Yeah; right up until the end it looked to me like the opening for some dystopian movie. The main difference is that in that case the end would a cutaway to some Evil Authority Figure watching as they preside over the destruction of Unapproved Cultural Artifacts.
I get what they were aiming for, but they didn’t pull it off well.
At almost any other time this would not have occurred to anyone and it would’ve been just another needlessly expensive ad, but right at this time, when AI is disrupting the creative industries directly, when arts jobs are being undervalued or eliminated entirely from key industries like film, TV, and video games, this couldn’t be more tone deaf.
Read the room, Apple.
Also, just to make things worse, it’s a direct rip-off from an LG ad from 2008.
You’re not alone. I pretty much agree with this. Well said.
…as if Apple has a problem ripping off ads.
LG has the better message too. All these features in a phone.
I’d love to have seen the keyboard and ported woofers deploy from that phone. (jk)
And to think of all the apps you could have with 8 Megs of RAM! My Nokia from 1999 was still going strong and AFAIK it’s the only phone with a deserved reputation for indestructibility.
Yeah, I thought “We’re squeezing all this stuff in” was obvious and sorta heard about complaints but so many “news” articles these days are about six Twitter randos that I paid no attention. If not for the people posting here, I would have assumed outrage was limited to said six tweets scraped to make it look like a story was happening.
Yeah, I think it was intended to cause some level of outrage. My reasoning is that the issue was widespread enough for Apple to apologize. But they also didn’t pull the ad. This says they wish to capitalize on that outrage. If a company really regrets an offended reaction to an ad, it gets pulled.
Sure, it’s possible they didn’t realize there would be this reaction, but then ran with it when it happened. But it seems unlikely to me that Apple would run an ad without knowing how people would react. Their ads are all about creating emotional reactions to their products.
The ad itself does have that dystopian vibe, I’d say. Particularly once it starts showing objects seemingly reacting to being crushed, trying to prevent it. One thing even seems to actually move entirely on its own.
But I’m also not sure I would notice all of that had I not been primed to do so. My dad, who looked over my shoulder to see it, didn’t seem to have a bad reaction. He just seemed to be curious why it was happening, and then satisfied when he saw what they were advertising.
Still, the varied reactions suggest they wanted controversy, especially since they left it up after their apology. They want people to be curious enough to go watch it. Every version of their new iPads gets less acknowledgement. I can’t say I noticed when the M3 one came out.
I’m sure they will. But they ain’t getting my money.
All their stuff is ridiculously overpriced.
And there are hardly any use cases of their products where I haven’t been able to find equivalent functionality much cheaper elsewhere.
The one temporary exception may have been in the early days of digital sound production where the MAC software definitely had the edge for a while. But Windows versions have definitely caught up now.
Yeah, this. I still don’t really get the “controversy”.
The idea that they are “crushing the arts” is kind of ridiculous. They are crushing a bunch of tools that artists use to make art. Because the device they are selling is a very thin tool that can be used in place of all those other tools.
It’s not like they fed artists into a woodchipper to make a smoothie for Siri.
(Now, that would be an edgy commercial…)
The ad isn’t even about AI, is it? Like, if they showed iPad devour an art studio before making its own art, that would be one thing. But this ad is pitching an iPad with more processing power that’s thinner - that’s it.
Eta: this is probably hardly relevant, but does anyone remember the Pugeot ad where a guy in India makes an elephant sit on the hood of his car to try and make it look more like a Pugeot? (Actually, did that ad ever play in the US? There are very few Pugeot here no?
My gf (in advertising) agrees. She recently did an entire ad campaign for a local company pro bono because she knew it would be a fun but mildly controversial project. She warned the company exactly what response was anticipated, and they gave her the go ahead.
Her predictions were predictive! There was some controversy and the agency was mildly concerned, but the campaign got people talking and the company signed on for more (which they are paying for).
Sorta. The new M4 chip that this iPad uses is primarily different in that it has more AI capabilities than the previous model.
And they do not only crush tools to make art. They crush a lot of art as well. It stars with instruments and paints, but it crosses over once it starts crushing ceramics. That’s also when it starts having the items seem more like they’re alive (with one thing actually moving on its own) and not wanting to be crushed.
But crushing the tools is exactly the problem. You still need the tools to make art normally–unless you use AI. It’s not like you play instruments on the iPad, usually. You mix them on the iPad. But the sounds come from real instruments.
But, regardless, right now the arts are all worried about AI and tech taking over. Doing something that crushes the arts and seems to celebrate the destruction still comes off badly to me. Especially once it’s clear that these items don’t want to be crushed.
Though that is probably a bigger deal to the Japanese audience that hates it because of a belief that objects that are used a lot will carry some spirit of life in them. Making the objects seem alive and unwilling really seems to have disgusted them. And it doesn’t help that much of the art is cute faces.
They did pull it. They canceled their plan to run it as a TV spot which would have been a much better way to offend people than just leaving it up on YouTube. That tells us offending wasn’t the objective.
That you didn’t notice when the M3 iPad came out probably has got less to do with any alleged waning acknowledgement and more to do with the fact that there was never an M3 iPad.
It was produced by Apple’s in-house creative, so I think it’s more likely they were a little too close to the subject and didn’t see the forrest for the trees.
But either way, it isn’t Apple’s MO (particularly under Tim Cook) to purposefully offend, let alone in an ad that was meant to run nationally on television for a tentpole product. Even their smallest moves get roundly scrutinized anyway, so what’s the point of switching to an any-press-is-good-press campaign?
Glad you got that off your chest.
Sure, but if it was that important to their sales pitch here you’d think they’d have mentioned AI. AI wasn’t part of the ad, as I said, even if it is tangentially related to the final product.
YMMV but most of the things it crushed that weren’t tools were representative of apps. The “ceramics” were an Angry Bird sculpture, emojis, etc. They are meant to represent things you can do with the iPad, not works of art.
Sure, but there is still an artist using these new tools in that scenario, they are just new tools. Like an iPad.
…unless you are using Garage Band, which has been on MacOS for over 20 years and on iOS since 2011.
Wait, so are you saying that this add is offensive because Japanese people view this as insulting, or because artists do?
Or, you know, anything.
This is the company whose stance on innovation has always been “it doesn’t count until Apple does it.”
I found about this commercial from Twitter. Just watched it again.
My reaction: Eeeeeaaauuuugghhhhrrrrrrggg. 
Guys…look…I get what they were getting at. A state-of-the-art modern day device which has the capability of numerous older artistic devices. And has a large number of vibrant colors (that’s what the paint was for, right?). But the execution was completely off. An appropriate method would’ve been to show all the objects being combined via some magical process, or drawn into the IPad, not freaking DESTROYED. Beautiful works of art being smashed, splintered, bent, warped, mangled, splattered, smeared…can you not see why a lot of viewers would have a problem with that? The only kind of product which should be advertised with beautiful objects being destroyed would be something to prevent or mollify such destruction, such as insurance or home security.
On a related note, I really don’t like the attitude that anything that doesn’t rise to the level of a hate crime is perfectly fine. I know the age of Trump has caused some people’s standards to go in the toilet, but I still believe in things like optics and decency and public relations and thinking before acting. Apple is a gigantic corporation; they should have an entire department for this sort of thing.
Seriously, what the hell. 
(P.S.: Can anyone confirm whether this latest iPad doesn’t either develop a massive battery problem or die for no reason after a few months like the three iPads I bought did? And if so, if that makes it worth whatever obscene price Apple is charging for it?)
The screen does. The iPad Pro itself comes in your choice of drab silver or drab black. I think the use of paint in the press was just because it made it look more visceral (which probably didn’t help).
I think the reviews are embargoed until right before the release date, so by Wednesday there might be some info on real-world battery life. I mean, it won’t be much since the reviewers will only have had it in their hands for barely a week. Or are you just venting?
What did Apple do when you contacted them about a dead iPad battery that was only a few months old?
Agreed. Somehow that information passed me by. The news video I watched was all premised on the fact they weren’t pulling it. Either that changed, or they had misinformation.
Yeah, if they pulled it, then I 100% agree that it was not intentional. Keeping it online for the curious while pulling out the most broad use is consistent with not realizing how people would react. Going to that much trouble knowing they’d have to pull it seems highly unlikely. At most they expected some minimal buzz, not enough to have to cancel things.
It just seems bizarre they would miscalculate that badly. The videos is them destroying these things. Not smooshing them into something. Not having them come back out. And it’s not like the whole hydraulic press meme is still current.
The underlying idea of smooshing all those things into the device could make sense–if they didn’t then lovingly focus on the destruction like a hydraulic press video would.
Both are given as reasons that people find them offensive. Artists because of the AI thing, and just the idea of destroying art. But it’s particularly highly disliked in Japan, and this animism is proposed as why.
I don’t think you realize how much existential dread there is in all creative fields right now because of AI. Anything digital and connected with the arts is seen through that filter by a lot of people.
That said, I get you not knowing that. But you’d think Apple would be aware–or, at least, the department handling advertising. It’s their job to know the general zeitgeist.
Yeah, I’ve been burning with resentment about it for ages now. 
I can’t really see why a lot of viewers would have such a problem with it. It’s not really “beautiful works of art”. Highlighted was a clay bust that I assume was made for the commercial, a bunch of paint, a piano, trumpet, guitar, cameras, fake arcade game, ceramic Angry Birds things, some rubber emoji balls and some blank-cover books. Less obvious were some video screens, turntable, speakers and other consumer goods. It’s not as though they were smashing actual art. It’s one piece of “art” (the fake bust; I’m not going to count Angry Birds shit as art) and a bunch of art/media tools.
At its most obvious, it’s just saying “We squeezed all this cool stuff into this device”. At its most callus, it’s saying “Haha, we smashed this stuff because this tool replaces those tools” but that doesn’t really make sense for some of it – We smashed Angry Birds into an iPad so you don’t have to actually launch ceramic birds in your backyard any more?