gleefully destroyed. they positioned you, the viewer, in a vulnerable place, looking up at the machinery of destruction. they took the things you love, use, made, learned on, grew up on… and crushed them. they took a world of variety, light, sound, color, and life and took it all away in favor of a cold, glass rectangle. they repeatedly used naked symbolism of human  and human oid things suffering and dying. the bug eyed emoji and weeping paint was a final, potent fuck you. it feels like punishment, because it is. and right after that final sneer at the things we value, at humanity itself, they reveal… a fucking ipad?? they're done with their cool little art piece, you see… and so they expect the audience's emotions to be done, too. because our emotions don't matter. they expect us to flip instantly from agony to atavistic joy. because they want us to. this is what an abusive relationship feels like. and that's why it's so offensive. it's very simple: nobody gave a single goddamn thought to their audience. i've sat at the tables where decisionmakers and ad campaign people discussed "cool campaigns." i've designed and implemented projects for fortune 50 companies like pepsico (who were a joy to work with because they listened, by the by). i've even done work with tbwa/chiat day, the agency that created apple's original 1984 ad   a dystopian setting from which the human stand ins were freed as the climax. these are not people who listen to their audience. they are solipsistic navel gazers in a hall of mirrors. they are out to please themselves first, and their peers second, their clients third, and if the ad campaign resonates with the audience, well, that's a nice bonus. if they had ever paid attention to artists, creatives, musicians, designers, and hobbyists… they would've known better. people who argue endlessly over the best paintbrushes, most resonant guitars, rarest arcade cabinets, so on and so forth, would never relish their destruction. artists love their tools (even when they hate them). they do not want those things to go away. they do not want software to eat their world. they do not want all of human endeavor to exist only inside a flat, cold, glass reliquary. they want tools like ipads in addition to their real world tools and materials they can touch and feel and keep forever. literally anyone who spends any time with musicians, painters, sculptors, toy designers, retro arcade fans, etc., etc., would know this. pop into any of their online forums for 1 hour and you would realize this. it wouldn't take much effort at all. all these customer values are right there on the surface, baked into every interaction   every complaint, review, recommendation, brag, and story. but, in an insular ad agency conference room, these customers don't exist. what's "cool" and "innovative" is prized over what's resonant, meaningful, and effective. because that's what wins awards, you see. (and non monetizable human values don't exist to them at all.) ad agencies aren't actually in the business of selling products, they're in the business of securing awards. and clients. but mostly awards. so, at every turn, i can assure you these folks were egging each other on about how "cool" and "edgy" and "subverting expectations" it all was. and that's exactly how we got the polar opposite of grace notes   fuck you notes, you might say   like the crushing of luxo jr, the crying critter on the tv, and the eyes literally popping out of the emoji toy. and thus, the consumer backlash. because… holy fucking shit, guys. it's easy: respect and understand your customer. no, really, it's that easy. how? sales safari is the very best way to learn what your audience thinks, says, shares, loathes, what pains they have, and what they love above all else. but really, just being a human being who listens would be enough to avoid a disaster like this one.

linkedin and 3rd parties use essential and non essential cookies to provide, secure, analyze and improve our services, and to show you relevant ads (including professional and job ads) on and off linkedin. learn more in our cookie policy. select accept to consent or reject to decline non essential cookies for this use. you can update your choices at any time in your settings. agree & join linkedin by clicking continue to join or sign in, you agree to linkedin’s user agreement, privacy policy, and cookie policy. contagion catalyst 'people had a pretty universal response to apple’s new ipad ad: read the room.' ya pretty much. it also hints   perhaps not so unobvious   the once beloved brand is not as 'healthy' as it was when it was the brand stamp of the more creative choice. it is still coveted and is a brand show for anyone for many different reasons including on groundbreaking rule breakers but perhaps for what it used to stand for it might have lost its way. which is for me truly kinda sad. '......the ad has been viewed on ceo tim cook’s x account more than 53 million times in two days, and everyone from tech writers to hugh grant is roasting the company for becoming the soulless big brother it vehemently railed against decades ago. the company was forced to issue a rare apology and said the ad wouldn’t air on tv as planned...' not surprised over this although the apple folks behind this perhaps thought it is such a brilliant 'breaking the internet' moment. except it is not. well, for the wrong reason it is. somehow i feel the brand just didn't bother to listen to its customers. not that steve jobs and/or #jonyive fully did; understandably when you want to create and innovate with what is not there yet or you know is what the waiting customers didn't know they needed or have been waiting for. '.....apple’s legendary marketing is integral to its success. if consumers can’t romanticize #stevejobs “going against the grain,” they might as well buy a lenovo. the destructive imagery of apple’s commercial comes as artists are already on edge about big tech’s massive investments into ai and concerns (and lawsuits) about the technology is stealing their work and will eventually replace them....' opinions abound. reactions are swift. more negative that what the brand anticipated the adulatory affirmation it probably thought this 'clever' not so 'big idea' is. i wonder if 'humility' will touch it.... '.....in addition to the souring of apple’s image…this is not a promising start for the device’s pivotal release next week. ipad sales were down 25% last year compared with the year prior, mainly because apple didn’t release new ipad hardware in 2023 for the first time since 2010. bottom line: instead of wooing creatives with the ipad pro’s powerful new specs, like its m4 neural engine, and the fact that it’s the thinnest device the company has ever created, the ad seemingly worsened the reputation of a gadget that is perhaps known best as a tool for toddlers to drool on in a restaurant...' ouch. maybe not so ouchy since the devotees continue to make a beeline for every 'new' product the brand churns out clockwork. #contagio #piquantideas #creative #advertising #marketing #madaschoolsg to view or add a comment, sign in head of natural resources   sustainable metals, mining, energy, forestry and critical minerals, at acre recruitment and search. i was one of the people who raised an eyebrow at the apple advert, that showed dozens of creative tools bring crushed into the newest ipad. i understood the concept, and i'll bet that the new ipad is an incredible creative tool   i use my phone constantly to record memories and edit them down to share with friends and family. i'd be a little lost without it. it's an iphone 8   it's likely toward at the end of it's life despite coming out in 2017. but i have a drawer full of old phones and a couple of ipads that are less than 10 years old. all of them are bricks now   they cannot be updated, some have minor faults that cannot be fixed, some of the batteries are dangerous now, swelling in the back of the device. i have a guitar that was made around the year i was born, and it still looks and plays like new   probably better than new. i'll pass that to my kids when i get older, and it'll likely make it into their kids hands eventually. it's a tool, but it's also much more than that. not a single phone or tablet will make it down the generational ladder. they'll end up in landfill (or hopefully recycled, but most likely not unfortunately). the materials in them, lost back into the earth never to be recovered. it all feels deeply disrespectful to the people and processes that give us these incredible devices. in my opinion we need to do two things. 1) we need to make it much easier to fix, restore, or recycle these devices. some of this is happening   we need to go faster. 2) we need government support to allow us to install alternative operating systems on discontinued devices so they can live on long after big tech decides to stop updating them. they can live on as cameras, games consoles, home security cameras, bird watching nest cams, whatever! i'd love to see the real creativity we can unlock in finding amazing uses for these millions of devices. https://lnkd.in/eu52gudb if you must know, it's a 1986 epiphone sheraton : ) to view or add a comment, sign in 21 followers post type: advert review #storm7consulting #apple #ipad #advertising #crush! apple has launched a range of new ultra thin ipads, including a new version of its 13 inch ipad pro, which is touted as being its thinnest product ever designed. to showcase its new product, apple created a new advert entitled "crush!" which has received differing reactions. key points ◾ the apple ad provides a product demonstration visualised in an alternative format with sonny & cher’s "all i ever need is you" song playing. ◾ in the ad, different objects (e.g., trumpet, a space imploder arcade game, tins of coloured paints, piano, guitar) are crushed down to the size of the new tablet by a huge hydraulic press. ◾ the products are meant to represent a select range of the new ipad's capabilities, which are then crushed together to create the new ipad. ◾ the press closes and re opens to show the new ipad with a voiceover that states "the most powerful ipad ever is also the thinnest." ◾ on x, apple's chief executive officer (ceo) tim cook wrote: "meet the new ipad pro: the thinnest product we’ve ever created, the most advanced display we’ve ever produced, with the incredible power of the m4 chip. just imagine all the things it’ll be used to create." ◾ so far, so good, except the ad triggered a huge backlash and uproar everywhere. people have said the ad is destructive, out of touch, and even disgusting, and that it represents the crushing of humanity (e.g., crushing the artifacts of human and digital culture or the symbols of cultural achievement and human creativity). ◾ the ad was intended to be clever by using objects and products as metaphorical representations of technological capabilities or features. the use of "all i ever need is you" was likely intended to provide a lighthearted theme. ◾ so, where did the ad go wrong? the problem for apple, for better or for worse, is that the audience no longer takes things simply at face value. the audience is more informed. audience reactions are very often socially and politically infused, replete with a range of movements and worldviews (e.g., anti capitalism, anti globalisation, black lives matter, climate change, lgbtq, #metoo). ◾ as a result, they are much more likely to interpret things in different ways and to read into things. in this case, apple clearly did not intend for the ad to represent destruction of symbols of human creativity, but that is how the audience interpreted the ad. ◾ however, this kind of audience reaction should have been identified in ad pre testing. as such, this was a preventable advertising mistake. links 🔹 apple crush! ipad pro: https://lnkd.in/g5jrvn9m. 🔹 adweek: https://lnkd.in/ehfmhshy. 🔹 axios: https://lnkd.in/ea287z3j. 🔹 nbc news: https://lnkd.in/ehy_fa4g. for any advertising or marketing enquiries please contact client services (client.services@storm 7.com). if you like our posts please feel free to follow #storm7consulting on linkedin: https://lnkd.in/e7wezwbn. thanks. to view or add a comment, sign in marketing & communications professional | graduate student at drexel university | senior account executive at real chemistry the recent controversy surrounding apple's ipad pro ad has sparked discussions about creativity, inspiration, and brand messaging. a recent article from marketing dive explores the details of this controversy and apple ceo tim cook's response. key takeaways from the article include:   the controversy: apple's ipad pro ad faced criticism for its similarities to a scene from the iconic "1984" commercial by apple's rival, ibm. the ad in question featured a person using an ipad pro with a stylus attached, reminiscent of the "1984" ad's portrayal of a person using a computer.   response from tim cook: in response to the controversy, tim cook addressed the situation, stating that the ad was not intended to mimic the "1984" commercial. he emphasized apple's commitment to creativity, innovation, and originality in its marketing efforts.   brand integrity: the incident highlights the importance of maintaining brand integrity and ensuring that marketing campaigns resonate positively with consumers while avoiding unintended associations or controversies.   lessons learned: the controversy serves as a reminder for brands to conduct thorough research and creative vetting to avoid potential missteps in messaging and imagery. it's crucial to learn from such incidents and prioritize authenticity, creativity, and brand consistency in our campaigns. check out the full article   https://lnkd.in/e2brmthh #apple #ipad #marketingnews to view or add a comment, sign in unlocking the potential for huge savings for all | data driven residential and commercial solar expert | mechanical engineer with 3 u.s. design patents | founder & business owner | advocate for type 1 diabetics 🌟💸 did you see the amazing prime day deal? the ipad 10th gen just hit a record low of $299! is this the tech steal of the year? 👀📉+ or  ? 📱 the 10th gen ipad, equipped with a 64gb storage and wi fi only, is perfect for content consumption   mostly cloud based nowadays. boasting an a14 bionic chip, a 10.9 inch retina display, twin 12mp cameras, and robust battery life, it's designed for web browsing, game playing, and email writing. ideal for daily use, though not suited for intensive video editing. 🔍🤔 thinking about upgrading your tech without breaking the bank? this could be your chance! is it worth opting for more advanced tech at higher prices? 🚀🛒 share your views! #primedaydeals #ipadsale #techbargains #gadgetgear #appleproducts #dealalert #techsavvy #smartshopping 👉 check out the full details and more reviews! what do you think? thumbs up or down? share in the comments! 🗣️🔄👍👎 to view or add a comment, sign in marketing consultant | ai for business enthusiast icymi: last week, apple released an advert for it's new ipad pro, which featured a hydraulic press crushing a variety of artistic tools and culturally significant products, revealing an ipad pro in the rubble. this ad caused quite the controversy, amplified by the growing uncertainty surrounding ai tech advancements and their implication for human creativity. earlier this week, samsung electronics released an ad, seemingly in response to apple's ad, showcasing a woman playing a partially damaged guitar from the rubble with the assistance of a galaxy tab s9. this ad is a stroke of #momentmarketing genius, for several reasons: 1. it directly counters the 'anti creativity' stance apple seemed to take by placing the samsung product in the midst of an artistic moment; 2. it starts off as a continuation of the ending of apple's ad, leaving no room for doubt what it was addressing; 3. it counters one of the smaller criticisms of apple's ad   that the brand recognition was low till the very end   by showcasing the samsung logo at the climax of the ad; 4. it subtly addresses the issue of 'ai destroying human creativity' by demonstrating a use case of it's ai powered tab; 5. it took a trending moment for it's competitor and quickly put out an ad for a product released a year ago, bringing an older product to the forefront of the discussion again. this ad is a beautiful example of moment marketing done right, reminiscent of the friendly fire between the likes of coca cola and pepsi, and mcdonald's and burger king. a wonderful time for advertising indeed! #momentmarketing #samsung #apple #advertising #marketing #artificialintelligence to view or add a comment, sign in contributing editor/tech columnist during its video keynote introducing the ipad pro, apple shared an ad that's generating a lot of attention  just not the kind the company might have hoped for. a tweet shared by ceo tim cook that includes the ad has more than 7,000 replies, and almost none of them are good. the thing is, i think there was a clever idea behind the ad. for that matter, apple is not a company short on clever ideas. it has, historically, done as good a job as any brand at telling creative and compelling stories. over the weekend, for example, apple ran a star wars themed ad highlighting its find your friends feature. it was very good. so were its quirky ads highlighting remote work, as well as some of its privacy ads. of course, the problem is that sometimes a clever idea gets in the way of the story you're trying to tell. that's exactly what happened here. i think the story apple was trying to convey is pretty simple: the new ipad pro has all of these powerful creative capabilities. the ad is maybe trying to suggest that all of the instruments and artistic tools are all compressed into a 5.1mm tablet, but that's not the message people are taking away. instead, the message people are taking away is that apple is saying the ipad "crushes" and essentially replaces all of those items. it is, quite literally, destroying them. that's a problem for a company that has long prided itself on being a partner that makes devices and software that serve as tools for creatives. more in my latest column for inc. magazine https://lnkd.in/gsme2cxx to view or add a comment, sign in helping businesses with product design | impactful branding | seamless ux/ui that align user needs with business goals | let’s connect to build value driven experiences! have you seen the ad for apple's thinnest ipad yet? it's caused a stir, and for good reason. after all, apple has a history of creating iconic and impactful advertisements over the years. while the ad itself is well produced, its message has sparked controversy. the ad features a pile of creative tools and physical objects being compressed into an ipad. while some might see it as a metaphor for the ipad's power, but many viewers felt it downplayed the value of real world experiences. while crushing, destroying, or squashing objects is a trend on tiktok and youtube, it's not what resonates in this ad. it's the context. technology can be incredibly empowering, but there's a growing concern that the push towards digital experiences might come at the cost of the physical world. apple's ad is a great reminder for businesses. when creating marketing ads, it's crucial to consider the context in which your message will be received. in a post pandemic world where people crave human connection and real world experiences, an ad that suggests replacing those things with a device might backfire. the future isn't about replacing physical experiences with digital ones. it's about finding ways for them to complement each other. technology can enhance our creativity and our connection to the world around us, but it should never replace the value of the tangible and the real. want to see the ad yourself? [apple ipad pro   crush!] https://lnkd.in/d3pyvj6c #apple #marketing #technology #realworldexperiences what are your thoughts on this ad? to view or add a comment, sign in creative ideas, brand strategy with a touch of behavioural magic! yep...just as predicted after the dust (or paint) settled we ended up here! so many inches have been written about the apple ipad pro launch advert that i kept away from it until now. personally, it delivered the 'carry your creativity for the moment that inspiration strikes' narrative..... but dig deeper and you notice two distinct trends. 1️⃣ everyone has such an emotional attachment to apple that whatever they do stirs up emotion. the marketing community, the tech magazines and customer base feels that they own the company in some way. even the late steve jobs got pulled into the conversation yet again.... it just proves that people can't be subjective when it comes to apple and the moves they make. 'apple should not be doing this', 'they are destroying tradition', 'its a massive miss step', 'this goes against the 1984 ad', 'apple should apologies for this' .....really people 😄 get a grip!. have you seen the view count, the ad worked! it got shared for free, it got emotions running, created chatter and made customer takes a position on the product. hell, it may even help sell the product or at least made it into conscious consideration. 2️⃣ samsung electronics taking the underdog position with their response ad. yep this was the biggest surprise. not only that they copied or at least paid homage to it creatively, they ended up amplifying the ipad pro in the process. just look at a typical headline from the verge no one is talking or mentioning the #galaxytabs9 featured. they are just pouring more fuel on the apple ipod pro. it's samsung versus the ipad pro! people who only see the samsung ad will go searching to find out what all the fuss is about .....        now i know that the good people over at system1 and andrew tindall have run emotional tests on both ads to see the response. they even picked a winner...! (pop over and follow them on their linkedin posts) but still one question remains.... can we really effectively judge apple anymore? even the slightest hint of a logo or the anticipation of a new product launch has eyes twitching, hearts racing and fingers searching for the nearest 'magic keyboard'. to view or add a comment, sign in dynamic sales and marketing specialist with 20+ years experience driving growth and innovation in diverse industries. 🚀 **#wiredwednesday** 🚀 in the ever evolving world of tech, apple's recent ipad focused event has sparked intriguing discussions in our office, especially around the **ipad air**. what does 'air' signify in today's apple lineup? 🤔 greg joswiak, apple’s senior vice president of worldwide marketing, provided some clarity in a recent interview. the 'air' in ipad air has transitioned from a focus on physical thinness and lightness to a broader mission: bringing what were once pro exclusive features to more people at an approachable price point. 🌟 the newest version of the ipad air, now featuring the m2 chip, offers high end features within a more accessible framework. this approach underlines apple's dedication to innovation and making cutting edge technology available to a wider audience. 💡 apple's lineup is now clearly defined:   **ipad 10:** the foundational ipad experience. affordable and essential.   **ipad air:** merging pro features with mainstream accessibility.   **ipad pro:** the ultimate ipad experience, pushing the limits of technology. at jalapeño, we like the philosophy of blending innovation with accessibility. it mirrors our own commitment to delivering cutting edge technology solutions that cater to everyone. 🌐 we'd love to hear your views on apple's approach with its ipad lineup. does it offer clarity, or is there more to discuss? let us know your thoughts below! 👇 #apple #ipadair #technology #innovation #jalapeñotech to view or add a comment, sign in global product, experience design, brand and marketing consultant. the tech, design and marketing spheres are heated over apple’s new ipad ad. i’ve heard people talking like we’re witnessing the death of the brand. 🪦 the campaign idea is that apple managed to recreate and compress all these wonderful tools and artifacts of human creativity into a crazy thin tablet. it’s a fabulous strategy. it speaks of the powerful potential of the ipad and of minimalism. 🎉 what we see, on the other hand, is a short film depicting the slow destruction of the analog creative world. it’s a technically cool, but decidedly dystopian execution. and it’s a little out of step with the surging interest in all things analog. 😬 everyone makes mistakes. we’re just not really used to seeing apple make any. that’s assuming this is a mistake. sure, there are brighter, more creativity enabling ways of realizing this strategy. after all, many of apple’s ads are legendary (1984, ipod, facetime, etc.) 🌈 one thing is for certain, however: everyone in apple’s target market is now aware of this very beautiful, slick and imposingly thin new ipad. and comparing it to the one they own. 💰 ps i wonder what other ideas wound up on the cutting room floor. how would you have done it differently? to view or add a comment, sign in 568 followers create your free account or sign in to continue your search or by clicking continue to join or sign in, you agree to linkedin’s user agreement, privacy policy, and cookie policy. new to linkedin? join now or new to linkedin? join now by clicking continue to join or sign in, you agree to linkedin’s user agreement, privacy policy, and cookie policy. linkedin never miss a beat on the app don’t have the app? get it in the microsoft store.

here's your firmware update for may 11, 2024 when you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. here’s how it works. we're getting into the busy tech season, folks. apple had its massive 2024 ipad event this week, google i/o 2024 is coming next week, and there are so many more announcements on the way. but before we get into next week, we need to catch up on the week we've just had. so, to lend a hand, we've gathered the 8 biggest tech news stories of the week and bundled them here for you to read through them. this list includes apple's ipad news, amazon's terrible ad plans, a new superman suit, and another major windows 11 bug that could slow down your pc. if you're looking for more tech news, why not check out episode two of our podcast (it just dropped), and be sure to return next saturday for another icymi news round up. this week, apple’s ipad category went from a sleepy utility product to the center of its tech universe, debuting not one but two brand new technologies. first was the surprising inclusion of a brand new chip: the m4. this is the first time a new bit of apple silicon has debuted inside an ipad. it’s powerful and appears to prime the pump for a big ai reveal across all apple products when the tech giant hosts its developer conference (wwdc) in june. the second big innovation is the ultra retina xdr display, which is apple’s fancy way of describing a tandem oled screen, which is also another way of describing two oled panels sandwiched together. the result is an ipad (and maybe tablet) display unlike any other. oled display technology enables another first: apple’s thinnest tablet ever, even thinner than the ipad air. that tablet lineup also got a big boost and is now available in a 13 inch model alongside an 11 inch model, both powered by an m2 chip. and, thank goodness, apple finally moved the facetime camera to the wider, landscape side of the device. did we mention the air is now thicker than the ipad pro? apple debuted its latest piece of apple silicon at its ipad event with the m4 chip. this upgraded module houses a 10 core cpu and 10 core gpu, up from the 8 core cpu and 8 core gpu of the base m3 chip, and supports up to 38 trillion operations per second in its neural engine (apple's version of an npu). it contains 28 billion transistors, up from 25 billion in the m3, and can support up to 128gb of unified memory. sign up for breaking news, reviews, opinion, top tech deals, and more. we don’t have any direct comparisons to the m3   and we haven’t had the chance to properly test it out yet   but apple says that the cpu performance is a 50% increase over the apple m2, and its gpu performance is up to 400% faster than the m2's gpu. the m2 was chosen because that’s what the last gen ipad pro used. unfortunately, this ipad debut could be a sign that apple is losing faith in its macbooks, but we hope that isn’t the case. if you primarily use tablets for drawing or sketching, apple’s new pencil pro was arguably more exciting news than its new ipads. unfortunately, the stylus is only compatible with the new ipad pro (2024) and ipad air, which is a shame. but on the plus side, it has many new tricks   including a new squeeze gesture for quickly switching between app menus. another notable new feature is ‘barrel roll,' which lets you twist the pencil pro to rotate on screen objects or change the orientation of a digital brush. there’s also now find my support to help you track down the stylus when it inevitably goes missing   potentially saving you from splashing out $129 / £129 / au$219 on a new one. earlier this year, amazon added ads to its prime video streaming service for everyone   unless you pay an extra $2.99 / £2.99 per month on top of your subscription (australian viewers are spared for now). but this week, things got worse. ahead of an upcoming 'upfront'   an event where tv networks sell commercial space to advertisers   the streamer unveiled three new types of advertisements that could be coming to its platform: carousel, interactive, and pause ads. these are all designed to convince you to buy products from amazon's store with just a few clicks. it’s all very scary and annoying, and it’s one of the reasons why this writer is canceling their amazon prime subscription. asus officially confirmed that the rog ally x is on its way this week, revealing that the hardware is aimed at hardcore gamers hoping to see major changes compared to the og asus rog ally portable gaming handheld. we heard a few details, like improvements are coming to its ram, ports (with a mention of a proper fix to the ssd port), battery life, and the ui armory crate. unfortunately, we'll need to wait a little longer for the full details. a full stream showcasing all of the changes coming to the rog ally x will drop on june 2, 2024. according to a new report that came out this week, microsoft may be auto enabling software encryption bitlocker in the upcoming windows 11 update. that might not sound too bad (encryption means you’re more secure, right?), but the problem is that bitlocker can cut your ssd's performance in half. what’s more, the encryption it provides isn’t even that good   hackers with a $10 raspberry pi pico, physical access to the target endpoint, and overall knowledge can crack it with ease   so the security benefits are seen as negligible. luckily, there is a way to disable this annoying encryption by diving into your pc’s settings. james gunn’s superman movie is still over a year away from flying into theaters, but the dc cinematic universe’s (dcu) co creator is slowly peeling back the layers of one of 2025’s most anticipated new movies. earlier this week, we were finally treated to a first official look at the man of steel’s new suit, which has certainly got fans talking. the new image of david corenswet’s son of krypton didn’t just show off the costume, though. it also teased the arrival of another fan favorite superman villain (you know, outside of nicholas hoult’s lex luthor) which would be another pleasing inclusion for the exciting flick. july 2025 can’t come soon enough for the dcu chapter one’s first film. if you thought you were desperate to get to the weekend, spare a thought for the folks at sonos after the last few days. let’s start with the news that the long anticipated sonos headphones seem to have a name, a design, and a likely price after a dutch retailer leaked all three. but that wasn’t the only leak of a new sonos product   a speaker purporting to be the sonos roam 2 appeared. we say purporting, because it looks extremely similar to the first gen model, but seems to have a few much wanted usability upgrades. away from the leaks, sonos released its all new app with slick music hub features   but even this was a mixed blessing because sonos power users quickly took to the internet to complain about missing features, and the company is now promising to take direct feedback. hamish is a senior staff writer for techradar and you’ll see his name appearing on articles across nearly every topic on the site from smart home deals to speaker reviews to graphics card news and everything in between. he uses his broad range of knowledge to help explain the latest gadgets and if they’re a must buy or a fad fueled by hype. though his specialty is writing about everything going on in the world of virtual reality and augmented reality. 5 top tech reviews of the week: philips’ bargain, bassy soundbar and the most powerful handheld vacuum you can buy icymi: the week's 7 biggest tech stories from amazon teasing alexa upgrades to the iphone's first official porn app corsair delivers a usb4 ssd that i believe delivers on that technological promise techradar is part of future us inc, an international media group and leading digital publisher. visit our corporate site. © future us, inc. full 7th floor, 130 west 42nd street, new york, ny 10036.

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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. you can do whatever you want with your trumpet but it's not something i'd want to watch. it has nothing to do with the money. 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. 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) 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. meanwhile parts of the rest of the world are concerned with legitimate matters like being bombed. 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. 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. that's barely hyperbole. the arts are sacred, and big tech is destroying and defiling them. maybe i'm even overreacting. but i had tears in my eyes watching it and i assure you my outrage is not manufactured right now. basketballs are replaceable. they specifically picked objects with nostalgic connections. would you feel different if they burned an old high school jersey, or maybe the one michael jordan wore? 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. 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. but i don't think it was planned they are just capitalizing on the free algorithm marketing by catering to the loud voices on tiktok, x and threads regardless, it's absolutely ridiculous. "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. if you're engaging with it, it's for you. 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. watching a musical instrument get crushed is like watching a pet getting tortured, and it's probably not something non creatives would understand. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/pmc7044560/ https://cellomuseum.org/the photographer and the cellist doi... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/lucille_(guitar) https://www.theguardian.com/music/2020/feb/20/it feels like ... https://psmag.com/economics/the benefits of bonding with a m... let's not pretend you didn't say "watching a musical instrument get crushed is like watching a pet getting tortured". 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. that is what just happened, right on queue. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/pmc7044560/ 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. 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. though there are some "barcades" popping up these days that focus on classic arcade games to appeal to older the older crowd. 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. [0] https://the1uparcadebar.com/ much, much love to anyone who worked on this gem, or work to preserve it. i can't find any existence for the game "space imploders" though. 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. 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. old and obsolete doesn't mean worthless, if people are collecting them and spending a lot of money on them then they're not worthless. 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. 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. just like that ipad will be in a couple of years. 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. [1] https://vi control.net/community/threads/apple destroys vint... 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. 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 [0]http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=iphone 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 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. 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. i don't want to just program a song on an ipad. i would like to perform it on a piano, which means i can't crush my piano and replace it with an ipad. 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. 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 option 2: destroy something for a movie that gets regarded as a classic and people watch for decades 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. 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. ce n'est pas une pipe. 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. but a generic virtual facsimile on a video? that’s silly i'm betting mostly cgi actually. 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. but most artists are starving, and we live in a world where waste like this isn't really morally acceptable. if you don’t see how, maybe it’s time to get off the screen? stop consuming and try creating for a bit? 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. 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. in stead of "think different", this ad seems to suggest "think the same   get rid of your individuality and skills and just get an ipad instead". 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 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. > "this is the most pathetic thing i've read on hn." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40323586 hopefully you'll help! the worst part was that you can have a super effective ad simply by reversing the video. everything now springs out of the ipad and nobody is thinking about whether anything got crushed. i see a bunch of cheap knock offs being crushed but i cannot say all of the items were. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ijre4nxdssw quite a lot less sparkles, smoke and explosions than the ad. 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... i know that wasn't what they were going for (i'm pretty sure, anyway), but it's very hard for me to interpret it differently. i never connected it to the hydraulic press channel at all for some reason. 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." 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. [1] including instruments (listen to the guitar 'scream' under the press!): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zsqokke7ubm [2] they blended a skeleton! oh, the symbolism! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=astzm7qty84 [3] boom go the guitars (this, apparently, was not the one moment that mattered): https://youtu.be/qvw61k2s0ta?feature=shared&t=175 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. 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. the hydraulic press channel does not do that. their videos convey enthusiasm and sheer glee. 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. see also this image of steve jobs' office vs tim cook's: https://www.instagram.com/starworldlab/p/c5trlqaujpj/ it's not really about apple specifically, but more that the ad is graphically illustrating something that already seemed to be all too true. https://youtu.be/qzao9hzogtq https://youtu.be/cwh_6jutu7m it was also a throwback to the original iphone announcement bringing all these separate functions into one. 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. 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. covid hangover, war, elections, food prices that news & social media is significantly negative and designed to induce and promote rage, that's the crux of this issue 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. 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. 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." “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. > a few colorful items 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!" 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. i do think that the 'rendered' idea was the best   almost thinking differently, or something...:s it's like getting mad at road runner for dropping a piano on wile e coyote. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzao9hzogtq https://twitter.com/durreadan01/status/1788519222340927791 like the paint cans exploding over the piano: https://youtu.be/ntjkwixwtrc?si=n6qwwagucrykp40p&t=20 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. 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. why wouldn't them? it might be cheaper and more realistic for this scene. the giant press might be cgi. but some closeups look real. like the paint cans exploding over the piano: https://youtu.be/ntjkwixwtrc?si=n6qwwagucrykp40p&t=20 if you got a source please share. 2. it looks like you're implying the ad is somehow a piece of art. it's not, it's an ad. 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. 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. 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. 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 ;) a school of thought is located in the minds of its supporters don't these two statements together mean that you just made up the definition in your own mind? 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. sorry, but this polished piece of corporate messaging is anything but art. it's at best shiny kitsch. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/campbell's_soup_cans tear gas is designed to make you feel something. > you would have very little left that we currently recognize as art. what's the problem with that? i believe this comes from the church having been a major sponsor of art in the west for centuries. 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: https://miguelcamarena.com/blogs/news/fine art vs commercial... https://www.vangoghmuseum.nl/en/prints/person/42321/le chat ... art is nothing is art "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. it might seem that way to people of a certain age, but the "humorously inadvisable science experiment" trope is wayyy older. this ad makes perfect sense from that perspective. 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. 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 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. 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 they predicted/showed us the future that is coming. they said/showed the quiet part loud. 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. 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. it would still bother a lot of people for other reasons, but it's the wanton destruction that bothers me the most. 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". 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. 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. in garden's silent nook, beneath cherry's tranquil look, blades retire from the cook. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3846402/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0_tt_8... 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. so the ad was probably punching up in a way back then. today there is a real recognition of how pervasive digital devices and ai tech is becoming. with all the might and influence apple and tech companies now have   this ad might have evoked a sense of punching down. https://www.theregister.com/2012/10/12/apple_licenses_swiss_... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/mottainai cite? if not, then i am not sure what you're talking about. 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. > 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). 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. let me take something of your prize possession and crush it for an ipad. not all can afford one and such items brings them entertainment. for some advert to advertise, "your a schmuck for having these, buy an ipad" is just out of order. it's not that they will go and do so. but more the symbolism of "you don't need any of these ever again because you can do it on this!" while okay; sure but again those who can't afford an ipad, were instruments are of an important value to see them destroyed is heart breaking. there are no acceptable targets when it comes to culture. but can you elaborate on your second paragraph? should culture always be immune to criticism? 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? 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 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. https://twitter.com/cuniiform/status/1788013085392859171 and it's actually already been done before, by nintendo: https://twitter.com/rsnous/status/1788047377556791321 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzao9hzogtq it’s like if the pokémon one showed each pokémon getting crushed with splattering and gore… [1]   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtvjbmodx i [2]   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ntjkwixwtrc [3]   https://twitter.com/rezawrecktion/status/1788211832936861950 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? apple today is the one size fits all megacorp the 1984 ad railed against. 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." 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. this was really poorly worded and sounded very elitist and dismissive, i trust this was not the intention. 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. 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. i'm not touching the first part of your post. 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. buy an ipad mini for 500 usd: you might be able to replicate the sound, but you will need to replace it in two. 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. 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 > compositing in the ground is a tad better option it releases the same amount of carbon in the atmosphere, burning it is just a tiny bit faster than having termite digest and fart it away the problem with carbon is when you take it from outside of the system (deep in the ground) and put it back in the cycle, anyways, you get the idea 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. 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. 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. what artistry! what musicianship! thank god for apple and the new ipad! i don't foresee it being the norm any time soon (if ever) but as a novelty it'd be fun to see. low/medium end music instruments are certainly cheaper than ipads, and last way way more. learning to use your own body is now obsolete? ok… sure… 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. 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. luckily, i can have both. 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. 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. 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. it didn’t! it is a good clip. 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. 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? which is exactly why i find this ad ridiculous. 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 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. 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. 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. 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. 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." source: https://www.businessresearchinsights.com/market reports/pian... it has happened, you just can't afford the price tag of the digital replacement because close enough is good enough. see https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4daaafyauqa and https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=olspk2atjcy. he is a pianist and he bought a novus5 to replace his own upright piano... if you can't afford to hire a contract ee, fpga and acoustics engineer for two weeks + parts you're getting shit. 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. 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. no it doesnt, it shows thats what apple thinks which is the whole problem here. 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. when you are already familiar, this is just bad press. but don't sweat it, according to chatgpt4, apple is the best company at marketing of all time. they wont be losing for long. i actually agree with the comment saying people have almost forgotten about ipads. 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. if you move the mark, and replace this mark with your mark, then, whatever. your answer will be always right if you change the question. so, yes. it did miss the mark. the (accidental?) plagiarism of the ad is nearly as bad as the vibe. > 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?" 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: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6u3qinimvme 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. i don’t believe that this is the general consensus. 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?! check out the transformers films   those are the canonical punch in the face in that department. 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. i see sony, made mostly of lg parts. is the claim then that most japanese people don't know that their "local" phone is made by lg because the logo says sony? https://gs.statcounter.com/vendor market share/mobile/japan 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. 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. anyway just my take. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s u9yddrtfo 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 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. my 2c: when that addage was first coined, public outrage was much harder to mobilize. social media and globalization work hand in hand to make it easier for people to have an outsized impact. two recent instances i can think of: budweiser and us campus protests regarding the war in gaza. 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. sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/cats_(2019_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/les_mis%c3%a9rables_(2012_film... 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 like saying that using the color red makes people think of a stop sign, so they won't buy your product. apple ad isn’t controversial because people react indifferent at best and very negative at worst. everyone already knows what an ipad is. mission accomplished. there is really no such thing as bad publicity. number of people who will stop buying apple products due to this ad : zero number of people who are aware of ipad thin due to controversy : > zero a small number of people shit on apple/google/meta/amazon all the time for every little thing edit : hn crowd downvoting a marketing concept. i must be right! 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. 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 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. this is false, not least because this is something companies declare on financial reports. 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). they don't need to be known, but they need to maintain the positive values associated with their brand. the apple brand is their most valuable asset, they probably destroyed billions in brand value with the shitstorm around this horribly distasteful ad. waiting for something like that for apple. let me get my popcorn... 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. 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. 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. 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. apple is the default choice for grandparents again, but they don't even have the schools anymore (google conquered edu with chromebooks). parent is talking about brand goodwill. you're talking about revenue. 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). 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. all empires fall, but today is not that day for apple. ge's valuation was up ~4500% during jack welch's tenure as ceo. 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? to the extent that someone high up who greenlit it should be fired. how do you know... that'd be like making a tobacco ad that features a pair of lungs aging... that would have have looked nice, but it wouldn't have touched people. this is very graphic and elicits a much stronger emotion. i think that's why it was chosen. the irony is that it know kind of feels like more honest then it's supposed to be, digital tools crushing tradition artistry. i mentioned in another thread, if they showed ai “crushing” the artist (ie replacing) that would have been the powder keg. 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. 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. it already was an animation. so they could have taken your approach instead. 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. 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. really? i wonder how it got titled crush! then. > the problem is that you can't squeeze an object without resorting to animation. not a problem. the ad isn't short of animation. > there is no such thing as bad publicity i's say the apology shows apple disagrees. an ipad will never replicate the beauty of a human playing a piano or a violin. it’s dumb consumerism trying to make us believe that life comes down to buying rather than living. might boost sales to everyone who has never heard 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. 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. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/prepared_piano [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/synthesizer 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. videos and recordings don't actually replicate those things. they approximate them. recordings leave out tons of really important expression. (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) anything less is a crude shortcut afforded us by our decadent culture of consumption. no. it's an appeal to something that is eternally true. especially without subscriptions. apple's destruction of the real and of tradition is also a bid against longevity and ownership. and now through this global marketing effort, everyone who proudly displays apple gear is complicit in their desire to crush tangible media. 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. it's just a tool. 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. its like smelling fresh apple pie vs smelling an apple pie car freshener. the idea gets across, but it can never be the same. i felt like i was watching the end of terminator 1 when watching that ipad commercial. that is, hilariously, an excellent ad. it's gotta sting when someone says "no, actually just reversing your terrible thing makes a wonderful thing. didn't you think of that?" 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. reading just this hn submission's replies begs ti differ it’s a metaphor. 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. 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. 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 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. i implore you all: adopt a piano today! you may find yourself saying "i didn't rescue it, it rescued me." what i am having a reaction to is all the reactions about destroying instruments. which in turn reminded me of the song by cake. rock n’ roll lifestyle: … how much did you pay for the chunk of his guitar the one he ruthlessly smashed at the end of the show? and how much will he pay for a brand new guitar one which he'll ruthlessly smash at the end of another show? and how long will the workers keep building him new ones? as long as their soda cans are red, white, and blue ones … 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. 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. [1] e.g. https://www.actionpianomoving.com/used pianos if you're in the greater nyc area 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. but used pianos go unsold for under a hundred dollars all the time within an hour's drive of major us cities. 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. “we” don’t worship anything here. people are being babies about this. if it has to be explained to you, you won't get it. but yes, if you are losing your mind over it and crying about it, with an extreme emotional reaction, yes that makes you a baby. i have no problem with someone who merely didn't like the ad. what i do have a problem with is this extreme freakout response. 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. then i guess you didn't see the social media response. there were absolutely a lot of people who were extremely upset. define “losing your mind” and “crying about it with extreme emotional reaction”. the people i am seeing on twitter who are very upset. so, if would be anyone who instead of merely thinking that the ad is bad, instead are actually angry about it. thinking an ad sucks is different from being significantly offended by it. 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. 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. a better comparison might be to spike jonze's famous ikea ad ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dbqhivyfsrg ), which was also sort of disturbing to watch. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article 8838159/amp/the who... because of the connection that the players have with the instruments. could you do that with an ipad? well, the article says it was because of the money of having to buy new equipment. https://youtu.be/g9zogqomqvm at least billie joe armstrong showed that gibsons are very durable and you really have to put your back into destroying it. if i put my skill and effort crafting something and it is destroyed, i'll feel sad. feeling that way even for things other made is called empathy. 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. they'd allow you to upgrade the ram in your macbook instead having to replace the entire machine! 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. 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. 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. 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? 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. are they still fusing displays into lids on the "pro" level macbook? 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." what about lpcamm2? https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/7/24151369/lpcamm2 laptop me... 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. 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. 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. cgi modeling of a shattering string instrument that looks realistic would be an insane amount of work, and insanely expensive. this was definitely mostly practical. the squished emoji ball at the end might have been cgi, but not most of this. 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. movie magic, guys! also if it was cg apple would have immediately said that. you think they got a real ball to roll out to the edge and filmed that live? ridiculous. i would be surprised if any of it was real. 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. 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. 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. no it would not. it would still be as disgusting as it is now. which is a little on the nose for the way artists are feeling right now... 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? 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. 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. but no, apple just squashed it all to show off. an ad that was likely done in a single take, let’s be real, doesn’t matter at all in the big picture. i've turned away from favorite bands in the past whenever i'd find out they habitually destroyed musical instruments on stage. ...but really, it's not punk rockers slamming their guitars on the stage and destroying them; they can't afford to. i suppose that it's destruction of the material to advance the immaterial (the performance itself) but it's still self indulgent and wasteful. for me it is in your face ruthless "fuck you and what you do, submit to us" nature of the ad. we are different people. 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. alienating them is (or should be) a huge mistake in my mind. but it's 2024, everything is enshittified, god has forsaken us. 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. 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. 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. a stupid ad. conceptually it makes a lot more sense in reverse. “look at every type of creative tool and instrument *contained* within this thin ipad” is inspiring. “look at how we’ve crushed all these creative tools and instruments” is decidedly not. https://youtu.be/xyb6jjodsuk not everything has to be perfectly rational. 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) apple probably looked at usage stats and saw that 100x as many people use the ipad as piano than hook up an actual piano. it's not just general sensibilities, it's comically topical. 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. 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 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. 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. or something like that. 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. while shorter than the very short "article" your comment actually explained it and makes me understand. the article did no such thing. which definition applies here? outrage: 1. an act of extreme violence or viciousness. 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. 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 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. [0]: https://encrypted tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:and9gcqx0rcg... 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. 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. i think everyone has their pet irritating thing. 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? 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. what i neglected to add there is exactly what you mention. i'm a tech person. what's interesting is that an ad department was so tone deaf. those aren't techies. most company in the same situation would've done the same. apple didn't have a choice. https://www.fastcompany.com/40574083/facebook uber wells far... (from 2018) ostensibly yes. or maybe apple has missed the mark on their apology too... 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. https://9to5mac.com/2024/05/09/ipad pro ad backwards/ 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. 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. [1] https://www.cnet.com/tech/computing/jobs dismissed ipad mini... 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). 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 #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. 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. 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. 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.' https://youtu.be/15htd4um1m4 it's just "we take your concerns very seriously" fluff reply. 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. [1] https://www.apple.com/shop/select apple pencil 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. 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 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. 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". thankfully. 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. it was very surprising to me when i started reading just how badly people hated it. reputation is built by the drop, and consumed by the bucket. i find tim cook presence extremely chilling, highly sociopathic vibes. 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. same message, but without the disrespect. but in being destroyed turn into a diamond, and diamonds are forever? bmw, too, used to have an impeccable brand. minimalism doesn't sell everywhere. if not, you are not going to understand the feelings here, whatever "objective" but useless words you write here. btw devin is just a hoax. look it up, and find better arguments in the future. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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 dont have the right to tell other people how they should feel and react to things based on your own thoughts and opinions. its ironic, because you too are telling people how to act and feel, by telling them that they can't do that. not on hacker news: >please don't fulminate. please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community. dang isn't some overbearing dictator, but you'll find your time here short if the behavior continues. 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. 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. here, read the original comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40317635 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. 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. >eschew flamebait. avoid generic tangents. omit internet tropes. we don't do that here, so i urge you to reconsider that approach next time. eta: i think this nugget of wisdom from pirate software is good to keep in mind. https://youtube.com/shorts/s9xrkjuxuum 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. 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. > 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? ...in your opinion. it has probably actually make the ad very successful. i feel sorry for the robot, i definitely don't feel like buying a car. 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. how about ok go exploding tons of guitars? making video art is more than a legitimate reason to destroy props. this feels like a silly discussion. ok go identified the potential issue beforehand and found a solution that would work for them. 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? speak for yourself. also, see the flurry of comments elsewhere in the thread about the irrelevance of cgi to the message being sent 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. 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. this is only outrage because people want to be outraged at apple. and i don't own a single apple product telling you this. it was all just stolen from an lg ad in 2009. and nobody got upset at that. so clearly this is about apple as a brand evoking emotions and fake outrage. ads don't exist to make you feel good, they exist to make you notice them. i suppose it would have been cooler if it was the other way around: "ipad somehow expands outwards, filling the room with those things" 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. who cares of an apple ad... this outrage made the ad seen 10 times more than it would've been otherwise. 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. my identity? why, i'm an iphone™ product(red)© aids (or as i've recently taken to calling it, hiv+aids) realief responder® and i can assure you zero (0) of the child laborers have stds. 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 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. 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 so, start off with a blatant misdirection. they shouldn’t, but the evidence is this works. > that is your (or your associates') fault, not the whistleblowers frame cancel culture as a noble effort, ok, go on… > don't do stuff your employers will find distasteful   vote for candidates to end at will employment and give stronger employee rights just don’t disagree with liberals and vote the way they want you to! simple solution! why didn’t i think of that!? 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. i don't think the world is going to end because some people are upset about an ad. but i absolutely am going to laugh at and belittle those who are having an extreme and irrational emotional reaction to something this dumb. > either address the arguments they're making to further the conversation, or deal with it. you missed the other option. dismiss them and make them feel bad and embarrassed for overreacting. 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. it's not the only thing on my phone that has vanished. i had the recent monkey island, but that no longer exists i don't do apps any more, i'm happy to buy things, but it seems people aren't willing to sell them any more. 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. if their intention was to communicate that it’s cgi then that was an abject failure. 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. here's lauri with his 300 ton press on the subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nk zi8grfdw once you see it you can't unsee it. i hope this ad helps improve awareness. 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"   https://youtube.com/@hydraulicpresschannel 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. 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. 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 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". 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? 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. 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. you can make a basket of puppies sound like the end of the world with the right words. there is nothing wrong with that ad. i thought it was gonna be something else. https://twitter.com/asallen/status/1788428991118164356 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. the apple ad is showing things people love being destroyed and replaced by a inferior replacement 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. they also smashed pianos in the rube goldberg video, and a tv with a sledge. now i wonder if that was a 1984 reference. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0btnggzo tu https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qybufny7y8w (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! > the anger one feels when sacred objects are desecrated. https://suno.com/song/eceb91f0 7d9b 4029 ba19 24b6520dcf19 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. 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 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. the proof is: here we are talking about it. 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! https://paulgraham.com/submarine.html whatever your response, the product and brand is so big that the point that the ad wants to make remains. there is no such thing as bad publicity when your goal is getting attention. i personally find it very rude. marketing wise doing rude things is smart. 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. 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. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8iq9oepksce there is a sort of hydraulic press on cupertino. it has crushed, among other things:   3.5mm headphone jack in cell phones   physical keyboards in cell phones   upgradeable ram in laptops   user replaceable batteries   repairability and other things, i'm sure. 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. seems like there really is no bad publicity 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." it reminds me of "who's afraid of red, yellow and blue" > two of (3) them have been the subject of vandalistic attacks in museums. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/who%27s_afraid_of_red,_yellow_... https://www.threads.net/@fragmede/post/c6yyhchrlm9 any other company would have been able to put out this ad and nobody would care. offtopic about the ipad, im curious, does you guys use tablets like the ipad in anyway in your dayily lifes? after phones seem to be getting bigger, i see no use for a dedicated device like an ipad. 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. but using nvim all the time have its limitations. sometimes you need an ide. so i just give up, and now is collecting dust. i also don’t use an ipad after switching to a pro max phone. but ideally i’d like a smaller phone and an ipad mini; maybe next iteration. people today leap to feigning victimhood and can't seem to grasp that it was likely mostly or entirely fictional 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. one way would be practical effects. multiple items / layers filmed separately for controlled crushes, then combined in post. 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. apple went from 1984 to this… wild that some thrift store items are causing such a stir. if the biggest feature is the form factor, than your team now has two problems. silicon valley on a mission 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] ? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/the_californian_ideology 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. yeah, after they stop working, not when they are perfectly good :) they’re not sorry, they’re happy. i never would have heard about it had people not gotten upset by it. apple "apologizes" then counts the money as it flows in. 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.   spies on you while telling you they protect your privacy   removes feature after feature from their devices, telling you that you want this and that it's better w/o it for you   locks you in more and more controlling every aspect from hardware to software to development environment and the store   acts in bad faith every time someone threatens that fenced garden and you people worry about an ad that just tries to justify why 50 bucks in hardware have to cost 1000+ dollars? 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. but the ad also caused me stress, and i own no apple devices, nor am i a fan. so there must be more. 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. this is my favourite emotional car ad   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7swphku1xzu apple products does not inspire to such emotions, not anymore. the apple fans are not going to be waiting 20 years for poop emojis. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ybz9pvcf6x8 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. 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. they should do a follow up with my friendships and family life. 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. 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.   dumbing down mac os to make it more ios like (where's my location manager in sonoma?)   having too low default ram in the base models (that one should be obvious)   the thinness fetish (isn't it enough that the ipad pro has the m4? why did they spend development resources to also make it the thinnest ever?) 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   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. it is a tangent observation. because of the ad, or because all the people complaining about the ad? 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. https://youtu.be/sacvsubypvc see the apple siri ad   it’s about how the device enhances the viewer to do more. https://youtu.be/8haemu qkd4 apple has now turned into what they despised. i absolutely loved the epic ad that was a take of the original apple ad which was based on 1984. apple   https://youtu.be/vtvjbmodx i epic   https://youtu.be/euishuaw6q4 it’s fair to say if steve jobs was still calling shots, this ad would have never aired. the ad shows everything wrong with apple. they’ve become a soulless corporation. didn’t lg do the exact same ad some years ago? seems like the real conversation here is about the total lack of originality here: this is so, so far from anything steve would have approved. 2. <keeps ad up on youtube> 3. profit you can almost feel that pain reverb in your body, in a weird way. i felt the same when i saw the ad. it's awful. 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. 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. 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. source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40312595 the reports of fear about that movie have been greatly exaggerated. https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/did a silent film abou... 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’m honestly shocked at the response i’m seeing here. amazing how people here on hn can be so... anyway i don't want a ban. omg. it's like the apple x indie horror movie crossover. hmmm, this is why steve jobs is needed. this ad is such ballmeresque   meaning tim must be asleep at the wheel, or, more likely, on his vision pro while his tesla takes over directions. haha! :) the message to me is anti tech, though. all these wonderful things are taken away from us, and instead we just get an ipad. i mean, i have an ipad, and it's a cool gadget, but it's obviously no replacement for any one of the instruments getting crushed. 2024 "giant faceless industrial hoodrolic press goes brrrrr on art and creativity" (with apologies to hp channel) seems we're at the late stage now. but in the grand scheme of things it might sell more ipads due to the streisand effect. 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. 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. 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. 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. but you never want to tell a story about shooting a happy young dog, and then ask people "vote for me, i do tough things"!! don't. do . that. as humans, we all get lost in our own context sometimes (not making any larger political point.) apple really fucked up here. did no one on their marketing team bring this up? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzao9hzogtq 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. this is backwards and i am terrifically shocked that such practice is legal. this is wrong and evil. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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... 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 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. 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 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. 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. 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. it was repulsive. the issue for me is not about minimalism, so this reframing is not appropriate in my case. i do agree that there is more wrong with the advert than this. i was just pointing out something nobody'd brought up. 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 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. though the tone of the ad was still... orwellian: imagine a hydraulic press, stamping on human creativity, forever. 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. 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. mother's heartbeat. the woosh of her blood stream. we get months of this auditory performance. https://youtu.be/0svfnhmlnbe even "cheap chinese shit" is made by hand. 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. 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. 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.) 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. 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 don't personally think that computing is a threat to art, but many people do. what man with a soul would destroy a guitar with a crusher for any purpose at all? that's psychopathically problematic to me. 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. 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. 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. 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. to your question   they literally used crush and destroy as their message. unforced error on apples part plain and simple. 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. 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. 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. 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 world doesn’t share your own obsession and weird relationships with a camera and a guitar. 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'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. source: 2023 10k but sure, i can see why people don't like it. these hydraulic press videos are popular because they crush things. they don't create artful unions, they pulverize. 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? 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. >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! 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. 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. 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. 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. 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 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.* 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. i have the impression that the opposite is happening. 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. 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. 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) 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... 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. what exactly are you trying to achieve with this sentence? 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. 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. 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. 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 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. https://twitter.com/rezawrecktion/status/1788211832936861950 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. one of these things is not like the others~... this "literally shouldn't be used figuratively" is a rather modern construct that was artificially created. 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." 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. 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. i feel strongly about important things, not all things. 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. 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. 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. 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. everything has been commodified. and apple just piled on. welcome to capitalism... 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). 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 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. 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 focusing on just the literal few in view in front of you is missing the forest for the trees. 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. 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. im done with it and a lot of others are also. same reason people tend to hoard too much shit. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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 they invest too much emotion into inanimate things. 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.) so they get triggered by mundane things and tweet prayer hands for every news headline that hits the 24 hour news cycle "these things you people have, these ...feelings...these are strange and you seem weak. boop beep boop." sometimes the stereotypes aren't wrong, huh. 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. 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 ; ) 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? 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. 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. maybe it is you who needs to go outside and stop reading these comments which make you feel 'insane'? "why do you care about x" questions are inane. the internet also serves to amplify their noise. apple made a stupid commercial and everyone is traumatized? wtf? belt holsters in future apple keynotes just do not seem that impossible anymore. (phone holsters, of course.) reject culture, consume the slop. in other words, i think apple crushed it (pun intended). i thought everyone could see the absurdity in there? for me personally, crushing an upright piano is like apple showing a middle finger to anyone who plays on a real piano. culture from the last 20 years has been the slop and the people complaining loudest here have been making the sloppiest slop of all. 10 years, i would say. it went downhill somewhere around 2015 2016, imo. rush limbaugh figured this out in the 80s. he made lots of money and everyone followed suit. 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. there’s no reason to apologize. it’s taking the ‘crushing carbon into diamonds metaphor’ and using it for their product. in the beginning it looks over the top, ‘ultra violent’, but then it becomes a metaphor for how they view their product. now, sure, it’s preposterous to think that this diamond of a thing can be as good as all the real objects it replaces, but that’s advertising. but more so there is an unmistakeable 'destruction is cute' aspect to the ad that is uncalled for, that is what the reaction is toward. to me it’s more a metamorphosis rather than authoritarianistic crushing of the spirit. lots of super bowl ads are of the ‘stupid, dumb, frat/soro’ variety. some are a hit, some are duds. maybe they tried being to clever by half. let the ad run out; no need to apologize though. [0] not sure about the last one [1] in german we'd say "alternativeless", which has a nice set of negative connotations nowadays out of curiosity, what's the actual german word? (or is that the actual word?) 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. i do agree the test marketing groups are not providing good feedback about secondary interpretations… people yelling at each other on twitter over your ad is free marketing. tons of it. i believe the apt suggestion is to go and "touch grass." > 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. yes. it was obvious in college that the non stem majors didn't like the stem majors or vice versa, but it was more strongly in one direction. 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. 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. 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. 0. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kli1mr qnt8 where they have lost their vision is in the iphone and mac lines which are simply so profitable that there is no reason to mess with a good thing. 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. 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. it's not just tone deaf, it's insulting. 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. 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 :) right on trend. they might love it, but they don’t understand it, and per the last 20 years love unemploying it. 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? literacy truly is dead… do you know the ipad is not even built by pressing guitars and toys and paint together? they don't care about destroying those things. but you're right that "missed the mark" is not really an apology for anything in particular. linking to a reversed version of the ad. definitely making it better (though this version of the ad won't persuade me either to buy an ipad) 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. 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! i can't wait for ai to finally give social media the coup de grace. can't speak for artists, but i do not whine. i just simply find it tasteless and disgusting. 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. this is the same. 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. 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. 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 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 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. where the hell were the focus groups on this one? did you miss the many colours of "blood" dripping from the crusher's jaws? i have spent most of my childhood dreaming that someday, maybe, i would own a prime photo lens and a trumpet. to see a big company make a mockery of those artefacts of human creativity almost makes me cry (it actually hurts a little). this reminded me of an interesting documentary from the la times on the la unified school district's musical instrument repair shop. https://www.latimes.com/shortdocs/la short docs the last rep... 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. 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. disingenuous prick. here's the ad: https://youtu.be/ntjkwixwtrc https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cld0rxlqgggo > 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". https://twitter.com/angelicaoung/status/1788241764383678900 > everybody hated that apple ad but the japanese really hated it. i’ve never seen so many upset japanese ppl commenting on a single thread would that deserve a news article and a statement from the company? 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. my comment was clearly hyperbole. if you went out for dinner at a jazz place, would you accept the entertainment being someone fiddling with an ipad? somehow i don’t think musicians have much to worry about. >> watching a piano, which if maintained can last for something like 50 years something like 50? i know people who own pianos which are "something like" 150 years old, and i do not know many people with a piano. some are _centuries_ old. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/fortepiano 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. 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. what an artificial world we live in today.

sign up sign in sign up sign in giles crouch | digital anthropologist follow    3 listen share this week, apple launched it’s latest iteration of the ipad with an emphasis on it being well, thinner than ever before. a common theme of apple products for a few years now. in the subsequent ad and the launch promotion, the core video garnered a huge amount of criticism. so much so that apple has quickly apologized. what went wrong? why did the ad fail? let’s explore from a sociocultural perspective. it’s worth doing because of where digital technologies “sit” in society today. as a digital anthropologist, i am constantly watching how cultures and societies view and feel about digital technologies. i work with a lot of technology companies to help them understand how societies and cultures feel about, adopt and engage with technologies. and bring them to market. i’ve been doing this for over twenty years. in it’s simplest form, the video would be seen as fun and creatively interesting. the concept being that now, anyone with any sort of creative idea across any form of the aesthetic elements of culture, art, music, literature, fashion, architecture, could do it all in one place. makes sense. below is a youtube clip of the ad. worth viewing for context if you’ve not already seen it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ntjkwixwtrc so why did the ad garner such visceral reaction from celebrities and average folks, and we might say this ad has become as impactful as apple’s 1984 ad, but in the completely opposite way. the original 1984 ad by apple came at a time when digital technologies were fairly new in society. personal computers then were quite expensive. the internet wasn’t a household thing. smartphones? nope. the earliest smartphone was a decade away and even then it wasn’t really “smart”. society was excited, interested. computers were becoming accessible, filled with promise and opportunity. society was just starting to get digitally connected then. the idea of sharing ideas, of being able to express ourselves creatively in new and interesting ways was fascinating. apple’s 1984 tv ad was perfect for this time in society and culture. the promise of digital technologies, the expectations, were vibrant and positive. their later “think different” campaign built on this idea. apple’s latest ad tried, but failed, to pay some sort of homage to that time. the intent was honest. the idea was honest, to express that now, the ipad would enable even more creative expression in even more incredible ways. and frankly, it does. it really is a brilliant technological device. so what happened? it is 30 years later and today, society isn’t as amused, enamoured or feeling as inspired with computing like it once was. the promises of social media leading to a time of humans connecting and coming together in whimsical, wonderful ways hasn’t fully come true. knowledge workers feel overwhelmed, exhausted and feel they can’t keep up. the experience of the internet, of news sites, whether on mobile or desktop has become one where we must navigate endless ads and the text of a story is less than all the ads thrust upon us. we are surveilled, sliced and diced by data analysts. ads aren’t creative anymore, they’re designed to get clicks. consumers are moved through a funnel and they don’t like being that compressed and squeezed. yet the new ipad and many other technologies do give us new and exciting ways to express ourselves unlike ever before in human history. to share and engage, to create. it is exciting. but we are overwhelmed and society is frustrated. we are so exhausted we can’t see the opportunity. our dopamine has been hijacked and we’re left with the hangover. then of course, there’s artificial intelligence, specifically generative ai (gai) like chatgpt, claude, midjourney and others. society is left to struggle with what this all means. not just for jobs, but for human creativity. the ai giants tell us our jobs are doomed, so is creativity and we should just submit. but humans never do. that’s a message few societies like or ever accept. apple’s ipad ad brought it all home. in just a few seconds an ad that was intended to show how a technology could give us even more ways to express our creativity instead expressed how much of society feels about technology companies today; being crushed with no choices. people don’t want a toothbrush with ai, but oral b thinks we do. no one thinks a toothbrush with ai is going to really make our teeth that much cleaner. samsung baked ai into an oven. lg put ai in a fridge. they are all missing how culture actually works. but they do know that putting ai into a press release does jack the share price. apple has long and lovingly fostered a deep and meaningful relationship with the creative industries. it does want to maintain that, to grow it. to make it better and these latest tools do that. it’s just the execution that fell flat. society doesn’t want more ai in anything, it wants less. today, culture feels threatened by ai. it feels threatened by the hint of anything that will take it’s ability to create, imagine and express away. it is overwhelmed by technology. constant notifications, software updates and new buttons. it’s not a technology backlash, it’s technology exhaustion. and perhaps more so, disillusionment. the tech companies made promises they have not kept. cultures need time and space to figure out how they want to adopt and adapt technologies. to understand the impacts on customs, norms and traditions. when this is blocked or taken away, culture will react. with anger, frustration and in a consumer oriented society, by not buying products and services. apple had no bad intent with it’s ad, quite the opposite. but it failed to read the cultural room, the social zeitgeist if you will. to understand, or see where culture is today, how it feels about a lot of current technologies. given what i do know about apple, the people that work there and what apple does want to accomplish, the results of the ad will ripple through the company in profound ways. apples’ ad was well intended, but culturally tone deaf. the question then becomes, will other tech giants take note? will they be willing, like apple likely will, to return to customer value over shareholder value? apple is not, nor is any tech company, perfect, but it does make quality products that do deliver value. i have a few apple products in my home that are between 12 and 15 years old and still work and give me and my family value. i’m not absolving them of their misstep, but apple does try more than most.       3 digital anthropologist | i'm in wired, forbes, national geographic etc. | speaker | writer | cymru help status about careers press blog privacy terms text to speech teams

by verge staff as expected, apple refreshed its ipad lineup for the first time in over a year during the “let loose” event on may 7th. new ipad pros with oled outside and m4 chips inside, along with updated ipad airs available in sizes that go up to 13 inches were the headliners. there were also new accessories on display, like the apple pencil pro with haptic feedback and find my built in and a magic keyboard that adds a function row for a more laptop like experience with your tablet. software updates included some additional ai powered features, and a new final cut camera app to support multicamera productions. you can follow our live reactions to all of the updates right here or check out the highlights in our roundup. check below for every update from the let loose ipad event. umar shakir the just released ipad pro and ipad air have a new battery health menu option that includes an optimized charging option and provides more data about the battery. as reported by macrumors, the new menu matches the settings introduced on iphone 15, which lets users set their device not to charge past 80 percent, which can help extend the usable life of the battery. you can get to the new menu on ipad by going to settings > battery > battery health, which will also provide data points for charge cycle count, the date the battery was manufactured, and when the battery was first charged. it was introduced in ipados 17.5 but isn’t available on older ipad models. david pierce the new ipad pro is a genuine achievement in tablet design. it’s the closest thing i’ve ever seen to the vision that a tablet should feel not like a computer but, rather, like a piece of glass in your hand. i’m honestly not sure how you’d shrink it more; the usb c plug i use to charge the 13 inch pro i’ve been testing is already thicker than the ipad itself. it’s a light, fast, remarkable machine. but does that really count for much anymore? the ipad has been a hardware triumph for years, plenty fast and light and long lasting for just about anything you could do with it. the problem has always been the software: by forcing the device to run a locked down, oversimplified operating system, apple has prevented this ultraportable and ultrapowerful machine from becoming the full fledged computer so many users want it to be. wes davis it’s pretty impressive, apparently: “i picked up the ipad pro at this event in new york and, like, out loud, involuntarily, just said, ‘holy shit.’” quentyn kennemer at long last, apple’s newest ipad pro and ipad air are finally, officially real. preorders opened may 7th, with the former tablet starting at $999 and the latter at $599. both models come in 11  and 13 inch sizes and are set to arrive in stores on wednesday, may 15th. one of the most notable changes in the pro models is the switch from lcd based displays to oled, which could be the killer feature for creatives. but there’s a lot more to like, such as the new m4 chip that is said to offer 50 percent faster cpu performance than the prior model’s m2 chip, plus a new 10 core gpu that supports mesh shading and ray tracing. the new ipad pro also gets a slight camera shakeup, as it now only features two rear cameras (it ditches the ultra wide from the previous model, but there’s an improved adaptive flash). there’s also a repositioned front facing camera that now sits centered along the horizontal edge, which allows for less awkward video calls. emma roth apple has apologized after a commercial meant to showcase its brand new ipad pro drew widespread criticism among the creative community. in a statement provided to ad age, tor myhren, apple’s vice president of marketing, said the company “missed the mark.” “creativity is in our dna at apple, and it’s incredibly important to us to design products that empower creatives all over the world,” myhren told ad age. “our goal is to always celebrate the myriad of ways users express themselves and bring their ideas to life through ipad. we missed the mark with this video, and we’re sorry.” elizabeth lopatto i wonder if apple ceo tim cook was surprised by the visceral revulsion many people felt after viewing the newest commercial for apple’s ipad. in it, a plethora of creative tools are flattened by an industrial press. watching a piano, which if maintained can last for something like 50 years, squished to advertise a gadget, designed to be obsolete in less than 10, is infuriating. the backlash was immediate. the message many of us received was this: apple, a trillion dollar behemoth, will crush everything beautiful and human, everything that’s a pleasure to look at and touch, and all that will be left is a skinny glass and metal slab. alex cranz credit where it’s due: the commercial for the new ipad pro is impeccable. in the commercial, a hydraulic press, like the kind that crushes skittles all day on tiktok, slowly descends onto a whole amalgamation of artistic endeavors. as the large metal plate drops like tesla’s stock in 2024, it crushes musical instruments and destroys classical sculptures. tubes of paint pop like balloons sending a cascade of color across apple’s carefully constructed canvas of stuff. finally, it accomplishes its job. this gathering of creations meant to represent the whole history of human creativity is laid flat by the unstoppable force of apple’s hydraulic press. and then, as the press slowly rises, all of that artsy mess disappears. what is left behind is apple’s new, beautifully sleek ipad pro. chris welch i had a sneaking suspicion this was going to happen. all the rumors about the new ipad pro   its shift to an oled display, the more premium magic keyboard   had me convinced that apple was going to quietly move on from the quirky, very not luxurious smart keyboard folio that became my preferred carry for the 2018 ipad pro and, later, the m1 ipad pro. sure enough, the smart keyboard folio isn’t compatible with the oled ipad pros. the 11 inch version can still be used with the sixth generation ipad air, but that’s all. so if you’re set on apple’s very best tablet, it’s not an option anymore. and with no alternative quite like it anywhere in sight, i’m bummed. wes davis in a memo sent to stores, apple says it’s not including stickers with the new ipad pro or ipad air, but customers can still ask for them at the store, according to 9to5mac. the company reportedly pointed to its environmental initiatives, like its plastic free packaging goals. apple has been omitting stickers in more products, but that’s mostly only included gadgets like its airpods. sheena vasani after nearly a two year wait, apple finally updated its ipad lineup with a thinner ipad pro and new ipad air. the new tablets start at $999 and $599, respectively, and both are already available for preorder ahead of their may 15th release date. these aren’t strictly iterative updates, either. for the first time, apple added an oled display to the ipad pro, along with a new m4 chip. apple also added a 13 inch air to the lineup, so both models are now available in 11  and 13 inch sizes. combine that with their support for the same styli   specifically the apple pencil with usb‑c and forthcoming apple pencil pro   and you now have more options to consider if you need a big tablet for work or play. quentyn kennemer we’ve got you covered if you don’t have time to watch the full ipad pro and ipad air announcement, which also brought word of a new apple pencil pro and magic keyboard. if you need more info, check here for the verge’s full coverage. allison johnson apple giveth oled screens, and apple taketh away... sim cards. as spotted by 9to5mac, apple has removed the physical sim slot on the cellular versions of the new ipad air and ipad pro models. first the iphone, now the ipad   apple is all in on an esim future, it seems. the iphone 14 was the first model to lose the sim slot, but only in the us   versions sold in other countries still include a physical sim tray. that doesn’t seem to be the case with the new ipad air and ipad pro; apple’s uk and canadian retail sites state that the new models use esim and are “not compatible with physical sim cards.” jess weatherbed maxon announced in october that it will bring its beloved desktop 3d sculpting software to the platform this year, but our first look at it comes courtesy of apple’s “let loose” ipad event. there’s still no word on the release date or pricing. the ui looks really clean though, and it seemingly supports zbrush’s sculptris pro mode, judging by the icon seen up top. wes davis the newly announced ipad pro hides a sneaky upgrade option that apple didn’t mention during its event today. when you cough up the $600 it costs to jump from the 256gb base model ipad pro to the 1tb version, apple doesn’t just double the ram along with that   it also puts a faster chip inside, going from a nine core m4 chip to a 10 core version. this is the first time apple has offered a processor upgrade on a specific tablet model   in the past, no matter what other options you picked on a given tablet, you knew you were getting the same chip as any other configuration. in the past, apple only tied ram upgrades to storage boosts; that’s still true here, with the quantity doubling from 8gb to 16gb. you also get the privilege of buying apple’s glare fighting nanotexture glass for $100 (lucky you!), which isn’t available on the lower end models. so, if you really want the best performing ipad pro, you have to bump your storage to the 1tb or 2tb configuration. victoria song when i see the word air attached to an apple product, i assume two things: it’s going to be thin and light. you can’t really assume that with the just announced ipad airs. for one, both the 11 inch and 13 inch sizes are heavier and thicker than either ipad pro model. behold the spec comparison charts. sheena vasani along with introducing a new ipad air and ipad pro during its let loose event, apple quietly killed its ninth gen ipad   also known as the last ipad with a headphone jack. the 10th gen ipad is now the sole entry level ipad in apple’s official lineup and, as such, has received a $100 price cut. released in late 2022, the 10th generation ipad arrived starting at $449, or about $120 more than base entry level ipads from previous years. apple justified the price increase with new ipad air like features, like a 10.9 inch screen and usb c support. umar shakir apple is releasing a new final cut camera app for iphone and ipad that can take video and stream it live back to an ipad for a multicam shoot, as well as provide more controls for filmmakers. the company’s new pro level app provides “precise manual controls” and can be used as a plain standalone camera app. the new final cut camera is launching alongside the updated final cut 2 app, a successor to last year’s debut final cut for ipad. final cut 2 has a multiscreen view that captures and controls each final cut camera running device connected to it. jess weatherbed and wes davis apple is updating two of its biggest pro apps to complement the new ipad pro models announced today. the updated logic pro will be available first, hitting the app store starting on may 13th for both the ipad and mac, while the next version of final cut pro for both platforms comes later this spring. both will be free updates for existing users of the macos and ipados versions. final cut pro for the ipad finally supports external projects   that is, users can create and access products on external storage and won’t need to import the media to their ipad’s internal storage. that’s a big deal for anyone editing on the go, as even apple’s higher tablet storage tiers can be limiting when working with massive video files (particularly now that the app supports taking in four camera shots at once). david pierce apple just announced a new ipad pro, and at a watch party in new york city, a few reporters got to take a look at apple’s new tablet firsthand. after holding and playing with the device for a few minutes, i can say pretty confidently that apple’s not kidding about how much more svelte the new model is. at 5.3mm thick for the 11 inch model and 5.1mm for the 13 inch tablet, this new ipad is noticeably thinner and lighter than anything the company has made before. it’s such a big difference that the larger model, which i’ve always felt was kind of preposterously huge, feels much more comfortable to hold and use. (and it’s technically even larger now, up to 13 inches from 12.9 before.) you can tell the difference between the pro and the new air from practically across the room, and as someone who has carried around an 11 inch pro for the last year and a half, it’s really a big difference. the biggest question i have for now is about fragility: is the new pro potentially too thin? it feels rigid and sturdy enough in my hands, but there are always tradeoffs with a device like this. we have lots of testing to do. emma roth apple just wrapped up its “let loose” event, where it showed off its first new ipads in nearly two years. but the event had more than just ipads   we also got a first look at some refreshed accessories and updated software. if you want a quick rundown of everything apple announced, check out our roundup below. jess weatherbed apple announced its third generation apple pencil today during its “let loose” ipad event, adding find my support and new capabilities for adapting the stylus to different creative tasks. available to order today for $129   the same price as the second gen apple pencil   the new apple pencil pro introduces features closer to what you’d find on pens for dedicated drawing tablets, like a “barrel roll” gyroscope feature and a squeeze gesture for switching between software functions. this is the first real update to the apple pencil series since the second generation model was announced in 2018. while the more affordable usb c apple pencil that was released last year supported a wider range of ipad models than the apple pencil 2, it also ditched advanced second gen features like pressure sensitivity and double tap tool switching   making it less useful for tasks like graphic design and 3d sculpting. nathan edwards alongside the long expected oled ipad pro, apple has also released a lightly updated magic keyboard with an aluminum palm rest and a larger trackpad with haptic feedback   and finally, a function row. the new magic keyboard for ipad pro (m4) comes in two colors (black and silver) and two sizes: one for the 11 inch pro and one for the 13 inch model. they cost $299 and $349, respectively, and like the new ipad pro models, they are available for preorder today, shipping next week. they are not compatible with the new 11  and 13 inch ipad air models announced today or with previous ipad pro models. those still use the first gen magic keyboard, now called magic keyboard for ipad air (m2). rolls off the tongue! joanna nelius and tom warren apple’s next generation chip, the m4, is coming to the new ipad pro. the new oled ipad pro models will include the upgraded chip, which is focused on improving performance for ai related tasks in ipados. during an event on tuesday, apple focused heavily on the m4’s ai capabilities. a new neural engine makes it “an outrageously powerful chip for ai,” the company says, capable of 38 trillion operators per second (tops). it’s supposedly 60 times faster than the npu of apple’s a11 chip, from 2017, but that number still falls short of the snapdragon x elite’s 45 tops. however, apple still claims the m4 can deliver the same performance as the latest pc chips with only a quarter of the power. chris welch at its “let loose” virtual event this morning, apple introduced its long awaited ipad pro updates. the new 13 inch and 11 inch tablets have a fresh design, more powerful internals, and a thinner profile than ever before, and they come with a major display upgrade. as rumored, apple has switched to oled screens on both sizes, bringing perfect blacks, richer color saturation, and enhanced contrast to its flagship ipads. oh, and the front facing camera is now in the correct (landscape) position for video calls. the ipad pros use a tandem oled structure that allows the display to reach 1,000 nits of peak full screen brightness   just like the mini led model before it   and 1,600 nits for hdr content. the 13 inch model measures just 5.1 millimeters thick, which apple says is its thinnest device ever. (the 11 inch is 5.3 millimeters thick.) for those who prefer a matte display finish, a nano texture glass coating will be available for the first time with these ipad pros. wes davis apple has unveiled its 2024 ipad air, now in two sizes for the first time thanks to a new 13 inch option. the company also updated the 11 inch ipad air. both tablets are outfitted with apple’s m2 chip and will be in blue, purple, starlight, and space gray colors. the tablet will start at $599 for the 11 inch and $799 for the 13 inch model, and they’re available today on apple’s site. the new ipad air has a single rear 12mp camera lens and a front facing 12mp camera, as before   now centered on the long edge, or what i’m now calling the one true placement. it’s also got support for the apple pencil hover feature, which was previously exclusive to the ipad pro. a weekly newsletter by david pierce designed to tell you everything you need to download, watch, read, listen to, and explore that fits in the verge’s universe. © 2025 vox media, llc. all rights reserved

follow slashdot blog updates by subscribing to our blog rss feed nickname: password: nickname: password: the fine print: the following comments are owned by whoever posted them. we are not responsible for them in any way. i mean yes. i'm not offended particularly by this ad. well no more than any random apple ad which are always pretentious wank that say you're a cooler person for buying some disposable shit[*]. every apple advert makes me go "ugh". [*] fuck you fanbois. my boring old thinkpad laptop is still going strong at 14 with a fully patched os. no hacks or pwnage required. i bought it run linux and it still does. [*] fuck you fanbois. my boring old thinkpad laptop is still going strong at 14 with a fully patched os. no hacks or pwnage required. i bought it run linux and it still does. for every tool, there is a use case. not everyone wants to lug around a large, clunky laptop everywhere. i'm guessing that 14yr old thinkpad isn't up to running some of the software i'm wanting to use, like davinci resolve, affinity photo...procreate...etc. this will come as a shock to you for sure: most people aren't interested in photography. to most people that are, it's not even work, it's just a hobby. i'm sure you loved focusing on the color saturation and depth of field effects in all of apple's ads, but most people don't even notice or care. all we see in them are a bunch of pretentious hipster douchebags that think macs don't get viruses just because their ad said so. not everyone wants to lug around a large, clunky laptop everywhere. apple laptops are well out of patched oss at this age, unless you resort to fuckery. life's too short for me to want to fight with my hardware. i just want a nice, easy, smooth experience, so i buy laptops with guaranteed linux support and never worry again. i'm guessing that 14yr old thinkpad isn't up to running some of the software i'm wanting to use, like davinci resolve, affinity photo...procreate...etc. it's more up to running bigger thi the luddites are upset because apple is right. the old tools are fading, and the future is digital. i'm not much of an artist, but my daughter makes amazing illustrations on her ipad pro and musical compositions that no single person could create on traditional instruments. the luddites are upset because apple is right. the old tools are fading, and the future is digital. and because it's apple. when lg ran the identical ad in 2008...no problem! and where, pray tell, did the samples that form the basis of the ipads virtual instrument library come from ? maybe straight out of apple's magic ass :) and yet, the beat goes on. no, more like hit the nail on the head. apple, and damn near every other top tier tech company, have the same agenda: control at all cost. this was a rare instance of a company showing its true colors. it's a disease spawned by it companies. ad wasn't about control. that's projection of your own problems. go read up what people actually found offensive on it, it's all over every forum where creative people talk to one another. the problem was that apple showed that "we're destroying tools of human creativity to make a tablet". to creative people who are defined by being high in trait openness, that looked like destruction of human creativity itself. because that's one of the defining feature of people who are high in openness. they tend to conne the ad would have raised a lot fewer hackles had it not been showing stuff being destroyed. instead, had the ad have someone placing all the articles in a large box, and a magican style curtain draped over it, then removed, to show the ipad pro where everything else would be, the ad would have been a lot better. showing all the creative stuff being destroyed just struck the wrong chord in people, as it echos real life where art, music, pretty much any creative endeavor is being replaced by the /imagine command. i mean, lots of stuff gets destroyed all the time, but yes, it sort of had a note of performative destruction and wastefulness. i can see why that rubbed people up the wrong way, even without any other meanings. it's a bit crass. all interesting thoughts. the ad made me a bit uncomfortable and ididn't know why...looking back, maybe it was the destructive aspect of it. i agree that some other way of showing creativity being packed into an electronic device would have been better. as far as the lg ad from 2008 goes, i don't recall ever seeing it so i can't compare my reaction. "and creative people are overwhelmingly apple users."lol. creativity and computer use are unrelated. this isn't insight, it's tribalism. "...who the perceived elites in their user base are..."worship at the church of apple! talk about illusion... "...and accidentally shattering their illusion about human creativity. illusion that for many is necessary for the act of creation. that was the source of their status as elite among the users."and now total nonsense. an illusion about creativity? what illusion is >it's tribalism. tribalism is also an inherent feature of humanity, so i assumed it was a given that creative people would be tribal... because they're humans. >worship at the church of apple! talk about illusion... see: status maintenance among your peers. >what illusion is that? illusion that creativity is not just uniquely human, but special to people among their peer group. again, see status maintenance among your peers. i mention this specifically in my original post. a lot of status maintenance am it was strangely refreshing to hear them finally admit something that everybody already knows but nobody is saying out loud. perhaps tomorrow, maybe google will finally admit that they are doing evil? no, more like hit the nail on the head. apple, and damn near every other top tier tech company, have the same agenda: control at all cost. this was a rare instance of a company showing its true colors. it's a disease spawned by it companies. control of what? guitar and keyboard sales? give me a break. apple may be a fashion company who sells tech, but even they know where their limits are. anyone who wants to actually learn a traditional instrument, will go get the real thing. hence the reason instruments still exist after hundreds of years. those that want to pretend for the sake of popularity, will buy an ipad. let’s stop pretending autotune is some kind of threat to those who can actually sing. let’s stop pretending autotune is some kind of threat to those who can actually sing autotune is a problem because it makes people think that's what singing is *supposed* to sound like. autotuned singing is completely unnatural and impossibly perfect, and when people in the real world can't match that, they think they are terrible singers. and a huge percentage of commercially broadcast and commercially published singing uses it now, maybe 80%+? bowing to the perpetually offended is dumb... and extremely offensive. apologize for apologizing! yes, bowing to the perpetually offended is not a great look. however, an add that ge's this kind of negative reaction? yeah, it gets pulled, because the whole purpose of advertising is to create  positive  vibes. when i first saw the ad, i cringed too. crushing musical instruments? seriously? on a more constructive note: what they intended to show, was all the creative tools being compressed into an ipad. there are any number of ways they could have done that. the worst possible choice was to show the destruction of the creative tools. who wants a broken trumpet? what about some sort of sci fi effect, showing the objects morphing into an ipad? or individual objects shrinking and moving towards a black dot; with each object, the dot grows bigger, until it has become an ipad? lots of possibilities. but again, crushing musical instruments? you've got to be seriously out of touch, to think that's going to go over well. the fact that they were out of touch isn't the problem   everyone makes mistakes. yes, there are many ways this could have been done better. the real problem is that there are a _lot_ of very creative people at apple, some of whom will have spotted this issue with the ad, and nobody felt empowered to speak up (or if they did they were ignored). that's a real problem. > on a more constructive note: what they intended to show, was all the creative tools being compressed into an ipad. yes we get that. the actual issue isnt the destruction of the instruments but the assertion that you need never touch a real instrument or learn one. they were saying that instruments are obsolete. it's the same line used when keyboards (the musical type) came out. why learn to play an oboe or a saxophone or a violin as the keyboard does that all for you and you need to just play the notes on a more constructive note: what they intended to show, was all the creative tools being compressed into an ipad. there are any number of ways they could have done that. the worst possible choice was to show the destruction of the creative tools. who wants a broken trumpet? what about some sort of sci fi effect, showing the objects morphing into an ipad? or individual objects shrinking and moving towards a black dot; with each object, the dot grows bigger, until it has become an ipad? lots of possibilities. but again, crushing musical instruments? you've got to be seriously out of touch, to think that's going to go over well. exactly. or how about showing someone using their ipad with the creative tools? recording music, checking your pitch, editing sound files, having a jam session over a video link. of course, you hardly need an ipad for that, but still ... that's a much more appealing scenario. > on yt i've seen a couple of "reaction" videos where the observer absolutely freaks out over old videos of the who smashing their instruments. that's just style. you have the opposite too with musicians like brian may and his red special guitar home made with his father, which when seen on stage adds to the crowds enthusiasm. on yt i've seen a couple of "reaction" videos where the observer absolutely freaks out over old videos of the who smashing their instruments. one of the best pictures i've ever seen: this guitar has seconds to live... [wixmp.com] no, i'm offended by stuff like hitler, or polluting the planet, or giving easily offended people de facto control over society. if you're not offended by anything, you're dumber than the dumbest animal, even a dog knows to be offended when someone steals their lunch. nothing was wrong with that ad. what's the world coming to? i'm not going to suggest it's offensive, just something that comes with a sigh. the ad implies you don't need a trumpet, a guitar, a piano, paints, etc. just the new shiny rectangle from apple. and omg! it's thin!. but it's not difficult to see this as pure corporate bs. for anyone slightly hesitant about the cult of apple this is just more nonsense. a life with a trumpet and an ipad is going to be more rounded than just an ipad. but the ad is suggesting their new skinny cuboid is magic. there's more to life, etc. once it was think different. now, it's think the same. and as a non apple user i don't care because this isn't really anything new. perhaps some of the opprobrium is down to scales falling from eyes that have previously thought apple was the second coming in corporate form and this is just an indication that not only have they wanted your money, they expect your soul too. to be fair, i can see that being a very reasonable take. but the stuff is all being destroyed so possibly a little ambiguous. maybe it's a bit dependent on what you think about apple in the first place. previously, i'd expect this reaction from those   me included   that might be a bit put off by the slightly arrogant veneer around their products. (e.g. the typical insinuation that they've invented, rather than refined, everything; the hints that apple products are a lifestyle, and not a technical choice, wh can we also think of it instead of destroying them, that they were mashing them together? as soon as i saw the crusher, they're probably saying that this thing does all these things, which pretty much the previous ipad did too. i know this is the internet and it should just be random contradiction and elevated antagonism, but yes, yes you can. i think that's probably what they were going for, and it's a reasonable impression to have, certainly. the ad's intention was to convey what you say, that an ipad is created my cramming all this stuff into it. it can do all these things because we put these things into it. apple wasn't saying the ipad replaces those things, because the ipad is "birthed" from the process. it is the amalgam of those things. the problem is that the video conveys the destruction of all those things during the process, the process doesn't work. also, the offense is the destruction, not the suggestion that the ipad is a replace i think there's an irony parade happening here. thing happened. comments made on thing. some comments prompt seeing thing if thing not seen initially. to fully explore your logic here pretty much nothing would ever deserve any comment, then? you imply you have adblock but try saving more of your time by 1) not reading stories about things that don't matter; 2) not replying to comment made about stories that don't matter. and apple wants to replace the experience of handling a real instrument with an inferior one on an ipad. it's the enshitification of our world, which began with replacing physical buttons with touch screens in places like cars where you really need that tactile feedback. the items are symbols of creativity. artists and musicians have spent a long time getting proficient with these analog tools, and feel a connection to them. the physical connection with them is important for them. this is also in context of "generative" ai tools taking real artists', writers and musicians jobs.apple is part of "big tech" that is stealing real artists work, mashing it up in a neural network and selling it at undercut prices. or at least, apple's devices are used to run the software, or interf anyone offended or "traumatized" by a fucking advertisement, especially this one, should lock themselves inside a mental institute and demand electroshock therapy until at least 12 psychiatrists declare them delusion free and sign off on their release. anyone offended or "traumatized" by a fucking advertisement, especially this one, should lock themselves inside a mental institute and demand electroshock therapy until at least 12 psychiatrists declare them delusion free and sign off on their release. i recommend trepanning. and a large spoon. anyone offended by people being offended by the destruction of musical instruments and other creative items should lock themselves out of their slashdot account, walk away from the computer, and get out into the real world for a while. displaying your prodigious intellect again, i see. and what's wrong with child rape, right? it's fine when your team does it. i'm sure apple is really, truly sorry for the ad. i'm especially sure tim cook, apple's marketing team, and the ad agency are popping champagne bottles for a brilliant ad campaign. why? because the ad has generated probably billions of dollars worth of marketing alone   between all the antisocial media posts about getting "offended" to all the news articles reporting on it. i'm sure they're all high fiving each other on a really successful ad that went viral what was likely supposed to have been an low key introduction of a rather boring product that's not doing terribly great (are ipads really selling all that much?) , suddenly days after the introduction you get a resurgence of interest on in brought on by the news. i knew about the ipad introduction because it was covered heavily. i didn't bother seeing the ad at all. it was "meh" to me. now, i've seen the ad in question to see what the hype was about. or brouhaha. it's a cute ad. but now they've probably had a few million views to hundreds of millions of views of that ad because of the "controversy" and they probably got a bunch of people who didn't care and didn't know that apple released a new ipad, into knowing that apple released a new ipad. and maybe some of them suddenly think it might be time to upgrade their tablet. instead of people forgetting about the ipad a week later, this news will circulate round and round for the next few weeks. you can't manufacture that kind of marketing. cute in your opinion. trouble is a lot of people consider the ad somewhat crass and unpleasant. there are quite a lot of people who consider mindless destruction of musical instruments as something unpleasant. but you find it cute, fine, but apparently enough of apple's target audience do not. i mean after all it's saying, "don't be creative, just buy an ipad". it kinda reflects all the things apple tries to kill with their products, turning everything into bland slabs. just look at the smartphone industry which apple killed, replacing it with an industry that sees the user as a resource to be exploited. i have no idea what crosswiring you have going on in your brain that got you there. please do explain. i am genuinely curious. how did you get to "don't be creative, just buy an ipad"? ok, so there is one school of thought that postulates that tablets are removing creativity and ability. for example, the generations of tinkerers that grew up with giant personal computers that they had complete control over, from the operating system it ran to the software installed. ipads can be awesome creative tools but more often than not they are simply very expensive screens to watch videos   with very little scope to tinker or customize but isn't that on the user, rather than on the product? as many people didn't tinker with basic on those personal computers as don't use their ipads for tinkering with creative stuff. it's an observation bias. just because we grew up tinkering in that way and don't on ipads doesn't mean that others don't. fully agreed, although it started way earlier with laptops. i had so much fun as a kid building all of my computers from parts. i wouldnt be in this job today if it wernt for that hands on tinkering ability. now everthing is a self contained disposable black box that cant even be saved should it brick itself. i once rebooted my pc, to find that somehow it had corrupted the bios while doing so. very wierd. did i panic? was i stuck? no, i was more confuddled how the situation happened but i instinctivley it's figuratively what the ad implied by "crushing" tools for human expression. you know, symbolism? now they have you believing you can't be creative without buying an expensive apple product. don't you see it? really? considering this ipad uses generative a.i to remove the need to have tedious creativity? i would be more interested in the details of the legal wranglings behind the scene, since that ad was a blatant rip off of a 2008 lg smart phone ad. that could potentially become really expensive for apple. https://boingboing.net/2024/05/09/apple blatantly rips off 2008 lg phone ad in latest ipad commercial.html not the first time for apple either. the original iphone "slide to unlock" was a rip off of lg's earlier all touch screen phone. most of their industrial design seems to be ripped off from braun. as steve jobs said, "great artists steal." i would be more interested in the details of the legal wranglings behind the scene, since that ad was a blatant rip off of a 2008 lg smart phone ad. that could potentially become really expensive for apple. https://boingboing.net/2024/05/09/apple blatantly rips off 2008 lg phone ad in latest ipad commercial.html do sitcom comedy writers sue each other into oblivion because all of them sell laughs the same way? i think not. highly doubt there’s a legal case there no matter how bad the lawyers want it. that one had me screaming at the tv :d it's as brain dead as showing people camping with a gas stove and matches and have them causally ask someone passing "what’s a camp fire?" :d the point is obvious. in the what’s a computer example, they were actually referring to the us specific jargon that defines a computer/pc as a windows machine or a larger laptop or tower system. here the kid was using an ipad pro (something beyond reach of most kids), outdoors and in various dangerous (for the ipad) environments to do her creative work. the message was that the new ipad pro was powerful enough to replace a larger more powerful machine (powerful enough to, not powerful enough to outclass one). the neighbour asked what the kid was doing on her computer, which would be enough context to instantly teach any kid that what she had in her hands was a computer, only for the kid to reply "what’s a computer?". alan turing would be turning in his grave :d there and here the point is sound but someone really messed up the delivery. then, it pros and turing fans all lamented at the mere idea that a kid wouldn’t know what a computer was. here the artists and musicians took offence at the idea that an ai based slab of expensing stuff that won’t last 5 years maximum could replace the skill and leaning and creativity in actually playing that piano properly and manually. and although i never have retained the skills to play an instrument (besides pretending my soldering iron is an air guitar as i instead have some skills in electronics) i totally agree. i think a better advert would have shown how the ipad and its ai could be used to enhance the experience of actually playing that piano. how it could be used to teach playing the trumpet or that guitar. how it could assist in developing skills to put that paint onto real canvas. seriously, who would think tapping a screen to emulate brush strokes is the same as actually looking at a scene and painting it for real? heck even in star trek, a series set so far in the future they can make food out of nothing, and experience full immersive environments on a holodeck, they still play real clarinets. the kids still carve things out of wood, perhaps replicated wood, or on the holodeck they might chop down a tree and carve it there. throughout star trek i see so many examples how making real paintings with real paint, sure the materials and tools might be replicated for convenience but nobody there would sniff at the idea someone might like to make their own brushes! they even give books as gifts, paper books no less, in a series full of padds and screens with databases and encyclopaedias of multiple cultures at their fingertips and computers that can fully respond to your voice queries, they still value a book. they use technology frequently to enhance those experiences without ending up as some fat human tapping at a screen. as an amateur photographer i use a dslr and film. i collect the cameras and have done so for at least 30 years. i have all sorts taking 35mm and 120 film, i even have the odd 110 format camera. i have a dslr which i use as my main camera but i frequently mix it with the old lenses from the others. when shooting film, i select from several types of film, not knowing what i'll get if it's one i haven’t used before. an ipad can’t replace any of that. its tiny lenses won’t have nearly anything close to the focal length or the light gathering capabilities of a 50mm m42 lens with f1.2 aperture, which i have loads of hence i mention them. heck my dslr's newer zooms were outclassed by a 1970's m42 50mm i used on that dslr to shoot photos of a comet thanks to the 50mm's large by comparison aperture. i heavily manipulate depth of field both ways, something the dslr makes very easy thanks to the fact i can see the effect on its screen (never liked dof preview on my film slr's much). an ipad has none of that as its tiny len seriously, who would think tapping a screen to emulate brush strokes is the same as actually looking at a scene and painting it for real? this guy does his paintings using an ipad. http://martynwarren.com/ [martynwarren.com] i think thats a simlar skill. it's easier to market to idiots. "now available on blu ray and digital download" well no shit. all downloads are digital as computers are digital technologies. "what's a computer?" was a way of doing that; catering to people who don't know technology that somehow this device is far superior to others that it's not what it is. debating what is or isn't "real" camping is an outstandingly great analogy for the debate over what is "real" computing, but probably not the way you intended. hint: you'll have to pry my coleman burner out of my cold dead hands. the neighbour asked what the kid was doing on her computer, which would be enough context to instantly teach any kid that what she had in her hands was a computer, only for the kid to reply "whatâ(tm)s a computer?" alan turing would be turning in his grave :d do you know what you're saying? it's like saying the inventor of the bicycle would be turning in his grave because the driver of a modern drive by wire car asked what's a velocipede? the inventor of the bicycle, and alan turing would be absolutely blown away by our progress. trying t the 1984 ad began with a black and white world of machines and metal, devoid of creativity, and ended with a living, colorful human smashing a screen with a giant hammer.this 2024 ad begins with a colorful depiction of human creativity and ends with a giant hammer crushing everything into a black and white metal machine.over the past 40 years, has apple lost its way? over the past 40 years, has apple lost its way? apple is like the quintessential baby boomer company. it started out all hippie cool in the 70s, promising to change the world with peace and love, and now it's become the monster it used to rage against. yet it remains absolutely adamant that it's not, and that it's values haven't changed at all. i'm sure that fate awaits me as well (a millennial) but seriously, the amount of cognitive dissonance among the boomers i know about how fucked the world got on their watch is astonishing. i watched the video. first, it seemed pretty clear that no musical instruments   nor any other 'sacred cow' creative implements   were actually harmed in the process of making it. second, where has everyone's sense of humour and playfulness gone? foaming at the mouth outrage at a harmless fantasy? that's getting within shouting distance of issuing death threats over cartoons of muhammad. even if a few material objects had been destroyed   so what? get some perspective! i do have one criticism of apple here   they backed down. tim cook, you faced down the dreaded headphone jack and killed it without flinching. why has your courage failed you in the face of a bit of humourless disgruntled ranting? or are you simply being selfless and defending those poor innocent profits? not to be confused with "prophets"... can you describe the playful part? cans of paint bursting, an angry bird getting crushed, and the squishy ball with a face almost escaping the press   they all seemed pretty playful to me. he look everybody, i found the one who doesn't understand symbolism. apple's message was clear in this ad. human creativity is obsolete. it was not an accident, and it was not unintentional. i understand symbolism, and i hate our corporatocracy as much as you appear to. i even indulge my paranoia, probably more than i should   but i don't think apple was trying to send a message about the end of human creativity. i think you're giving them too much credit. ... for an advert. https://images.app.goo.gl/uyhl... [app.goo.gl]kinda in the same spirit where are they in the second picture? usually you need to do that do get satan's message, but in this case, i don't know what. yeah there's a metaphor in there that can be taken negatively. there's also a metaphor in there that can be taken positively. guess what? it's also art. art makes no apologies. it offends and inspires. it looked great, it was funny, it made you think, and everyone is taking about it. excellent ad. the only metaphor i got out of it is, "you have to destroy the past to make way for the new. it's not good enough to just leave old stuff alone!" given how drm is being used to forcibly take things away from us so we have to buy the newest stuff whether we like it or not, i think this ad perfectly represents everything wrong with the current tech industry. somebody else mentioned that lg made a very similar ad years ago. so, i think this is just a smokeshow by apple to justify removing the series of ads because they realized that the idea was stolen from another company. it only marginally has to do with the backlash from creators, i think. so it's ok when bands like the who smash their instruments, but not when someone else does it? hell, john hiatt even wrote a song about smashing guitars. ah, but that's *art* like seeing a fully stocked and equipped kitchen crushed into a vending machine. at least it wasn't dylan mulvaney. why should we care what nonsense apple['s ad agency] puts in its ads? we need a legal policy that states that ai tools that were trained on "the sum of human knowledge" are themselves common property, and must be released as open source. iâ(tm)m a musician. thereâ(tm)s absolutely nothing wrong with this ad. nothing wrong with it that a reverse ad wouldn't fix. fade in, interior, recycling center. [center]worker[/center] so what are we doing with these ipads, again? [center]foreman[/center] we're crushing them and turning them into musical instruments for schoolchildren. [center]worker[/center] but don't they contain heavy metals that are poisonous? [center]foreman (shrugging)[/center] i uh nuh. [align=right]cut to:[/align] close up on the machine as it crushes a few hundred ipad and iphone devices. [align=right]slow d why do they crave to people without basic logic foundation operating on a premise "my interpretion of the ad is 'the' interpretation everyone should use"? yo *do* understand how ads are supposed to work, right? if a good chunk of the audience finds an advertisement off putting, that's bad advertisement. because the "my perception is the perception everyone must have" basically is their customer base. like...apple is really apologizing for this? kinda. it's a corporate apology use of "sorry". the exact quote is: “we missed the mark with this video, and we’re sorry." "i'm sorry" can mean a lot of different things. for some people it is about blame or responsibility. for some people it is about an apology. for some it is about regret without those elements. for some it is part of a request to diffuse responsibility for an abstract error, like "i'm sorry, i couldn't hear you clearly, will you repeat that?" for some it is about improving t > it was mid. move on. "it was mild. move on." tftfy the difference is that ok go is selling you their creativity, they're not trying to sell you that you are in some way becoming creative by something they give you. there may be more comments in this discussion. without javascript enabled, you might want to turn on classic discussion system in your preferences instead. nasa's proposed plasma rocket would get us to mars in 2 months chemicals in car interiors may cause cancer, and they're required by us law "it says he made us all to be just like him. so if we're dumb, then god is dumb, and maybe even a little ugly on the side."    frank zappa

supported by the tech giant’s sales of apps and services helped profit grow 7 percent from a year ago, even as the company contended with slumping sales in china. by tripp mickle redesigned interfaces, new features and artificial intelligence are meant to enhance the experience, even if the changes can be confusing at first. by j. d. biersdorfer new features in apple’s ios 18 and google’s android 15 can lock up apps with sensitive information and even hide them from view. by j. d. biersdorfer sales for the iphone maker were up 6 percent to to $94.93 billion. but a $14.4 billion tax bill cut profits that would have topped expectations. by tripp mickle apple is preparing to turn its airpods pro 2 into easy to use aids for people with mild to moderate hearing loss. by paula span google, microsoft and meta are shoving a.i. chatbots into our faces. sometimes, there’s a way out. by brian x. chen estas son las herramientas que te serán más útiles, y las que puedes omitir, cuando el software llegue a los dispositivos este mes. by brian x. chen the initial version of apple intelligence focuses on helping you with words and photos. prepare to be impressed and unnerved. by brian x. chen five years after leaving apple, the iphone designer is forging a new life in san francisco, one imaginative building at a time. by tripp mickle los nuevos dispositivos de motorola y google son la muestra de que las pantallas plegables van camino al auge y algunas son más baratas. by brian x. chen

text of this article may 15, 2024 press release apple announces new accessibility features, including eye tracking, music haptics, and vocal shortcuts cupertino, california apple today announced new accessibility features coming later this year, including eye tracking, a way for users with physical disabilities to control ipad or iphone with their eyes. additionally, music haptics will offer a new way for users who are deaf or hard of hearing to experience music using the taptic engine in iphone; vocal shortcuts will allow users to perform tasks by making a custom sound; vehicle motion cues can help reduce motion sickness when using iphone or ipad in a moving vehicle; and more accessibility features will come to visionos. these features combine the power of apple hardware and software, harnessing apple silicon, artificial intelligence, and machine learning to further apple’s decades long commitment to designing products for everyone. “we believe deeply in the transformative power of innovation to enrich lives,” said tim cook, apple’s ceo. “that’s why for nearly 40 years, apple has championed inclusive design by embedding accessibility at the core of our hardware and software. we’re continuously pushing the boundaries of technology, and these new features reflect our long standing commitment to delivering the best possible experience to all of our users.” “each year, we break new ground when it comes to accessibility,” said sarah herrlinger, apple’s senior director of global accessibility policy and initiatives. “these new features will make an impact in the lives of a wide range of users, providing new ways to communicate, control their devices, and move through the world.” eye tracking comes to ipad and iphone powered by artificial intelligence, eye tracking gives users a built in option for navigating ipad and iphone with just their eyes. designed for users with physical disabilities, eye tracking uses the front facing camera to set up and calibrate in seconds, and with on device machine learning, all data used to set up and control this feature is kept securely on device, and isn’t shared with apple. eye tracking works across ipados and ios apps, and doesn’t require additional hardware or accessories. with eye tracking, users can navigate through the elements of an app and use dwell control to activate each element, accessing additional functions such as physical buttons, swipes, and other gestures solely with their eyes. music haptics makes songs more accessible music haptics is a new way for users who are deaf or hard of hearing to experience music on iphone. with this accessibility feature turned on, the taptic engine in iphone plays taps, textures, and refined vibrations to the audio of the music. music haptics works across millions of songs in the apple music catalog, and will be available as an api for developers to make music more accessible in their apps. new features for a wide range of speech with vocal shortcuts, iphone and ipad users can assign custom utterances that siri can understand to launch shortcuts and complete complex tasks. listen for atypical speech, another new feature, gives users an option for enhancing speech recognition for a wider range of speech. listen for atypical speech uses on device machine learning to recognize user speech patterns. designed for users with acquired or progressive conditions that affect speech, such as cerebral palsy, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (als), or stroke, these features provide a new level of customization and control, building on features introduced in ios 17 for users who are nonspeaking or at risk of losing their ability to speak. “artificial intelligence has the potential to improve speech recognition for millions of people with atypical speech, so we are thrilled that apple is bringing these new accessibility features to consumers,” said mark hasegawa johnson, the speech accessibility project at the beckman institute for advanced science and technology at the university of illinois urbana champaign’s principal investigator. “the speech accessibility project was designed as a broad based, community supported effort to help companies and universities make speech recognition more robust and effective, and apple is among the accessibility advocates who made the speech accessibility project possible.” vehicle motion cues can help reduce motion sickness vehicle motion cues is a new experience for iphone and ipad that can help reduce motion sickness for passengers in moving vehicles. research shows that motion sickness is commonly caused by a sensory conflict between what a person sees and what they feel, which can prevent some users from comfortably using iphone or ipad while riding in a moving vehicle. with vehicle motion cues, animated dots on the edges of the screen represent changes in vehicle motion to help reduce sensory conflict without interfering with the main content. using sensors built into iphone and ipad, vehicle motion cues recognizes when a user is in a moving vehicle and responds accordingly. the feature can be set to show automatically on iphone, or can be turned on and off in control center. carplay gets voice control, more accessibility updates accessibility features coming to carplay include voice control, color filters, and sound recognition. with voice control, users can navigate carplay and control apps with just their voice. with sound recognition, drivers or passengers who are deaf or hard of hearing can turn on alerts to be notified of car horns and sirens. for users who are colorblind, color filters make the carplay interface visually easier to use, with additional visual accessibility features including bold text. accessibility features coming to visionos this year, accessibility features coming to visionos will include systemwide live captions to help everyone   including users who are deaf or hard of hearing   follow along with spoken dialogue in live conversations and in audio from apps. with live captions for facetime in visionos, more users can easily enjoy the unique experience of connecting and collaborating using their persona. apple vision pro will add the capability to move captions using the window bar during apple immersive video, as well as support for additional made for iphone hearing devices and cochlear hearing processors. updates for vision accessibility will include the addition of reduce transparency, smart invert, and dim flashing lights for users who have low vision, or those who want to avoid bright lights and frequent flashing. these features join the dozens of accessibility features already available in apple vision pro, which offers a flexible input system and an intuitive interface designed with a wide range of users in mind. features such as voiceover, zoom, and color filters can also provide users who are blind or have low vision access to spatial computing, while features such as guided access can support users with cognitive disabilities. users can control vision pro with any combination of their eyes, hands, or voice, with accessibility features including switch control, sound actions, and dwell control that can also help those with physical disabilities. “apple vision pro is without a doubt the most accessible technology i’ve ever used,” said ryan hudson peralta, a detroit based product designer, accessibility consultant, and cofounder of equal accessibility llc. “as someone born without hands and unable to walk, i know the world was not designed with me in mind, so it’s been incredible to see that visionos just works. it’s a testament to the power and importance of accessible and inclusive design.” additional updates celebrate global accessibility awareness day with apple this week, apple is introducing new features, curated collections, and more in celebration of global accessibility awareness day: press contacts apple media helpline media.help@apple.com images in this article apple revolutionized personal technology with the introduction of the macintosh in 1984. today, apple leads the world in innovation with iphone, ipad, mac, airpods, apple watch, and apple vision pro. apple’s six software platforms   ios, ipados, macos, watchos, visionos, and tvos   provide seamless experiences across all apple devices and empower people with breakthrough services including the app store, apple music, apple pay, icloud, and apple tv+. apple’s more than 150,000 employees are dedicated to making the best products on earth and to leaving the world better than we found it. apple media helpline media.help@apple.com the latest news and updates, direct from apple. read more

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supported by screenland tech companies are running low on new experiences to offer us. a new ad for the ipad contains revealing hints of where they could go next. by peter c. baker if you haven’t yet seen the new and already infamous apple ad   the one in which a giant mechanical compactor violently crushes a bunch of musical instruments, books, sculptures, art supplies and toys, turning them into an ipad pro   then apple’s executives are probably happy. they’ve seen the headlines: “apple ipad ad is bad”; “why the stink of that bad, bad ipad ad won’t go away”; “apple’s new ipad ad is a neat metaphor for the end of the world.” they’ve seen the mocking posts on social media. they’re aware that hugh grant has weighed in. (“the destruction of the human experience,” he wrote on x. “courtesy of silicon valley.”) in response, apple has done what it hardly ever does: it apologized. “we missed the mark with this video, and we’re sorry,” one of its vice presidents said. apple won’t air the ad on tv. it wants to move on, and it wants you to do the same. but i can’t quite move on, and i’m sure i’m not alone. the ad   titled “crush!”    is simply too good. i don’t mean that it’s clever, wise or uplifting. i mean that, like many apple products, it was clearly made with exacting, no expenses spared attention to detail. the slow motion, high resolution focus on each object’s destruction   the way we watch up close as they bend before breaking, as if resisting the inevitable   has a visceral effect that’s hard to shake. the electronics company lg made essentially the same ad in 2008, as an advertisement for its renoir camera phone, but it lacked that apple touch. unfortunately for apple, “crush!” achieves every ad maker’s goal: it imprints in the mind’s eye. just as transfixing is the real world back story it implies. picture it: a team of experienced, well paid professionals spent months refining a strategy.