They said the quiet part out loud
May 9, 2024 9:49 AM Subscribe

Dear Tim Cook: Be a Decent Human Being and Delete this Revolting Apple Ad

Since it doesn't seem to be in the article, here's the ad in question—it's actually called "Crush!". CW: It's pretty disturbing.

posted by signal (214 comments total) 21 users marked this as a favorite

Why complain about truth in advertising? It’s not like stopping the ad is going to make Apple less contemptuous of their customers.
posted by rikschell at 10:05 AM on May 9 [7 favorites]

That is almost certainly 100% CGI. Nothing was actually crushed.

You can tell yourself that the items on that metal press are "only stuff "and their eradication doesn't mean anything. But if you do, it means you've never had a violent person destroy something you loved as a way of warning you "You're next," which in turn means you are a person who lacks imaginative empathy and should've kept your mouth shut.

I bet this person is real fun at parties.
posted by grumpybear69 at 10:06 AM on May 9 [28 favorites]

I think the reaction to this ad is really interesting. I think it's a misfire for a couple of reasons, but it's a resounding success in terms of generating discussion and getting the iPad into the public consciousness after an extended period of ho-hum releases.

I'm not personally disturbed by it, although I can see why it would be for some people. But "revolting," "revolting", or as I saw in one weirdly phrased headline, "wanton," seems like a bit of an overreaction to me. I think you could certainly read the ad as disregarding the value of creative endeavors, but I can't really convince myself that's where the strong emotional reaction is coming from. I doubt most viewers are making the mental leap from the imagery to something like "I'm shocked that Apple is embracing the use of AI and thereby devaluing the work of creatives in every field and depriving artists of livelihoods. The camera lens breaking is proof that Tim Cook wants to burn down the Louvre!"

Of course, the fact that I'm even posting this comment means the ad is working, so there's that.
posted by wakannai at 10:07 AM on May 9 [8 favorites]

yeah...I don't like the ad, on a pretty visceral level but "revolting" had me expecting something a lot more...revolting?
posted by supermedusa at 10:10 AM on May 9 [13 favorites]

I can only assume that everyone who gets worked up by this ad has a psychotic break every time someone comes up to them and says "I got yer nose!". Seeing those frogs say "Bud", "Wise", "Er" in that commercial back in the 90s must have put them in the hospital for weeks.
posted by Back At It Again At Krispy Kreme at 10:11 AM on May 9 [29 favorites]

Apple is genuinely repugnant, but the ad is just an ad.
posted by The Manwich Horror at 10:13 AM on May 9 [6 favorites]

apparently people still watch ads

this concerns me. somebody should do something.
posted by philip-random at 10:13 AM on May 9 [47 favorites]

It seems pretty clear that the original intention for the ad was "we compressed all of these art, music, and games into this one tiny device!" I think it's fair to say that the execution ends up suggesting a level of destruction that undercuts the intended meaning, but pretending that that's not the intended meaning is silly.
posted by vibratory manner of working at 10:14 AM on May 9 [47 favorites]

I kinda see what they were going for... a more charitable reading of the ad would be that the creative items are being compacted and combined rather than destroyed, in the same sense that no one needs to carry around a walkman, a camera, or a flashlight anymore, making creativity more portable and accessible than ever. OTOH there's no way image-obsessed Apple didn't know this ad would spawn a thousand angry think-pieces in this age of AI, so I have to assume they considered that a feature and not a bug.
posted by nanny's striped stocking at 10:14 AM on May 9 [5 favorites]

this sort of reminds me of how people used to laugh at folks like Ray Bradbury for being a Luddite only later to find out that the Luddite philosophy was more about how the vast increase in surplus value was going to be exploited by capitalists, retaining all of it for themselves, and none of it being shared out to workers

AI-scraping seems to be much the same - probably not the vast increase in production that, say, an industrial mill has over manual labor for textiles but definitely an increase and shortening in time required for producing some content, some development, some art - and all of the profits generated going right back to shareholders with workers being paid a bare margin more

I think if I cared about, say, the value of labor and workers I might find an ad like this that 'celebrates' the compression of the value that an individual worker produces into some kind of technological signifier 'revolting' but I always did have strong opinions about capitalists and the hoarding of wealth
posted by paimapi at 10:15 AM on May 9 [44 favorites]

My nibblings age 6-13 pretty much only play on their iPads. (Or Nintendo switch). No other toys. Limited outdoor play besides some organized sports. Very distopian

As much as my houses is a mess with kids art supplies, hot wheels, wooden trains and books, I am very happy my kids don’t have tablets
posted by CostcoCultist at 10:16 AM on May 9 [9 favorites]

The Will Oremus explainer in WaPo gets at it, I think. And there’s definitely a fascist thread of worshiping mechanization at the expense of slowness - it goes right back to the heart of Futurism.
posted by Going To Maine at 10:16 AM on May 9 [10 favorites]

I appreciate this ad in that it feels like the most potent visual metaphor for what the tech industry/late-stage capitalism is doing to all of us.
posted by overglow at 10:17 AM on May 9 [12 favorites]

honestly, i'm not *that* upset or bothered by the ad (though i think it's a bad one), but i do find it interesting:

that 40-year-old ad with the big brother motif was very much about opposing conformity, what with bright colors destroying a gray world

this ad, being the inverse, sort of underscores what's happened in the past two decades: the gray conformity crushes color, but also apple is now, in some ways, the conformist option: that whole debate about green vs. blue bubbles and who's better; android users giving people the ick in dating; to use ios, ipados, or macos is to do something the apple way, in a walled garden within bounds for approved customization...
posted by i used to be someone else at 10:17 AM on May 9 [31 favorites]

apple is now, in some ways, the conformist option

That was always the goal. Apple is first and foremost a lifestyle brand.
posted by grumpybear69 at 10:20 AM on May 9 [13 favorites]

The add is kind of confusing. It seems like it wants to say that all of these creative instruments/tools are packed into the new iPad. There's definitely a trope of putting a bunch of stuff into some sort of compactor to represent that all these features/abilities are being miniaturized into the small package that emerges, but uh, typically that trope doesn't go into any great detail as to how the stuff is being compacted. The wanton destruction of everything feels like someone really badly screwed up the intended metaphor, if it is intention is to say "look at all the things we've included in this new device".

That said, it's not revolting ad. Someone at the ad agency's kid showed them the Hydraulic Press Channel and they decided this was the best thing ever.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 10:20 AM on May 9 [7 favorites]

The ad in reverse is lovely.
posted by pernoctalian at 10:21 AM on May 9 [23 favorites]

This generally seems to fall in the same bucket as describing the Barbie movie as “subversive”, when it was made in partnership with Mattel and sold a lot of Barbies.
posted by Going To Maine at 10:21 AM on May 9 [20 favorites]

The great thing about large hydraulic presses is that they are very slow, and their function is made quickly apparent. So even if you've never seen one before, the dramatic pan about 10 seconds in should be enough to decide not to watch the wanton destruction. So it's very much a choice to stick with the video after the trumpet crumples upon contact with the press.

Many objects were crushed, and the world is cruel to those who are sensitive to needless waste and wanton destruction. Like, I can appreciate an Ok Go video but part of me always marvels at the amount of energy and time it would take to execute. But that's hardly a Pulitzer Prize take, its just reactionary.

Of course there are other ways to approach this sort of thing. Take this argument about how implausible the trash compactor on the Death Star would be. A nine point argument that includes serious points about the benefit of anchored stability in having only one moving wall.

The criticism of the Death Star trash machine works because it frames the argument in terms of what a utility, even in a fictional universe, should be expected to actually provide. In contrast, I love living in the future where iPad can incorporate this much utility. I just used my old one to make a short movie and it was so pleasant.
posted by zenon at 10:28 AM on May 9

I have issues with unnecessary destruction in general, and issues in particular with mechanized destruction, so I was viscerally repulsed by the ad.

It would definitely sway me against Apple if I were not totally dedicated to Apple as the sole provider of electronics I mostly trust and find to comply in some sense with practical and effective UX guidelines.

Apple marketing does throw balls sometimes, and sometimes they bean the batter. I'm sure some of you recall the "you can never be too thin" backlash.
posted by seanmpuckett at 10:28 AM on May 9 [6 favorites]

I thought this ad was repulsive, and I'm pretty surprised to see it defended as 'just an ad' here. I understand people take it as a point of pride to demonstrate their imperviousness to advertising. But if you're watching or commentating with an opinion on an ad, then hey guess what...

Anyway, looking forward to Bezos lighting a match to a pile of books because with the Amazon Kindle, it's all in the smoke or whatever.
posted by UN at 10:31 AM on May 9 [26 favorites]

Wow. Nothing disturbing about it. It's just an ad.

Even at my ever-advancing age, sometimes I am genuinely shocked at how some people can over-react and find fault/flaw in something so benign.
posted by davidmsc at 10:34 AM on May 9 [4 favorites]

The hydraulic press will take on a new meaning when buyers realize the thinnest iPad ever is also the most fragile, easily bent, easily shattered, iPad ever.
posted by mittens at 10:35 AM on May 9 [3 favorites]

I got an ad for “For All Mankind” in the article, watched it, and was utterly confused until I clicked back here.

Then I watched the actual ad, and was all: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Now I’m annoyed that I watched two ads.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯
posted by HVACDC_Bag at 10:38 AM on May 9 [10 favorites]

That is almost certainly 100% CGI. Nothing was actually crushed.

Yeah, that's kind of not the point?
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 10:39 AM on May 9 [16 favorites]

I think the post title here pretty much nails it.

I found this take pretty much spot on:

"I am reminded of a horrific scene in Vernor Vinge's Rainbow's End, where a university cheaped out in digitizing their entire library by running books through a woodchipper into a funnel lined with cameras, and algorithmically reassembling the shredded books."
posted by ursus_comiter at 10:40 AM on May 9 [16 favorites]

Watch Apple Trash Compact Human Culture was a short piece by Charlie Warzel posted yesterday in The Atlantic that I feel covers the relevant distaste about the ad.

Here's a demonstration of actual objects and tools of creativity being compressed (and viscerally destroyed in the process) into a digital simulacrum that's now for sale. Why learn the trumpet (or hire a musician) when you can have Garage Band fart out a digital trumpet for as long as you need (or have a machine-learning tool write a song for you instead)? Apple's advertising teams are incredibly insightful and know exactly how this sort of thing will play at this moment in time, and they're all for it.

It's a special breed of hubris that practically begs for a righteous takedown. But, then again, maybe that's the point of all this after all.
posted by neuracnu at 10:43 AM on May 9 [16 favorites]

~~SILENCED~~ SMOOSHED ALL MY LIFE.

That there's some misunderstanding of the ad's intentions means it's a miss on some level, but anyone who's seen videos of hydraulic presses in action knows that the result is (usually) a very compressed thing, like a wafer-thin iPad.
posted by emelenjr at 10:46 AM on May 9 [1 favorite]

Yeah, that's kind of not the point?

It mean, it kind of is? People make CGI videos of all sorts of stuff getting destroyed and nobody bats an eye. But when Kurt Russell smashed a real Martin guitar on the set of The Hateful Eight people were rightfully upset, because an actual beautiful thing in the world was no longer.

I get that this is a bad commercial which paints Apple in a bad light. But it is not horrifying because, in the most literal sense of the term, nothing of value was lost, unless maybe people are mourning their idealized idea of a benevolent, creator-focused Apple that, let's be honest, never really existed.

It is also kind of a pastoralist RETVRN POV that capital-c Creativity and capital-a Art are somehow intrinsically linked to things like pianos and film cameras. People can make art with anything, anywhere, at any time, with any tool. It is not somehow lesser to use an iPad Pro to make a song or a drawing or a movie vs. a guitar and Otari 24-track or a 16mm film camera.

Why learn the trumpet (or hire a musician) when you can have Garage Band fart out a digital trumpet for as long as you need (or have a machine-learning tool write a song for you instead)?

I'll just leave this here:

https://www.engadget.com/2015-12-04-casio-and-the-sleng-teng-riddim.html
posted by grumpybear69 at 10:49 AM on May 9 [6 favorites]

CGI or real, it hurt to see musical instruments and camera lenses, etc., destroyed. Apple, as a corporation, is sitting on vast mountains of cash. They are Peak Capitalism at its most efficient and ruthless. They play on consumers' psyches with great skill. Successful corporations in 2024 are pretty much universally evil, and they are an apex corporation.

Men in tech always talk about the thinness of the devices. I have an iPhone because Reasons. I don't care about the thinness. I like that it's well-constructed and runs an app I have to have. I'd like it to have more ports for attaching stuff, a sturdy opening so I can attach a loop or my keys. I'd like it to be a bright color so I can easily find it (I wear women's clothes, which seldom have adequate pockets). Iphones don't get very loud, but I am hearing impaired and need it to be loud so I can find it, as it controls my hearing aids. I hate that Tech companies ignore real needs to satisfy what are basically dick size wars.
posted by theora55 at 10:51 AM on May 9 [26 favorites]

Gosh, this seems overblown.

When I think about the amount of digital creation that has been enabled by Apple's tools -- from the "desktop publishing revolution" to albums composed, mixed, and performed entirely on a MacBook, to entire films made on an iPhone -- and how much this creation has been praised over the last thirty years, the responses here don't make sense to me.
posted by wenestvedt at 10:51 AM on May 9 [8 favorites]

The ad in reverse is lovely

It really is, and it gets at what they’re saying in a much less destruction-fetish way.

The way it is set up in the original is that all of these objects are slowly and grotesquely destroyed before being put into the iPad. So the iPad contains a mangled trumpet, a shattered piano, etc.

I have to admit that watching these objects that I have great nostalgia for being mangled was a turn off. I won’t go as far as offensive, but it’s certainly was not a way to drag me into a pleasant happy feeling about what was being advertised.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 10:52 AM on May 9 [19 favorites]

I think the reaction comes because the arts are under particular attack right now, from multiple angles, but especially from generative "AI" companies seeking to destroy entire professions. From someone seeing their livelihood under that kind of technological threat, seeing a computer company gleefully destroying a huge pile of creative implements can seem like a personal assault, especially when those people are a market that Apple has long courted.
posted by JHarris at 10:54 AM on May 9 [34 favorites]

> Yeah, that's kind of not the point?

It mean, it kind of is? People make CGI videos of all sorts of stuff getting destroyed and nobody bats an eye. But when Kurt Russell smashed a real Martin guitar on the set of The Hateful Eight people were rightfully upset, because an actual beautiful thin in the world was no longer.

Apples (so to speak) and oranges.

The Hateful Eight incident was an accidental smashing - yes, this actual guitar got smashed by Kurt Russel and people were upset about the smashing of an actual item. But the message being conveyed by the film was just that "this is a fictional story in which a cowboy smashes this one single guitar because he's a bad dude" (I'm assuming).

This ad may have only been "smashing" things with CGI, but the message being communicated by the ad is "we don't need any of these things in real life, so fuck 'em, just get our iPod!"

It's not the actual physical items being smashed people are upset about. This isn't like the Ikea lamp ad. People are upset by the message being communicated by the ad.

I get that this is a bad commercial which paints Apple in a bad light. But it is not horrifying because, in the most literal sense of the term, nothing of value was lost, unless maybe people are mourning their idealized idea of a benevolent, creator-focused Apple that, let's be honest, never really existed.

And that is why the title of this post is "They said the quiet part out loud", no?
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 10:54 AM on May 9 [21 favorites]

Definitely an ad-verse reaction
posted by GenjiandProust at 10:54 AM on May 9 [9 favorites]

Everything From This 1991 Radio Shack Ad You Can Now Do With Your Phone
posted by torokunai at 10:54 AM on May 9 [4 favorites]

Another dumb hot take designed to translate outrage into clicks. All those creative tools and games beings compressed into a single ultra thin gadget — so what?
posted by interogative mood at 10:56 AM on May 9 [5 favorites]

My favorite comment in this thread is the one where this ad is described as “fascist”. Just perfect.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 10:56 AM on May 9 [2 favorites]

No sir.

I don't like it!
posted by mazola at 10:58 AM on May 9 [1 favorite]

yeah...I don't like the ad, on a pretty visceral level but "revolting" had me expecting something a lot more...revolting?

they gave you sonny and cher, didn't they?
posted by pyramid termite at 10:58 AM on May 9 [1 favorite]

>where this ad is described as “fascist”

I took that as referring to the fetishization of traditional stuff over modern technology.
posted by torokunai at 11:00 AM on May 9 [1 favorite]

This is the fail state of crouton petting
posted by not just everyday big moggies at 11:00 AM on May 9 [8 favorites]

>>That is almost certainly 100% CGI. Nothing was actually crushed.

>Yeah, that's kind of not the point?

It mean, it kind of is?

No. There is not a massive blowback because a single television or trumpet or piano was mangled. Real or imagined, no one had any attachment to that particular television or that particular instrument. People are upset because of what they represent.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 11:01 AM on May 9 [11 favorites]

so i think there's a sort of space in between "it's just an ad" and "this is a crime against humanity and art"

advertising absolutely does have an influence on how people approach things--that's the entire point. it also reflects biases and beliefs common to the age, which is why when people say there's nothing disturbing about apple's ad i think aren't quite hitting the point. looking back on ad campaigns over the past century, it's hard to justify images of women being degraded (as rugs, as kidnapping victims, as dead bodies, as helpmeets) as "it's just an ad"; it's hard to ignore the influence of subaru's lesbian coding, the marlboro man's influence on toxic american masculinity, or dove's real beauty campaigns on commercializing and mainstreaming the body positivity movement. even the modern conception of santa claus as a jolly, husky, bearded man was strongly influenced by coca-cola.

on the flip side, i'm not sure that this is really as much of a crime against humanity or art, because... it's advertising. it's already a bit of a creative dead end. a lot can be said about the priors of the creatives and marketers who ideated and approved and generated the imagery for the ad, but at most it's just an indictment of how mindless a lot of advertising can be: they mushed the somewhat popular hydraulic press genre with a specific message that they wanted, and came up with this--and now the reshares and the discourse and the attention is letting them hit all their kpis, and if they get enough sentiment measurements they'll issue a small statement. or not.

i think it's a bad ad. i think that the message, which is that the ipad is thinner than ever, has been lost in the anger/backlash around the subtext, especially in an era where artists of all sorts are existing in a state of ever worsening precarity as commerical prospects, llms/genai, appropriation, and cheapening of labor makes it more difficult to do what many find to be a calling. from a creative perspective i think it's also kind of weak: if the idea was that so much creativity can come out of a small device, the reverse, which has been linked, is a lot more effective. ultimately, though, i think the ad will be forgotten in short order, and it won't impact ipad sales either way: the entire market is shrinking, and ipads will remain at the top of a shrinking pile.

i won't be purchasing one in the near term, because i am of the even smaller group who prefers the ipad mini form factor, so.
posted by i used to be someone else at 11:01 AM on May 9 [8 favorites]

That is almost certainly 100% CGI. Nothing was actually crushed.

It's probably real, on the basis that it would be much cheaper and faster to rent a crusher and buy some stuff to crush.
posted by BungaDunga at 11:10 AM on May 9 [9 favorites]

The Hateful Eight incident was an accidental smashing - yes, this actual guitar got smashed by Kurt Russel and people were upset about the smashing of an actual item. But the message being conveyed by the film was just that "this is a fictional story in which a cowboy smashes this one single guitar because he's a bad dude" (I'm assuming).

This ad may have only been "smashing" things with CGI, but the message being communicated by the ad is "we don't need any of these things in real life, so fuck 'em, just get our iPod!"

It's not the actual physical items being smashed people are upset about. This isn't like the Ikea lamp ad. People are upset by the message being communicated by the ad.

Well, call me old fashioned, but I care more about real things getting destroyed than ads about fake things getting smooshed and turned into an iPad. This ad will be forgotten in short order and the well-heeled people who can afford a new iPad Pro will buy it and use it to check their email and hate on Android users.

The right thing to do with an ad like this, if you truly think it is harmful, is to not write about it at all, because the hatorade just boosts the signal.
posted by grumpybear69 at 11:10 AM on May 9

I don't think it's harmful! I love that Apple took the mask off, albeit without realizing that's what they were doing.
posted by ursus_comiter at 11:12 AM on May 9 [3 favorites]

Well, call me old fashioned, but I care more about real things getting destroyed than ads about fake things getting smooshed and turned into an iPad.

so i think this is an extremely dismissive way to approach the argument and the discourse; by all rights, if we care more about real things getting destroyed than anything fake, there's no reason to watch or read any fiction?

because if it's just about cg, it's okay that up and wall-e didn't make you cry but it had some emotional resonance for others.

and this ad, while it might not do anything for you, it did trigger visceral reactions for many.
posted by i used to be someone else at 11:13 AM on May 9 [6 favorites]

> be much cheaper

"Ok, Apple iPad Crush video start, take #34..."
posted by torokunai at 11:18 AM on May 9 [4 favorites]

In an age of AI, depicting your device as literally created from the destroyed carcasses of real artistic tools is maybe more of a self-own than Apple intended, but based on the hyperbolic overstatement in the linked piece, I expected the ad to depict like, actual people being actually maimed or something.

I know several writers and actors, some of whom were part of that big-ass series of strikes that happened last summer. One of the things that the actors were striking about was the right to prevent a studio from digitally scanning you and using your image, in perpetuity, whenever and however they wanted. If they'd lost that strike, you very well have seen an ad depict people being maimed by such a machine - but it would have been CGI people, of course. We all would have understood it was CGI on some level.

But that's not even the point either. The point is that my friends who maybe had one days' pay as an extra in a jury scene in a Law and Order: SVU episode about 3 years ago would probably have had their own digital clones being smooshed in this ad - but they wouldn't have ever been paid for it. Because it was "just" the CGI version. And they wouldn't be getting paid when Android tried to do something similar as a clapback this winter. Or 3 years from now in another ad. Or....

The people who are upset about this are reacting to the "we don't need actual people, we can do it all with technology" message.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 11:21 AM on May 9 [20 favorites]

Are you somehow under the impression that I didn't understand that? Because I feel like you just explained the first half of my one sentence post to me in great detail.
posted by jacquilynne at 11:29 AM on May 9 [4 favorites]

I like it - it's well done and it highlights all the things an iPad "contains".

On the other hand, I started reading the article and then just stopped when I realized he's a Neo-Luddite.

How do you spot a Neo-Luddite? He's the one yelling at you and waving an onion.
posted by JustSayNoDawg at 11:29 AM on May 9 [2 favorites]

I want to personally acknowledge all the people here who went out of their way to point out that the ad mentioned in the article is an ad.
Until that point, I thought it was a bicycle.
Thanks for clarifying this.
posted by signal at 11:30 AM on May 9 [9 favorites]

I feel like the last image of compression, where the emoji ball is squeezed and its eyes pop out until they explode along with the rest of the head, basically encapsulates the ad. It does not feel like a human-friendly moment.

I'm not sure what exactly the ad makes me want to do, but "buy an iPad" is not a strong contender.
posted by nickmark at 11:30 AM on May 9 [14 favorites]

"we don't need actual people, we can do it all with technology" message

We’re there people in the ad?
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 11:30 AM on May 9

Somehow this makes me think of the Venn diagram of nerdiness that was circulating a few years back. In one zone, the passionate, technically accomplished Geek whose greatest vulnerability is their sincere love for and investment in their vocation. In another, the cold, mercenary Dweeb who has the chops but not the passion, and feels a kind of sneering contempt for the Geek. Finally, you have the earnest, fan-boyish Dork, an a-critical consumer of content and consumer tech who shrinks from from expertise and aesthetic judgement of any kind. How we feel about this ad, or AI, or whatever, might correlate to where we locate ourselves on this diagram.
posted by ducky l'orange at 11:36 AM on May 9 [1 favorite]

I thought this ad was repulsive, and I'm pretty surprised to see it defended as 'just an ad' here.

. . . we’re posting from our iPhones.
posted by betweenthebars at 11:39 AM on May 9 [5 favorites]

I remember when the first iPad came out. I really really wanted one. I even stopped a couple wandering around a tourist attraction near my house and asked them if I could just take a look at the one they had.

I really really wanted one.

Simultaneously there was a "meme" going around of snotty kids larking about destroying their brand new unused iPads, usually with bricks or golf clubs or something. Just petty vandalism of their own stuff, the implication being that they could easily replace it.

This reminds me of that, in reverse.

Meanwhile: revenge
posted by chavenet at 11:41 AM on May 9 [1 favorite]

We’re there people in the ad?

It’s not really a shock to me that some people hate the ad because, like, people love pianos and guitars, and because the crushing is depicted with some violence, but this is actually an important point, the intended symbolism of smashing a bunch of creative tools down into an iPad is clearly not the same as smashing creative people and is in fact very consistent with Apple’s longtime marketing vision.
posted by atoxyl at 11:43 AM on May 9 [1 favorite]

How do you spot a Neo-Luddite? He's the one yelling at you and waving an onion.

Consider my onion waved.

Destroying systems and machines that concentrate wealth at the top and destroy any work with decent standard of living sounds like a good plan to me.

Or when they are built by virtual slaves out of materials with a serious environmental impact.
posted by The Manwich Horror at 11:44 AM on May 9 [17 favorites]

I feel like the last image of compression, where the emoji ball is squeezed and its eyes pop out until they explode along with the rest of the head, basically encapsulates the ad. It does not feel like a human-friendly moment.

So much this.
posted by overglow at 11:45 AM on May 9 [7 favorites]

. . we’re posting from our iPhones.

I've worked in tech my entire adult life and have zero qualms about using and creating the new things — and yet I do not appreciate or support the message on display here. Crush arts and culture, no thanks?
posted by UN at 11:45 AM on May 9 [10 favorites]

Just simply: For all of Apple's faults, the people working there by and large do care about creativity and music and The Arts and everything else in those realms. People will find a reason to be upset about anything, and choosing to misinterpret this ad is just the latest in a long string of outrage du jour. (I mean, the tagline is literally how it's the thinnest iPad ever...)

> that whole debate about green vs. blue bubbles and who's better; android users giving people the ick in dating
> well-heeled people who can afford a new iPad Pro will buy it and use it to...hate on Android users

Who is actually doing this? There are near-constant breathless headlines about Green Vs Blue and I don't get it. I, as a longtime Apple devotee, am not like this; nobody I know, many of whom are either Apple users or at least own an iPhone, is like this; I don't even hear anecdotes about a friend-ofa-friend-ofa-friend where this is a situation.

Teenagers? Sure, I 100% believe that. Teenagers will go out of their way to find something to ostracize a person for. But the majority of adults? I don't buy it.

to use ios, ipados, or macos is to do something the apple way, in a walled garden within bounds for approved customization...

iOS or iPadOS, yes; those are relatively limited in customization and other "power user" scenarios, though that is (very slowly) changing--witness e.g. Shortcuts, despite its limitations. macOS still runs on top of Unix and can still be tuned nearly to the heart's content. If you're downloading exclusively through the Mac App Store, no, but then you're basically right back where you would be on iOS or iPadOS, so that should not surprise anyone who's paying attention. And the world of Mac software is vast, and the vast majority of it exists exclusively outside the world of the App Store.
posted by tubedogg at 11:46 AM on May 9 [2 favorites]

METAFILTER: sort of space in between "it's just an ad" and "this is a crime against humanity and art"
posted by philip-random at 11:46 AM on May 9 [12 favorites]

Release the onions!
posted by ursus_comiter at 11:47 AM on May 9 [3 favorites]

I wonder how much of the thought process for this was "everyone loves Hydraulic Press Channel".
posted by egypturnash at 11:47 AM on May 9 [9 favorites]

The Manwich Horror: How do you spot a Neo-Luddite? He's the one yelling at you and waving an onion.

Historical Luddites were 100% right. I'm guessing Neo-Luddites will also be considered right in the future, if there's anybody around to do the considering.
posted by signal at 11:47 AM on May 9 [21 favorites]

My favorite comment in this thread is the one where this ad is described as “fascist”. Just perfect.

Oh hey. I wouldn’t say the ad is “fascist”, per se. But it worships the idea of a machine replacing older technologies. This has definite notes of Italian Futurism, which is an art movement that was -for its founders- explicitly fascist.
posted by Going To Maine at 11:47 AM on May 9 [23 favorites]

Lenovo does go to extremes in the ad, but I think it's a play on the product name.
posted by Iris Gambol at 11:47 AM on May 9

If the ad had shown a bunch of older apple products being crushed and replaced with a new apple product I would have been irked, as it would be a whitewash for manufactured obsolescence.

This is just showing old technology being replaced by new technology. To find that disturbing is somewhat knee-jerk conservative.
posted by CynicalKnight at 11:48 AM on May 9 [1 favorite]

I got the first iPad as a gift 15 years ago and I’ve used an iPad basically every day since. I’m typing this on an iPad.

I get people’s annoyance with the feeling that Apple doesn’t cater to creative pros anymore. I’m a photographer but I’ve never felt like Apple products have stood in my way when it comes to photography. Personally I think Adobe is doing more harm in that space.

But a lot of the complaints that people are making about this ad feels like…not acknowledging that ship has sailed a long time ago.
posted by girlmightlive at 11:51 AM on May 9 [2 favorites]

It’s not really a shock to me that some people hate the ad because, like, people love pianos and guitars, and because the crushing is depicted with some violence, but this is actually an important point, the intended symbolism of smashing a bunch of creative tools down into an iPad is clearly not the same as smashing creative people and is in fact very consistent with Apple’s longtime marketing vision.

What do you think is the intended symbolism of the moment when the emoji ball, which of course resembles a human head, is crushed in such a way that first the eyes pop out?

Maybe it's supposed to be funny? But it doesn't land to me, or to many people, as funny. It lands as deeply sinister.
posted by overglow at 11:53 AM on May 9 [6 favorites]

I'm pretty sure that whoever wrote and directed this laughed out loud at the trash compactor scene in Toy Story 3— not at the scene itself but at all the losers who thought it was distressing.
"They're just toys! They're not real toys even, it's just CGI!"
posted by signal at 11:56 AM on May 9 [11 favorites]

I hated the ad. Mostly for the same hostile-to-material-reality-and-the-human-cultures-that-developed-in-it odors that are being discussed here.

One angle that I think is under-discussed is that Apple's corporate attitudes are about two decades behind the reality that it—and by extension the people who run it—is among the largest, richest, most powerful on the planet.

This seems like an ad campaign from the same place as iPod-era, "I'm a Mac" ad campaigns. I can imagine a two page magazine ad with a record collection going into a wood chipper on the left panel and an iPod on the right. Whimsical, irreverent.

It just doesn't work the same way when your company is more valuable than every living artist, every record label and every musician's catalog, every orchestra, every movie studio, every press, every newspaper, every art supply manufacturer, every instrument maker, and in some of those categories all of them combined.
posted by mtthwkrl at 11:57 AM on May 9 [19 favorites]

The way some react to a commentator having an opinion on an advertisement is how I react to someone having an opinion on me having an opinion on an advertisement.

Also known as: it's just an opinion, relax.
posted by UN at 11:58 AM on May 9 [1 favorite]

I would bet a lot of money that this ad was designed to provoke outrage. I would even wager that Apple put a few "ew what a gross ad" comments out there to start the fire burning. Because you know what? Everyone is talking about this ad, and everyone now knows that there is a new iPad out.
posted by grumpybear69 at 11:59 AM on May 9 [3 favorites]

I get people’s annoyance with the feeling that Apple doesn’t cater to creative pros anymore.

It seems very clear to me what this ad is aiming for and it’s squarely in the tradition of Apple selling a certain fantasy to creative hobbyists. It just makes a couple of odd decisions, getting in on the hydraulic press thing years late and going for a slightly-too-real kind of comedy violence instead of a purely upbeat “look, it’s all at your fingertips!”
posted by atoxyl at 12:00 PM on May 9

That ad made me want to buy a hydraulic press.
posted by mazola at 12:00 PM on May 9 [20 favorites]

This is just showing old technology being replaced by new technology. To find that disturbing is somewhat knee-jerk conservative.

Being told that you’d better jump on a bandwagon isn’t that great either, especially if you’re engaged in a bit of conservatism in defense of something you love.
posted by Going To Maine at 12:01 PM on May 9 [2 favorites]

On the other hand, I started reading the article and then just stopped when I realized he's a Neo-Luddite.

To the extent this is supposed to suggest that only luddites found the ad upsetting, I would point out that the reaction has been nearly universal and has been mentioned in publications like AdWeek and Forbes as a "rare misstep" by Apple. For a distinctly non-luddite take on why, here's the current top story at The Verge describing the "visceral revulsion many people felt" at the ad:

Apple Doesn't Understand Why You Use Technology
posted by The Bellman at 12:01 PM on May 9 [12 favorites]

Yeah, the people who make these ads know what they’re doing. And they know that a lot of their core consumers are spooked about AI-driven obsolescence. They’re selling the disease and the cure.

If this attitude gets labeled “conservative,” I say… so what? Some things are actually worth conserving.
posted by ducky l'orange at 12:06 PM on May 9 [5 favorites]

I'm here for the ad hominem from people who weren't bothered by the ad directed at people who were.
posted by stevil at 12:07 PM on May 9 [11 favorites]

Just to follow up my own comment (sorry), from the Verge, not exactly luddites, and generally very Apple positive:

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.

Astoundingly, this is meant to sell a product. “Buy the thing that’s destroying everything you love,” says Apple.

That pretty much sums it up for me personally.
posted by The Bellman at 12:07 PM on May 9 [29 favorites]

In conclusion, I'm not inclined to buy a new ipad.
posted by gottabefunky at 12:08 PM on May 9 [2 favorites]

I get the message the ad is trying to convey -- that all of these creative media are compressed into the iPad Pro -- but it really reminds me of a hollow version of the combination of hype and horror I felt as a child the first time I saw the video for Close (to the Edit) by Art of Noise.
posted by The Great Big Mulp at 12:12 PM on May 9 [1 favorite]

This is just showing old technology being replaced by new technology. To find that disturbing is somewhat knee-jerk conservative.

If it is conservative to be immediately repulsed by corporate branding and the replacement of durable tools with planned obsolensence and unsustainable manufacturing, I'd say we need more of it.
posted by The Manwich Horror at 12:19 PM on May 9 [11 favorites]

I'm here for the ad hominem

I'm here for the ad neanderthals.
posted by biffa at 12:20 PM on May 9 [2 favorites]

The trumpet I learned to play was old when I got it, at least two music students in; and then it sat in attics for a while and then went to another student (and I think another since then).
posted by clew at 12:26 PM on May 9 [3 favorites]

You mean like this? yt

Kinda, yeah!
posted by Pope Guilty at 12:27 PM on May 9 [2 favorites]

The trumpet I learned to play was old when I got it, at least two music students in; and then it sat in attics for a while and then went to another student (and I think another since then).

You've reminded me of the film that won the Best Short Form Documentary at the Oscars this year - it's about a musical instrument repair shop, fixing up instruments for kids in Los Angeles' public school system.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 12:28 PM on May 9 [4 favorites]

My completely unsatisfying and contentious hot take is that I'm mildly irked by both "sides" in this unnecessarily binary debate.

On the one hand, I saw this ad as part of the iPad event and immediately thought it was weird and off-putting in a lot of different ways. The fact that it's crushing a bunch of richly-textured, fondly-shaped, vividly-colored objects, all of which bring people lots of joy, with a brutal-looking grey slab just feels... I mean, it's playful, but it absolutely makes Apple feel like the Big Brother from their 1984 ads. And it's a wild misstep to me, because Apple's iPad ads have traditionally emphasized color and texture and all that jazz, because that's how you get people to feel like a slab of aluminum and glass is warm, organic, and friendly. Like... who on earth art-directed that without picking up on how squicked-out a lot of people would be?

On the other hand, thinking that a company's ads say anything meaningful about that company is dumb whether your takeaway is positive or negative. Monsanto makes loads of warm, friendly ads about how much they love farmers, but they're still Monsanto. Politicians make warm, friendly ads about how they're warm-blooded non-lizards. Advertising is fundamentally a kind of rhetoric: the only subtext of any ad is that a company would like you to know that they exist, which doesn't tell you much of anything at all.

Personally, I still feel like Apple is far and away the Big Tech company that I like the most, both in terms of "minimally gross" and in terms of "actually trying to make good things." The iPad has long been Apple's most Apple-y product, for better and for worse; my iPad mini is my favorite digital notebook and it makes for an absolutely killer manga reader, and I would trade my laptop for an iPad Pro in a heartbeat if its software wasn't so frustratingly limited, because its hardware and software are both just an absolute joy to use, right up until the part where there are things I flat-out can't do on them, like any part of my profession whatsoever.

It looks like next month will see Apple reveal its take on what "AI" should be, and I'm cautiously optimistic that they'll have found an ethical and non-shitty way to implement it. They described some of their new Logic Pro features as "AI" yesterday, but none of it was LLM-related: it was things like tools for generating session instrumentals, which they've done in the past in a fairly tasteful and ethical way. (You can argue that all digital music generation is unethical, but that's a hard position to defend; their existing "session drummer," meanwhile, is less "let the computer generate drums for you" and more "let us try to offer interfaces that help you articulate the sound you're going for, so we can create various patterns and effects without your needing to know how to program this drum noise note-for-note." Imo, it's a solid balance between making creation easier while putting the control and the vision in the individual's hands.)

So far, they've seemed to take pretty good stands on building technology that works in ethical ways. I'm really hoping that they keep that up, because Apple execs come off as people who are aware of ethical concerns in tech—unlike every Facebook and Google and Microsoft exec I've ever heard speak—and they seem to give a shit about keeping their products non-dystopian. And I hate that that's the high watermark in Big Tech, not least of which because Apple is a fallible and flawed company that has plenty of issues of its own, but they're the one company of that size that isn't actively and wantonly trying to shit the bed, and it's not even a close competition.

IMO the real takeaway here is that Tim Cook has somehow successfully managed to make Apple a blander and less spicy company than it was before he took the reins. Steve Jobs used to actively and publicly pick fights with other companies, he once got in a flamewar with a journalist over whether iPhones should ban porn, and every other iPhone release would have some new feature that was gross, tacky, and completely impossible to avoid. So far Cook's big controversies have been "U2 album," "weird commercial," and "big goggles," which is a level of non-contentiousness that wouldn't have been possible to imagine back in the 00s.
posted by Tom Hanks Cannot Be Trusted at 12:30 PM on May 9 [12 favorites]

I am not a preservationist. I'm happy to watch upright pianos lit on fire and shoved down a flight of stairs. Melt down your trumpets and saxophones and make them into plumbing. Slice up your old paintings and stitch them into tablecloths. You can get a sharper, faster, better picture from a five-year-old cell phone than you can from high quality 20th-century film cameras. The destruction of the old-- that's not what's stirring the negative reaction.

What's stirring the negative reaction is the things that aren't in the hydraulic press. They didn't crush the ads. The gamification. The walled garden. The endless scroll. The Pavlovian chimes of the endless notifications. The message from your boss while you're trying to paint. The upsell popup to add new sounds to your piano. And the watching, all the watching.

They took a huge pile of tools that were truly under your control, smashed them down, and replaced them with something that isn't. Tools that could be used individually without distraction, replaced with something that's nothing but.

(And if you've got kids, you've probably already seen where this goes. )
posted by phooky at 12:31 PM on May 9 [19 favorites]

The role of planned obsolescence, of capture, is part a big of the anger here.

The lords of tech keep insisting that it is both out-of-touch/ fuddy-duddy and snobby to prefer any means of production other than theirs, since their tools democratize and decentralize and scale and you can learn how to use them on YouTube instead of investing 10,000 hours and all that other stuff, and if all that was 100% true then fine, but it’s not.

When you deskill an art form to the point where you’re just dragging and dropping dots on a timeline or describing what you want to a bot, when all that software is proprietary and subscription based-and could be wiped away with a keystroke, you are a sharecropper on someone else’s content farm. The endgame is a situation where nobody gets to make any money or enjoy any autonomy but the owners of the platform.
posted by ducky l'orange at 12:42 PM on May 9 [20 favorites]

I'm a lifelong horror movie fan, and this ad creeped me out.

Maybe it's spending years playing a musical instrument (cello), or learning to take photos with a real camera now, or spending a lot of my life caring for books. Maybe it was the sheer glee of the ad, reveling in the destruction.

I remember an ad from circa 1999? which had a pre-9-11 airport security line. A guy puts a bunch of stuff on the conveyor belt: a typewriter, a boom box, a drawing pad, etc. They all go into the scanner, and out the other side emerges... a laptop. (HP? Levono? can't remember) It was a better vision, something like a magic trick without the destruction.
posted by doctornemo at 12:58 PM on May 9 [10 favorites]

Glee is just the word. The cruelty is the point.
posted by ducky l'orange at 1:02 PM on May 9 [5 favorites]

So I can crush my grand piano and just get an iPad. Good to know.
posted by hypnogogue at 1:04 PM on May 9 [3 favorites]

You mean like this? yt

Kinda, yeah!

Funny because I thought a large part of the disconnect was somehow drifting from the concept of squeeze or compress all these items/tools/instruments into this insanely thin tablet to the idea to compact or crush all these items/tools/instruments - and once the idea of a intrinsically menacing hydraulic press took roots the whole concept took on an entirely different and cringe tone and vibe. And that's when I remembered the squeezing the tomatoes into the bottle and went looking to see if I was misremembering it - thanks to YouTube it took me all of 20 seconds to find it.

I've been in literally hundreds of creative / brainstorm sessions in which the same kind of shift takes place and sometimes it starts with just riffing here and there and next thing you know someone takes an idea in a direction that's imaginative but directly at odds with the original concept - and they don't even see it.
posted by thecincinnatikid at 1:05 PM on May 9 [7 favorites]

What’s fascinating to me is the amount of people who shrug and say “it’s just an advert”. Like they’re living in a world where entertainment has no deeper meaning than the thing it depicts. I’m not offering a judgement on the advert - I am judging everybody who only engages on a surface level with media though.
posted by The River Ivel at 1:09 PM on May 9 [6 favorites]

Continuing to do my part to never ever buy Apple products and avoid using them wherever possible. Had a brief stint with the Apple ][ playing Oregon Trail back in the day before I knew better. Thankfully, since then, they've done everything they possible could to make their hardware and software as unappealing as they could. Hoping everyone else notices that sooner or later.
posted by GoblinHoney at 1:14 PM on May 9 [6 favorites]

Judging people for not engaging with an advertisement on a deep level?
posted by grumpybear69 at 1:15 PM on May 9 [6 favorites]

My completely unsatisfying and contentious hot take is that I'm mildly irked by both "sides" in this unnecessarily binary debate

I agree with a lot of this take. I get what bugs people about the ad and think it’s a miscalculation but the other side touches on notions that are also pretty easy to critique. The ad crushes a bunch of stuff. It’s stuff that people enjoy and care about which is not actually replaceable by a iPad, but art is not ultimately about fetishizing the stuff. I like pianos and guitars myself but if it becomes team expensive piano vs. team cheap softsynth I don’t have to think too hard about which side I’m on.
posted by atoxyl at 1:22 PM on May 9 [4 favorites]

All I get from this ad is a big fat f-off to anyone who creates without the almighty iPad (and I say that as a loyal Apple user). I can’t fathom how crushing instruments, toys, paint cans, etc. until they explode is just clever ad-speak for the utility of the iPad.

The ad reminds me of the behemoth truck ads that depict them climbing up mountains or driving into waterfalls. Nature, creativity… it’s all obsolescent compared to the latest whiz bang product (at least until the newer whiz bang product comes out next year).

To me, there's a lot more worth in pen and ink drawing, a good camera or a guitar with a fine tone… than any technology that tries to replace them.
posted by jabo at 1:24 PM on May 9 [2 favorites]

I would bet a lot of money that this ad was designed to provoke outrage.

That would be incredibly out of character with Apple’s advertising for the last 40 years.

In fact, I think that may be part of the energy here. Apple has put out consistently gentle and/or uplifting ads over the years, and this is a disappointing misstep for them.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 1:27 PM on May 9 [5 favorites]

They took a huge pile of tools that were truly under your control, smashed them down, and replaced them with something that isn't. Tools that could be used individually without distraction, replaced with something that's nothing but...(And if you've got kids, you've probably already seen where this goes. )

Having made sure all the horses are out, they scramble to shut the barn door before putting on their VR goggles again and resuming (Call of Duty, Polly Penguin Goes to Argentina, or whatever).

Please do not mention Kurt Russell's destruction of that priceless Martin guitar again. I know he did not do it intentionally, but I still find it disturbing. Okay, the movie sucked, too.
posted by mule98J at 1:29 PM on May 9 [1 favorite]

Judging people for not engaging with an advertisement on a deep level?

I’m mostly judging people who find it important to take time out of their day to show disrespect to people who are considering the deeper meaning of things.

If you don’t care about something that’s fine. But why people think it’s important to cast aspersions on people who do care I have no idea.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 1:31 PM on May 9 [12 favorites]

This is one of those ads that if it'd been make 20+ years ago would have had a great making-of documentary about how they made it happen, and how they only had one take with the press to crush all this stuff and make sure it was captured perfectly on camera. But now it's all computer-special-effects so the making of documentary would be less dramatic (though I do wonder how much time would have been spent creating the objects and making sure they exploded 'just right' when crushed.)
posted by eddieddieddie at 1:34 PM on May 9

I’m not sure anyone has posted this yet, but the same ad from 2008.

Now I really am disappointed in Apple.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 1:36 PM on May 9 [12 favorites]

Apple has apologized.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 1:38 PM on May 9 [3 favorites]

Good.
posted by ducky l'orange at 1:40 PM on May 9 [1 favorite]

LG phone ad from 2008 (BBH London)
posted by 1970s Antihero at 1:41 PM on May 9 [1 favorite]

the same ad from 2008

It's fun to imagine how Steve Jobs would have reacted upon learning his company had cribbed an ad from—of all companies—LG!
posted by Atom Eyes at 1:47 PM on May 9 [12 favorites]

they've done everything they possible could to make their hardware and software as unappealing as they could

Now you're just making shit up.
posted by grubi at 1:50 PM on May 9 [6 favorites]

9 to 5 Mac: Apple apologizes for controversial iPad Pro ad, scraps plans for TV campaign.
posted by gentlyepigrams at 2:01 PM on May 9 [1 favorite]

the joyful zip and zing of just-stretched new strings on a well set-up fretboard;
the creamy nuanced line laid down by a gouache-loaded brush on stretched paper;
the reassuring click of setting a camera lens's aperture ring;
the light metallic pressure on the lips from a trumpet mouthpiece as you count in the bars to begin your part in an orchestral piece ...

Apple can make none of these, so they chose to show them destroyed.
posted by scruss at 2:04 PM on May 9 [8 favorites]

Hoping everyone else notices that sooner or later.

Lol did a MacBook take you in a backroom and beat you up or something? It's one thing to say you don't like Apple in general, or that you prefer PC products, although doing so by saying Apple has gone out of its way to make its hardware and "as unappealing as they could" is a weird way to get there, as Apple hardware and software is often widely praised as being among the best-looking in their respective markets, and for the longest time the competition was beige plastic towers and black plastic laptops that were, uh, not appealing to basically anybody. But the fact Microsoft went so far out of its way to basically photocopy Apple (and Huawei is still doing so, and Samsung to a somewhat lesser extent) should tell you something about how far in the minority you are with that viewpoint.

would point out that the reaction has been nearly universal

A bunch of "news" articles and celeb tweets does not mean the reaction is universal or even nearly so, as evidenced by this thread alone.

Apple has apologized.

Pretty surprising.
posted by tubedogg at 2:08 PM on May 9 [1 favorite]

Wow, those Apple executives sure are Luddites! How dare they stand in the way of the relentless crush of progress sweeping away all these obsolete technologies! What's their next product gonna be, an onion to wave around pointlessly?
posted by overglow at 2:10 PM on May 9 [3 favorites]

I'm glad $2.83 trillion underdog companies still have some brave people to come to their defense against the woke mob.
posted by signal at 2:11 PM on May 9 [6 favorites]

Judging people for not engaging with an advertisement on a deep level?

If adverts didn’t work on a deeper level, they wouldn’t be effective. A perfume advert sells us a fiction that using that brand will make you sexy. Car advertising tell you that you’ll be strong and independent. All advertising uses stereotypes and your desire to be better - to fit into what you consider an attractive stereotype - to get you to spend money.

It’s the fact that people just act like films, media, and entertainment are just… the thing they show you, like there hasn’t been centuries of analysis, like media literacy isn’t a thing, like they can’t tell when somebody is lying to them in person, like they never heard of an allegory. And it’s smart people doing this, people who are otherwise good at thinking, who have this whole vacant area that they’ve just ceded to anybody with a camera.
posted by The River Ivel at 2:12 PM on May 9 [7 favorites]

Looks like an earlier ad from another company.
posted by doctornemo at 2:12 PM on May 9 [3 favorites]

The ad in reverse is lovely.

This should be the new ad. Backwards soundtrack included. Just swap the logo to the other end.
posted by mazola at 2:19 PM on May 9 [3 favorites]

If adverts didn’t work on a deeper level, they wouldn’t be effective. A perfume advert sells us a fiction that using that brand will make you sexy. Car advertising tell you that you’ll be strong and independent. All advertising uses stereotypes and your desire to be better - to fit into what you consider an attractive stereotype - to get you to spend money.

Most of them don't work. Advertising is getting less effective, precisely because of the media literacy you mention. It is a choice, to engage critically with a piece of media, and when it comes to advertisements, the choice is more often than not "no thanks!" What advertising does more than anything else is raise brand awareness, so that when you are faced with a choice on what to buy, that brand will seem the most familiar. Even so, I must have seen that "HEAD ON: APPLY DIRECTLY TO THE FOREHEAD" ad like 1000 times and never thought "huh, I should put HeadOn on my forehead" because ibuprofen is just so effective.

And more to the point, ads are explicitly designed to hock wares, which means the value of looking for "deeper meaining" or whatever is generally just not there, because it's simply a short film designed to make you buy something. Sometimes there is absurdist humor to be found - like in mid-aught's Jack-In-The-Box commercials, or more recent Trolli spots, and in many cases truly fine artwork and craftsmanship. Occasionally there is a positive social message that the ad is spreading. But it is always, as in never not, subservient to the goal of getting you to buy something. So the subtext and allegory and whatever might be there in the commercial is often lost because the people half-watching don't really give a shit.

Films and TV shows, on the other hand, are more likely to be engaged in because the choice has been made to engage and you are not being actively sold to. So it does not follow that someone who says "it's just an ad, man" is then going to dismiss all media as "just some moving pictures, man."
posted by grumpybear69 at 2:44 PM on May 9 [4 favorites]

The ad in reverse is lovely.

Introducing the new Elppa dApi Orp
posted by chavenet at 2:47 PM on May 9 [2 favorites]

This is a disturbing, shocking ad, not just because of what it shows but because of its seeming obliviousness to the subtext that it turns into text, as well as the message it sends to every artist alive: the tech industry will crush you, destroy you; suddenly, violently, all at once.

Is AI cribbing from The Onion now?
posted by lock robster at 2:49 PM on May 9 [1 favorite]

They could've done a cute CGI thing where things stretch and squash in a fun, amusing-to-look-at way, showed them being all squished down through the plane of the iPad screen into the iPad. Look how much fits in here! Look at all these things we put in here!

Yes, and they could've showed the things, instead of being destroyed, being changed for the better. Like the trumpet could've morphed in some quintessentially trumpet way into the trumpet it can only become when apple frees it of the prison of its brass body and endows it with artificial and therefore superior intelligence. The piano could have become the ur piano. Blah blah etc. etc., for all the stuff.

I don't think it's harmful! I love that Apple took the mask off, albeit without realizing that's what they were doing.
Totally. I kind of love it. Had they paid homage to the stuff like the Heinz commercial, the ad would have been infuriating for an entirely different reason, but for some reason they instead elected to break everything and rub your face in the wreckage.

The part I don't get at all: everything they broke was the yummiest, glossiest, most brand new, candy-colored, begging-for-your-touch fetish version of the thing. To me that's the weirdest part. Why show beautiful new notebooks in candy colors that everybody with a notebook yen is going to slobber over and want to grab and carve up with their perfectly sharpened exact-right-graphite-content luscious black soft pencil or their fountain pen that they fill themselves with ink they make from gallberries from their own oak stand blah blah blah? The piano is all perfect and beautiful, the record is even a sexy colorful vinyl. It's everything everybody covets. And none of the lustable-afterable stuff goes IN the device; it gets smashed to bits and then the device just... appears? Like, "We broke all this cool stuff for the lols. Also, buy this totally unrelated thing, now."

I suppose they're going for "that shit you loved is gonna be dead to you because our shit is so much better." Well, maybe, except you plagiarized the whole idea from an LG ad from before the Obama presidency, so I'm thinking... nah?"
posted by Don Pepino at 3:09 PM on May 9 [7 favorites]

The Hydraulic Press Channel was the best concept coming out of the brainstorming session.

The runner up was the proposal to base the ad on Will It Blend?
posted by kandinski at 3:15 PM on May 9 [3 favorites]

Can’t say I care for it. Conceptually I guess it’s not so different from one of those “see all these objects? Your phone does that now” images that have gone around, but it’s tone is weirdly grim and destructive.

And we’re at a time when basically nobody creative is going to make any money again and huge corporations are going to make all of it, which for sure makes it bad timing.

The vibes are off.
posted by Artw at 3:19 PM on May 9 [5 favorites]

I'm in the "don't get the uproar" crowd, as the first time I saw the ad I read it as no more than "look at everything that you can do with the new iPad" which is a pretty standard sort of message. The fact that so many people read it as violent indicates to me that clearly Apple missed the mark, which is a pretty rare thing for them vis a vis advertising. Just days before the iPad ad, they released this fantastic one for Precision Finding on May the Fourth (I highly recommend watching, if only to try and catch all of the easter eggs).

On the other hand, I find the continued vitriol against people who like and prefer Apple products bewildering. Yes, they are the largest technology company in the world, and one of the largest corporations full stop. But they are also the only one without a strong profit incentive to harvest and share your information, the absolutely best for accessibility features in all of their products, and have a longstanding and extremely strong stance towards user data privacy, especially when compared to literally anyone else in technology.
posted by griffey at 3:26 PM on May 9 [8 favorites]

Work faster. Be thinner. Own and treasure nothing except what we say you should.

It's a fuck of a message.
posted by Hogshead at 3:33 PM on May 9 [10 favorites]

Daring Fireball: Is the ‘Crush’ Backlash a Dead Canary in the Apple Brand Coal Mine?

Would this exact same commercial have evoked the same collective response in 2010? I’m going to say no, it would not have. What about in 2018? I’m going to say ... probably not? Something has changed. Part of it is that our culture has changed. I don’t think many people 10 or 15 years ago would have seen dissonance between Apple’s oft-professed sustainability ideals and a commercial celebrating the destruction of artistic tools and objects. But part too is that Apple’s position in our culture has changed. They’re no longer, and never again will be, the upstart. They’re The Man now. They’re part of the firmament of our entire society, not just the tech world. When you’re on top, everyone guns for you.

I think the bigger reason is "A.I." has made creatives suspicious of technology companies. Ironically, Apple hasn't done much in that field (Yet. They're reportedly working on getting their chips used on the back end.)
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 3:55 PM on May 9 [5 favorites]

I can’t say I’d care for the LG ad either TBH.
posted by Artw at 3:56 PM on May 9 [3 favorites]

On reflection, this ad is fully in tune with Tim Cook's vision of Apple products, which is to sell shiny little things that rapidly become obsolete and are not upgradeable, and even if they are, Apple will encourage you to trade them them for new shinies and shred the old, still perfectly good, ones. (archive link: https://archive.is/sWIwu)

I've been using and supporting Apple products since the 90s and have been watching Apple ever so slowly pull the rug out from under their customers bit by bit. All you folks lauding Apple's awesome ecosystem have not been Apple sysadmins for the past quarter century seeing a great ecosystem get developed, then abandoned. Go try accessing the logs from an up to date OS X system and get back to me.
posted by ursus_comiter at 4:07 PM on May 9 [8 favorites]

I can see how some people would be negatively triggered by this ad, but fortunately I'm too hip, savvy and handsome to be so easily manipulated
posted by Ray Walston, Luck Dragon at 4:11 PM on May 9 [15 favorites]

I remember a far more horrific ad - one where they actually compress LIVING CREATURES into a flat piece of electronics.
posted by Small Dollar at 5:40 PM on May 9 [5 favorites]

Imagine how useful that iPad's gonna be when it's as old as the piano they crushed.
posted by straight at 5:51 PM on May 9 [10 favorites]

The problem with the "it's all being compressed into the iPad!" read is that it's not. They could've done a cute CGI thing where things stretch and squash in a fun, amusing-to-look-at way, showed them being all squished down through the plane of the iPad screen into the iPad. Look how much fits in here! Look at all these things we put in here!

Instead they showed a bunch of things being destroyed. Not compressed into a useful, portable form, but destroyed.

Yes, this is what I found offputting about the ad (maybe not revolting or terrifying, but surely offputting). Especially because they did a little anthromorphizing of some of the objects, and they look scared and sad, not like they're ascending into a higher plane or anything.
posted by praemunire at 6:08 PM on May 9 [13 favorites]

> rapidly become obsolete

This is a thing that people like to say but it's a weird claim because Apple products receive software updates and have a useful lifespan which is generally much longer than comparable products from other companies. You can make the case that the entire industry is bad here, but it's weird to single Apple out about it when they're trying harder to make products that last than most of their competitors.
posted by vibratory manner of working at 6:11 PM on May 9 [2 favorites]

I was fine with crushing the emojis. I want more of that. A lot more.
posted by JustSayNoDawg at 6:44 PM on May 9

In an age of AI, depicting your device as literally created from the destroyed carcasses of real artistic tools

David Hockney and his iPad would like a word.
posted by hoyland at 6:56 PM on May 9 [2 favorites]

I liked this concept better when it was a Yo Mama joke.
posted by L.P. Hatecraft at 7:28 PM on May 9

This is a thing that people like to say but it's a weird claim because Apple products receive software updates and have a useful lifespan which is generally much longer than comparable products from other companies...it's weird to single Apple out about it when they're trying harder to make products that last than most of their competitors.

Apple's the one inviting us to notice that about every single thing getting destroyed in that video has a longer useful lifespan than that fragile sliver of aluminum, silicon, and rare earth metals they imply can replace them.
posted by straight at 10:10 PM on May 9 [4 favorites]

The thing that irritates me most about this, by far, has nothing to do with the ad itself (which as someone else noted is just riffing off a very popular YouTube series), and more to do with someone like Matt Zoller Seitz taking time out from his no doubt busy schedule to scold Tim Cook for doing something like this to draw attention to his product... thereby ensuring that Cook's efforts are successful. Good job, Matt. Roger Ebert sure would be proud.
posted by Halloween Jack at 10:16 PM on May 9 [1 favorite]

The ad in reverse is a better ad, I think.

It says, the iPad contains all these wonderful tools and this wonderful art, plus is thin and light. Rather than the iPad represents the destruction of all these wonderful tools into something generic.
posted by Erinaceus europaeus at 10:21 PM on May 9 [3 favorites]

They're reportedly working on getting their chips used on the back end

Their main focus seems to be “on device” ML applications. Their chips have included specialized coprocessors for this for a while but so far what they’ve done with them has been pretty unobtrusive stuff like (I assume) the image segmentation and OCR built into the iPhone camera app.
posted by atoxyl at 10:37 PM on May 9 [2 favorites]

There's a Nobel Prize waiting for the person who develops a process for converting outrage into electricity.
posted by fairmettle at 10:42 PM on May 9 [1 favorite]

... so it's still a few years off before they can crush our souls into an iPad?
posted by grokus at 10:54 PM on May 9 [1 favorite]

It says, the iPad contains all these wonderful tools and this wonderful art, plus is thin and light. Rather than the iPad represents the destruction of all these wonderful tools into something generic.

I'm sad for all that lost potential, hinted at when one watches the ad in reverse. I miss the energy Apple had when the iPad came out, when it was a kind of blank slate from which a lot of new creative work of all kinds could have been made. For the most part, it has been locked down to become like every other tablet that copied it, just a generic piece of glass for checking email, browsing the web, and buying stuff. Maybe one day its potential will be unleashed.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 11:18 PM on May 9 [1 favorite]

I thought it was a bad ad - I wanted nearly every one of those objects more than I want a thinner ipad.

The ad reminds me that I should spend my money on something that uplifts me and gives me joy.

As for Apple products - unrepairable, undocumented OS and instructions because it is "intuitive" - a few steps removed from the black tablet at the beginning of 2001: A Space Odyssey and I don't throw rocks at it, but I sure don't need to buy another.
posted by Barbara Spitzer at 11:32 PM on May 9 [5 favorites]

My first take-away from this ad: when everything else is destroyed the Apple gadget still survives, like an inanimate digital cockroach. I'm not sure whether that was what Apple was going for. I also don't understand what the yellow balls with animated faces are doing in this ad. Their only function seems to be to look disturbing as they're getting crushed.
posted by rjs at 12:52 AM on May 10

In the Minions movie, a minion is given an electric guitar ("supa-mega-ukulele!!"), which they smash up after doing a bit of Hendrix.

My kid (distinction in ukulele grade 3) was six at the time, and cried so hard at that scene. Even recollecting it later through age 11 would bring on The Feels. If you play musical instruments, you quickly think of them as precious and sacred.
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 1:11 AM on May 10 [7 favorites]

tubedogg: It's one thing to say you don't like Apple in general, or that you prefer PC products

If by 'PC products' you mean products that run Microsoft or Android operating systems, then it's good to realise that there is a world of other options out there.
posted by Too-Ticky at 4:16 AM on May 10 [1 favorite]

Go try accessing the logs from an up to date OS X system and get back to me.

I want to know why the average person needs to care about this.

This is where the Apple conversation inevitably goes and I never get it. If the products are unsuitable for you in a frustrating way, I understand that that’s annoying, but if it doesn’t apply to others, why the insistence that it should? It reminds me a bit of the Nikon vs. Canon thing, you get to the point where you realize it actually doesn’t really matter because being philosophical about the brand of camera you use has basically nothing to do with actually taking a good photo.
posted by girlmightlive at 5:15 AM on May 10 [8 favorites]

first and foremost a lifestyle brand.

a lifestyle i want nothing to do with and i wish it would end
posted by numaner at 6:06 AM on May 10

Too-Ticky: If by 'PC products' you mean products that run Microsoft or Android operating systems, then it's good to realise that there is a world of other options out there.

The "I'm a Mac/I'm a PC" ads perfectly illustrated just how embarrassing it is to say "Microsoft Windows is a good idea." decades later, people still agree.
posted by emelenjr at 6:12 AM on May 10

Definitely a swing and a miss. There are legions of indie bands happy they didnt sell a song for the soundtrack.

But hey, I know very view people who arent happy that they can carry small devices that aid or facilitate their craft. There are some, but they wouldnt be swayed by any commercial.

I would think that almost everyone on earth that needs an iPad has one. Apple might be targeting the last of us who dont. This may be the result of that cartesian calc.

On the other hand, maybe Apple should be talking to Boston Dynamics in a monthly “do not scare the shit out of humans” meeting.

I unxderstand the visceral rejections of the ad by recalling my reactions to videos of the robot swarm that will be used to break up protests in 2030.
posted by drowsy at 6:25 AM on May 10 [2 favorites]

I think it’s a stupid ad for all the reasons others have mentioned. I like to use Apple products, but I don’t hate products that are not produced by Apple nor the people who use them. When I worked for a technology publication, I ran across annoying Apple fanatics from time to time. And apparently there are anti-Apple folks and that’s fine as long as I get to use what I want. I just checked my iPad, which was a hand-me-down from a buddy who likes to replace his devices way more frequently than I do. Based on the serial number, it was produced sometime between 2014 and 2017. I am not a professional creative person who needs the latest and greatest so I expect to continue using this device for several more years unless I drop it or I am gifted with another hand me down.
posted by Bella Donna at 6:30 AM on May 10 [2 favorites]

Did I find the ad offensive? No.

Did I find it tone deaf? Yes.

Going into this knowing it was an iPad commercial means I kinda figured out the gimmick right away. Still, I could easily see someone, watching this in isolation, not knowing it was an ad for a super thin tablet, wondering "why the fuck are they crushing all these things?" and assuming it to be some tech company nonsense promoting the latest in AI content-sludge generating crapola. Or just getting offended that all these objects were being crushed for some kind of ad in general.

Whatever the intent of the ad, it clearly came off wrong to a lot of people. Having worked in marketing, I'm inclined to blame ignorance over malice in a case like this. I'm also not interested in policing how people react to it, and neither should anyone else. It struck enough of a nerve with enough people that I'm glad to see Apple decided to apologize and pull back from this marketing campaign.
posted by SansPoint at 6:55 AM on May 10 [3 favorites]

I think this ad would have played perfectly fine just 2 or 3 years ago. Nobody would have even thought twice about it. The intention is clear: everything someone needs to make art and music fits in this extremely thin device. Indeed, one of my main uses for my iPad lately is to plug my digital piano's midi into it and run state-of-the-art piano modelling software that sounds incredibly realistic (to me) and much more nuanced than the sample library in the digital piano. All that (and some damn adapters since they no longer have a headphone out) and I can put it on my music stand and read sheet music at the same time. But with the background of Midjourney/ChatGPT threatening, or even promising, to destroy the careers of "creatives" through a flood of machine generated simulacrums of art, it does have bad vibes. The ad was not about AI, but you can't escape it now. It's kind of like that Kardashian Pepsi ad where she solves racism or whatever by sharing a pepsi. In the 90s that ad would have been very successful. But the vibe has shifted.
posted by dis_integration at 6:57 AM on May 10 [4 favorites]

I would think that almost everyone on earth that needs an iPad has one. Apple might be targeting the last of us who dont.

That is the most first-world opinion I've seen on this site so far, which is really saying something. Kudos.
posted by signal at 7:01 AM on May 10

Go try accessing the logs from an up to date OS X system and get back to me.

If all I want to do is have a blog, why would I need to care about this?
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 7:29 AM on May 10 [1 favorite]

This reminds me of the time that Bridge Publications set copies of their latest L. Ron Hubbard rerelease on fire at an American Booksellers Expo to illustrate that it was “burning up the charts” without considering how a convention hall full of book professionals would react to a literal book burning. Tone deaf indeed.
posted by GenjiandProust at 7:34 AM on May 10 [3 favorites]

One of the things that unlocked what people were seeing in this ad was a description of it pointing out how many horror vibes the ad has - the low lighting, the camera angles of the crusher, the way that the various objects seem to realise that they're being crushed.

Yes. Some of the responses in this thread seem to originate from a world with zero media history. Every moment of the ad reflects choices made by people to portray something specific, in a specific way. The ad reveals who and what we are at this time, quite effectively and accurately in my view. I am sorry for us.
posted by elkevelvet at 7:34 AM on May 10 [1 favorite]

I would think that almost everyone on earth that needs an iPad has one.

A few years back I talked to a group at Facebook that was dedicated to expanding cell phone coverage in Africa because they were running out of potential customers. Apple could use its enormous cash reserves to uplift economies to the point where people could afford iPads.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 7:36 AM on May 10

Heh - Colbert offers a nicely Gothic twist.
posted by doctornemo at 7:55 AM on May 10 [3 favorites]

(oh, for fuck's sake): My PC is better than your Macbook.

The Bear looks into a mirror and sees another Bear.
posted by mule98J at 8:07 AM on May 10

If all I want to do is have a blog, why would I need to care about this?

OK, so you're the computer equivalent of the old pensioner who only drives their car to church on Sundays, but you don't understand why your neighbor, the car mechanic, really hates that the latest Apple vehicles don't have a way to open the hood to access the engine.
posted by ursus_comiter at 8:16 AM on May 10 [1 favorite]

I didn't care for this ad, but my reaction was better captured by Linda Holmes than by Matt Zoller Seitz:

The reason people will react as emotionally as they do to the vulgarity of the ad is precisely why the thinnest iPad yet cannot do what they say it will do. It cannot replace the things that people have, over hundreds of years, learned to carry and live beside, and to incorporate into their creation of what they hope will be beauty.

posted by the primroses were over at 8:25 AM on May 10 [5 favorites]

OK, so you're the computer equivalent of the old pensioner who only drives their car to church on Sundays

If there’s no reason I need to access my car’s engine, then yeah, in that case I’m 100% baffled by my busybody neighbor expressing any strong opinions whatsoever about my car that he’s never going to work on.
posted by not just everyday big moggies at 8:28 AM on May 10 [7 favorites]

Fuck Apple. The last good thing they did was the iPod (mine all still work) but iTunes is the worst program I've ever used in my entire life. I haven't bought another product from them since, and the disdain some Apple users frequently express towards those of us who don't use Apple products is absolutely disturbingly bizarre, and elitist, and boring. I will never buy another Apple product.

Apple products and some users of them remind me of the worst of NYC devotees - no, the rest of us aren't jealous and do not think about your products/city constantly, weird, I know.
posted by tiny frying pan at 8:33 AM on May 10 [3 favorites]

If there’s no reason I need to access my car’s engine

OMFG, are you seriously this short sighted? And selfish?

I help an amazingly diverse range of folks with their tech. You're smugly sitting there and saying that because you have a little widget that works for YOU and it works NOW that it doesn't matter that it won't work for others anymore and that they face serious consequences because of it.

I hope when you do have problems, you run into the kind of unhelpful tech support that just says, "It works for me," and hangs up on you.

I'm just seeing all sorts of vectors of sparkly privilege shining into the sky
posted by ursus_comiter at 8:40 AM on May 10 [1 favorite]

OK, so you're the computer equivalent of the old pensioner who only drives their car to church on Sundays, but you don't understand why your neighbor, the car mechanic, really hates that the latest Apple vehicles don't have a way to open the hood to access the engine.

Okay, so you were clearly trying to throw shade at me with this - but the thing is, yes, you're right, I am. And you know what else, there's a fuck of a lot more "old pensioners" than there are "car mechanics", both literally and figuratively.

So...now what?
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 8:51 AM on May 10 [3 favorites]

The pressure has made a lot of people mad.
posted by mattgriffin at 8:53 AM on May 10 [1 favorite]

Tim Cook wants you to fight.
posted by mittens at 8:55 AM on May 10 [3 favorites]

They peaked with the newton amirite?
posted by whatevernot at 8:58 AM on May 10

(oh, for fuck's sake): My PC is better than your Macbook.

and at about a quarter the price.

but actually, not better, a little clunkier to be honest, and of course more prone to the bullshit that Microsoft keeps trying to pull.

But it does pretty much all the same stuff ... at a quarter the price! So I now have three laptops at my service. One for video stuff, one for music etc and one sorta general knockaround older one that I end up probably using more than the other two combined.

And I could even afford a fourth, except that cash seems better invested in my support of weird artist types bent on fucking the system anyway they can. Or just drinking better beer.
posted by philip-random at 9:10 AM on May 10 [3 favorites]

This ad is surprisingly tone-deaf for Apple, which is usually the best of the tech companies at putting out ads that make you really desire the products. I disagree with those that say that the ad is successful because we're talking about it - an ad that makes you not want to buy the product is a bad ad.

Just days before the iPad ad, they released this fantastic one for Precision Finding on May the Fourth (I highly recommend watching, if only to try and catch all of the easter eggs).

Now this is a perfect example of what Apple generally gets right in its ads -- it is about how technology can bring people together in the real world and actually make your life better/easier. It is fun and joyful and depicts something that is actually relevant to life. It makes me go "that's a cool feature, I'd like to have that."

These things are ultimately tools, and they have no use outside of how they can help us accomplish things. I get that the Crush ad was meant to communicate that the iPad can take the place of all these other tools, but it will only appeal to a certain kind of tech fan who doesn't value the tools that are being crushed. As others have pointed out, people have emotional attachments to their musical instruments and don't want to see them destroyed.
posted by Ben Trismegistus at 9:12 AM on May 10 [2 favorites]

Getting upset with users for not caring about diagnostic features of their devices is misplaced. All of the vitriol should be directed at Apple for making their products harder to maintain and fix. I get why someone helping others with their Macs would be upset that logs were no longer accessible, and I understand why someone using their computer for a blog doesn't really care. We can't all be technologists or mechanics, and having contempt for the non-technical is not a good look at all.
posted by grumpybear69 at 9:56 AM on May 10 [3 favorites]

Excuse me? Being all, "fuck you got mine" is not the same as being non-technical.
posted by ursus_comiter at 10:16 AM on May 10

Also, it's one thing not to care. It's another to make an effort to tell someone being impacted by what they don't care about that such impacts don't matter.
posted by ursus_comiter at 10:17 AM on May 10 [1 favorite]

And you know what else, there's a fuck of a lot more "old pensioners" than there are "car mechanics", both literally and figuratively.

This is a derail, but.... Yes, but the old pensioners can get the car mechanics to help them with their stuff, or pay them to do it for a hell of a lot less than a new device costs. If the devices are locked down so you need a hot glue gun to open them*, or replacement parts won't operate unless they've been Blessed By Apple, or John Deere, or a proliferating number of other devices which use microchips to make their devices stop operating if non-blessed parts are used, then there'll be a lot fewer mechanics out there to help the old pensioners.

This stuff really matters. It's why the Right to Repair movement has taken off.

* I've done this. Used a hot glue gun to open and repair my old iPad, because I don't have the cash to just replace electronics. I never could get it back together right afterward. Because Apple used glue to hold it together in the first place.
posted by JHarris at 10:18 AM on May 10 [6 favorites]

(I'll admit, I'm the kind of person who watches Youtube videos where people take old computers apart and get them working again.)
posted by JHarris at 10:20 AM on May 10

Excuse me? Being all, "fuck you got mine" is not the same as being non-technical.

I do tech support for people all the time, too. Mostly family members. It really is asking too much of them to understand why access to system logs is important. Your hostility is misplaced, full stop.
posted by grumpybear69 at 10:26 AM on May 10 [4 favorites]

It really is asking too much of them to understand why access to system logs is important.
Right to repair is really really not that hard to understand. You can use the metaphor everyone's been recommending. "I can't fix it, Grandma, but not because I don't know how. I can't fix it because the company has made it impossible. It's like when cousin Tommy realized he couldn't repair his own car because the manufacturer snaked all the belts around and under the engine so you have to lift the engine out to service it. That's why Tommy had to start going to the dealership and paying $400 for a repair job he used to do himself."

Add to that the fact that it's so often cheaper, now, to toss stuff and buy new, thus packing the landfills with filthy nasty techgarbage and enslaving more Congolese people and gobbling up and destroying more habitable land in search of cobalt and ramping up global warming and and and to infinity.

This ad is so boneheaded it's truly thrilling. How did they let it sneak out to do all this damage before they focus-grouped it? Amazing...
posted by Don Pepino at 11:06 AM on May 10 [2 favorites]

Don Pepino, it's 2024 and the notion that they're rubbing our faces in it is a distinct possibility
posted by elkevelvet at 11:15 AM on May 10 [1 favorite]

+----------------------------------+

|         The new iPad Pro           |

|   You'll buy it and you'll like it   |

+----------------------------------+

posted by mazola at 12:35 PM on May 10 [2 favorites]

Go try accessing the logs from an up to date OS X system and get back to me.

Did they do something to the Console application? I don't recall having to do anything arcane to turn it on, but that's where all the system logs have been accessible I'm pretty sure since 10.0. If you mean hiding the user account Library folder, yeah that was an unfriendly move.
posted by figurant at 4:26 PM on May 10 [2 favorites]

Since you asked: Sonoma’s log gets briefer and more secretive .

This includes a bit of a history lesson on the state of OS X logging all the way back to Sierra. Don't sleep on the comments, either.
posted by ursus_comiter at 4:51 PM on May 10 [1 favorite]

If my house was burning down and the fire department said I had time to run in and grab one object, the acoustic guitar my mom bought me for Christmas 25 years ago would probably be the thing I picked, and not because I couldn't get a better replacement for $400.

I know the guitar in the ad isn't that one, but it's just the kind of object that seems to be able to hold a soul. The durability, the art, the feeling of uniqueness, the stories you have with it, the places you've taken it. It's not the same feeling I have for my mouse, or keyboard, or kitchen knives. It's different. The image of thoughtlessly destroying one is alienating, almost like body horror. It simply shouldn't be done.
posted by 0xFCAF at 5:11 PM on May 10 [8 favorites]

“Apple Sorry for That Crushing iPad Pro Ad: ‘Missed the Mark’,” Dan Ladden-Hall, The Daily Beast, 10 May 2024
posted by ob1quixote at 6:27 PM on May 10

The raw hatred towards Apple has always been weird. It continues to be weird. And some of the comments here demonstrate why it's weird: for all folks want to act like it's a righteous stand against the inhumane brutality of Big Tech, it's still got the weird resentfulness that Linux and Windows people had against Apple in, like, 2003; it's got people who hate iPods or iOS for "dumbing down" the computer experience; it's got resentfulness against the "elitism" of those smug morons who use Apple products, lording it over the rest of it; hell, it has people complaining about specific pieces of long-discontinued Apple software as if it's proof that the whole company should be struck from the Earth.

I think the ad was surprisingly tone-deaf and touched a real nerve for people w/r/t their anxieties and hatreds and fears towards the modern state of the world. That's real, and that's important, and honestly Apple marketing should be less idiotic. (Especially after everyone memed that shot in the Vision Pro ad where the dad's shooting footage of his daughter's birthday with the headset on, looking completely disconnected from his own family.)

But let's not act like those sentiments don't also bring out the same old console-war fandom bullshit that some people have managed to keep harping on about for two and a half decades now. Half of the anti-Apple comments in this thread are just people going "AND THE DREAMCAST WAS BETTER THAN THE PLAYSTATION!" Like, shitting on Apple users for being vain and smug stopped making a scrap of sense when the iPhone became the most successful piece of consumer tech of all time, and when MacBooks became pretty much the college-kid laptop staple.

There are a lot of really valid critiques of how Apple approaches both hardware and software, but Apple's also made strides in fixing the shittiest aspects of both, and mostly publicly acknowledges the need to improve on those fronts. It's also far and away got one of the most eco-friendly approaches to both designing and recycling its devices out of anyone in tech, and went out of its way to design its own microchips with an emphasis on energy efficiency, in part to cut back on the whole "planned obsolescence" thing: their products' batteries last longer and decay more slowly, their hardware takes far longer to noticeably slow down, and old devices receive new software updates for far longer.

And I'm not saying any of that to "stan Apple." But I think it's important to look at what companies are trying to do while critiquing what they're not doing, because otherwise you wind up propagating disinformation. I also try to be fair to Google, a company I largely despise, and to Meta, a company that literally eats people's souls. Some tech companies are flat-out ghoulish, and there are a lot of bad actors in the industry. But most of the time, the story you get is a lot more boring: a bunch of well-meaning people with glaring blindspots try to make products that people will like, which often conflicts with their slightly-less-important goal of making products that won't make society actively worse, which is a much harder thing to anticipate and plan for anyway. That's a more interesting story, imo, than trying to deep-read adverts as if they were tea leaves.

Basically, I think the ad is much more interesting in what it highlights about people's anxieties and frustrations, and what it says about what the tech industry has done to culture that people have those anxieties and frustrations to begin with, than when people's takeaway from the ad is that Apple specifically is the worst tech company, rah rah rah. Like, Google and Meta and Microsoft all actively incorporate LLMs into their products; Apple doesn't. Google and Meta killed publishing; Apple (and Microsoft) didn't. The idea that Apple ruined society by (*scrolls up*) making it harder to access data logs feels like it's missing the point of what people are reacting to for the sake of grinding an axe that hasn't been relevant in decades.
posted by Tom Hanks Cannot Be Trusted at 5:13 AM on May 11 [7 favorites]

> The image of thoughtlessly destroying one is alienating, almost like body horror.

as an elder millennial raised on grunge, i basically grew up dreaming about playing a killer set and then smashing my guitar to pieces on stage. let’s not be hyperbolic. smashing a guitar is not a sin against the world
posted by dis_integration at 5:31 AM on May 11

It is, that's what gave power to Jimi et al.
posted by signal at 6:01 AM on May 11 [1 favorite]

Right to repair is really really not that hard to understand.

Well this "old age pensioner" understands right to repair - but not "right to reprogram" or "right to debug". So, like, I could understand the need for a shock-resistant glass screen - but "accessing the OX logs" is, like, Martian to me and I'd be having to bring the thing to the Genius Bar anyway and asking someone to fix it for me at an exorbitant markup, as opposed to the PC, which is cheaper, that I can just bring to any local PC repair place, that would be cheaper (especially if I shop around).

So, again, "Apples" and oranges.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 6:29 AM on May 11

The raw hatred towards Apple has always been weird. It continues to be weird. And some of the comments here demonstrate why it's weird

There are people who are annoyed at Steve Jobs' lionization (like me! I'm annoyed by it). But in this case, it's probably because any company that gets to Apple's size is due a truckload of criticism, because its cultural attack surface is so vast. In a sense Apple is damned if it does or doesn't, but that's to be expected for companies bringing in (looks up figure) 383 billion dollars in 2023 alone, oh frog.

Well this "old age pensioner" understands right to repair - but not "right to reprogram" or "right to debug".

Well, part of it is that "macOS" is built off of FreeBSD. It's not just a Unix-like under the hood, it's a Unix-like that was created specifically to be free and open, but Apple sure doesn't seem to respect that. Also, logs are an essential part of troubleshooting and security, it's why logs are kept in the first place, so people can read them. Of course that's going to mean tech people. But tech people need tools to do their job. That's part of "right to debug."

"Right to reprogram" is also essential. It's your device, you should be able to do anything you want with it. Computers are essentially general-purpose machines, Apple's attempts to turn them into locked-down appliances are not only against their nature, they're even against the philosophy the company was founded on. The Apple I was created in a garage by one person out of stock electronic components. But then, to bring it back around, once 383 billion dollars a year becomes involved, a lot of principles and philosophies get forgotten.
posted by JHarris at 8:02 AM on May 11 [1 favorite]

JHarris, you do understand that not everyone has the same level of interest in the guts of their machines, right?

The original origin of this tangent was about how divisive the Apple vs. PC rivalry can get, and part of that is perpetuated by a zealous devotion on the part of Apple users.

I know that it is possible for me to learn computer programming and use that knowledge to tinker with programming my own computer - but I don't care. That is knowledge that I don't care enough to acquire, and there is nothing wrong with that. I applied my brain power somewhere else, and that's fine. So telling me this:

part of it is that "macOS" is built off of FreeBSD. It's not just a Unix-like under the hood, it's a Unix-like that was created specifically to be free and open, but Apple sure doesn't seem to respect that.

Means literally nothing to me. I respect that you are upset about it, but I literally do not understand what that has to do with my own HP laptop that lets me surf the web.

I mean, sheesh, if all some people want to do is have a machine that lets them perform a function, that is totally fine. If it breaks, someone else can fix it. I mean, we all own refrigerators (with some exceptions, I'm sure), but we aren't all signing up for HVAC technology degrees to operate the damn things. We don't sign on to refrigeration courses, we just throw our lettuce and milk in the thing and shut the door, and if it doesn't work we call a guy in to fix it.

Ironically, we probably can be coming to common ground about how the Apple ad could be criticized when it comes to wasting older machines ("who needs a record player when you have an iPad, just throw the record player out"). The right to repair argument could be equally valid for both - you want the right to hack your older generation iPad, and I want the right to keep my vinyl record player, and the new iPad is thus threatening us both and this ad is encouraging people to waste older things and that's bad all around.

But the people dismissing people like me as "old age pensioners who only want to use their computers for email" are missing out on some allies, I think.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 9:25 AM on May 11 [3 favorites]

The obligatory car analogy is that, while most people don't tinker with their cars, they benefit from being able to get repairs done by independent garages who aren't dealerships.
posted by BungaDunga at 9:30 AM on May 11 [8 favorites]

it's got resentfulness against the "elitism" of those smug morons who use Apple products, lording it over the rest of it;

It’s not all that weird, particularly here. Buying into the Apple ecosystem requires a lot of money, and vitriol for people who have money is a core part of the Metafilter experience.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 9:42 AM on May 11 [1 favorite]

There's a lot of arguing, but no disagreement that I can detect. "If it breaks, someone else can fix it." Right. Exactly correct. If a pc breaks, it can go to "U Break I Fix" or the IT guy at work who fixes computers for people or your cousin who's always been a tinkerer: someone else can fix it. If an Apple product breaks, there is only one place it can go, namely the insufferably named "genius bar." Someone else can't fix it; only Apple can fix it. Thus fixing it will cost a planet, just like buying it did in the first place.

HVAC is another great example. At the moment, heating and air conditioning tech is open and understandable to anyone who studies it. So if the AC goes out, you can call any one of a few dozen independent HVAC repair companies to come out and fix it. And you can shop around. If the company you called do a great job you can call them again the next time it breaks and if they were too expensive or it took them a couple of tries, you can call someone else next time. But what if AC companies figured out that the way to unimaginable riches was to needlessly complicate their machinery and make it impossible to fix without a proprietary gizmo or make it self-destruct if opened by someone without the special code so that in order to get your Carrier unit repaired you had to call a licensed Carrier technician (who could charge whatever they liked and who would then do everything possible to upsell you on a newer unit or some supposedly necessary accessory)? Would that supersuck? Yes, it superwould.
posted by Don Pepino at 2:36 PM on May 11 [2 favorites]

To EmpressCallipyos, I do see that, but I feel like I keep saying, to the point of annoying repetition, that it's still important for other people to be able to look inside their machines, and it's important for them in a way that indirectly helps even the people who could care less how it all operates. The ultimate benefits are great, even for those who won't ever care about jailbreaking their devices.

I'm sorry if it seems I'm piling on or that I'm particularly obstreperous. If it appears that I am harping on this issue, it's because manufacturers have been taking advantage of most people's disinterest in device internals, using it to justify a heinous trend of locking them down, the thinking going that most people won't care, so they can get away with it. But it's everyone who is blocked by that trend, not just the disinterested, but people who might work on behalf of the disinterested, and even third-party software that the disinterested might use to do tasks for them that they might not care a fig about themselves.

Apple might argue that their machines don't need it, but the problem with trusting manufacuters to make the decision of where the usefulness of their devices ends is that they'll always find lines to draw that benefit them. That usually means selling more units, which ultimately contributes to our dreadful e-waste problem.
posted by JHarris at 2:41 PM on May 11 [2 favorites]

Well this "old age pensioner" understands right to repair - but not "right to reprogram" or "right to debug". So, like, I could understand the need for a shock-resistant glass screen - but "accessing the OX logs" is, like, Martian to me and I'd be having to bring the thing to the Genius Bar anyway and asking someone to fix it for me at an exorbitant markup, as opposed to the PC, which is cheaper, that I can just bring to any local PC repair place, that would be cheaper (especially if I shop around).

Debugging and reprogramming can be vital for fixing issues. (Not to mention, you know, making your own creative changes and content and tools and so on.)

This is about rights - accessibility, ability, potential - not an obligation that any specific person must personally repair, reprogram, debug, or otherwise mess around with any item they bought. But you should be able to if you do ever decide you want, or need, to.

And hell, if you have a techy friend or neighbor or family member they should be able to do it for you too. As should a local repair place not officially affiliated with or blessed or equipped by whatever corporation.

(These days, you don't even have to be especially techy. I've gotten solutions and explanations for various issues by looking at those "Martian" logs, googling an entry or two with a timestamp that seems relevant, and finding discussions with people having the exact same issue. It's also common for someone to post about some problem they're having and someone else to say "please post what this log file or this diagnostic command says" so that they can interpret the Martian for you. Which, among many other things, is extremely helpful if repair places aren't accessible to you in the first place for reasons of finances or geography or disability or pandemic or whatever. Don't knock the Martian! ;-)

I literally do not understand what that has to do with my own HP laptop that lets me surf the web.

If some part of it stops letting you surf the web - the hardware, Windows, the drivers Windows uses, the browser you're using, some website you want to access, etc - it's a good thing for people - maybe not you specifically! but ideally a whole lot of normal people - to (a) know how to fix or work around that, and (b) not be intentionally blocked from doing so.
posted by trig at 4:00 PM on May 11 [2 favorites]

On a more emotional level, right to repair/debug/change also connects to the problem with the ad. The feeling of working with a tool that you can explore, examine, alter, repair, maintain, extend the life or functions of, and fundamentally understand is different than the feeling of working with a tool that is fundamentally closed off to you. The relationship you build with the tool is different. There's a magic in being able, and feeling able, to do those things. It's fine if not everyone feels some specific flavor of that magic; I don't have the same feelings towards a brush or guitar that a painter or musician might. But I can recognize that those feelings exist and matter. There's something fundamentally human about them, and for many people they're an inextricable part of the joy of their work.
posted by trig at 4:33 PM on May 11 [3 favorites]

But tools don’t exist on a single axis of “fundamentally closed off to you” to “not fundamentally closed off to you”. For example, all the musical instruments in the ad are built around 12 equal temperament (talk about a walled garden!), but for some reason we don’t see posts about how traditional instruments are the wedge-end of fascism due to their inherent violence toward the microtonal possibilities. Strange how this topic really brings out a black and white thinking that would be seen by most here as laughably unsophisticated if applied pretty much any other subject.
posted by not just everyday big moggies at 5:30 PM on May 11

Now, that’s a weird counterexample, because analog instruments can be retuned. Treated pianos, trumpets with a slide snuck into one of the bends, this isn’t my thing but even I know about them. Because they’re open, and not legally protected against "jailbreaking", etc.
posted by clew at 9:53 PM on May 11 [5 favorites]

The raw hatred towards Apple has always been weird. It continues to be weird.

what if they sold you a lemon and refused to admit it? What if you lucked out the wrong way and got that one-in-a-thousand (or whatever) damaged-at-birth box that just kept breaking down, kept requiring service, but they never accepted responsibility, never admitted there was something inherently wrong with the hardware in question, just kept "fixing" it until finally, it was out of warranty, past which ... "sucks to be you".

I have never been treated worse by a tech company, any company really ... except for maybe Sony, which is a whole other story.
posted by philip-random at 10:30 PM on May 11 [1 favorite]

Strange how this topic really brings out

If we're complaining about extreme thinking: I see where two comments earlier in the thread brought up fascism; what they said was that the ad's approach connects to a fascist idea. Neither of them was mine.

Now, that’s a weird counterexample, because analog instruments can be retuned

And there's nothing arbitrary stopping anyone from trying to fix them when something goes wrong, or to experiment with changing them even in ill-advised ways. They're yours.

What my comment did say is that being able to see and use a tool as something that you can "explore, examine, alter, repair, maintain, extend the life or functions of, and fundamentally understand" changes the relationship you can have with that tool, on an emotional level. You can disagree with that; it's true for me.
posted by trig at 1:40 AM on May 12 [1 favorite]

What my comment did say is that being able to see and use a tool as something that you can "explore, examine, alter, repair, maintain, extend the life or functions of, and fundamentally understand" changes the relationship you can have with that tool, on an emotional level.

Maybe that is what is behind the emotion of the people who are upset about the ad, because it seems like Apple is suggesting just trashing many of these other tools and getting their gadget.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 5:14 AM on May 12 [2 favorites]

Exactly. The Ikea ad where the little lamp is left out, alone, in the rain, was good because it understood the sense of connection people can feel towards physical objects, even if it lovingly made fun of it. But there was no sense in the Apple ad of understanding people's sense of connection to, and joy in, the tools and materials and childhood toys shown being crushed in unfeeling detail. I'm sure they thought they were hitting the loving/winking tone of the Ikea ad, but they didn't understand the emotions that made it work.

I did think it was funny how the extended crushing scenes really highlighted the tangible, tactile qualities of the things being crushed. Am I the only one who wanted to reach out and touch them, who was hit by rich sensory memories of handling these things and interacting with them physically? And then what single quality does the ad emphasize in the replacement it's offering for all these sensory experiences? That it's the "thinnest ever". The least tactile, the least physically present. They even display it in profile - no focus on the colorful screen, just the gray, barely there siding and sharp edges.

I think people are reacting to multiple things in the ad, and a sense of disenchantment with the brave new world tech turns out to be imposing is one of the reasons. But for me the emotional and sensory deafness really sticks out.
posted by trig at 7:40 AM on May 12 [7 favorites]

Apple is a giant evil corporation (no, really, not cynicism).
I mean, I have apple products, because they're useful, but I knew early on when they called themselves Apple after the Beatles Record Label, then won the suit against the label, because nop one would mistake Apple Records, the music corporation, with Apple the computer company, until they became a music corporation as well, that they were evil capitalist fucks whose only allegience was to their bottom line.
I'm not a fucking genius, by far one of the lesser intellectual lights on this sight, and yet, I have to ask, why, WHY, are you watching commercials, and expecting something more than "Buy my product, and make me a millionaire, I want a house in the country." (that's a quote used back in the day by Sid Vicious in an ad for his solo album, you're probably to young for this part). they want to sell you something, that's the point of a commercial. They'll use whatever they think is going to work. They're just as happy if you hate it because you remember it. So, and I say this in all sincerIty STOP WATCHING COMMERCIALS. Jesus motherfucking christ, you should already know this.
posted by evilDoug at 3:13 PM on May 12 [1 favorite]

they called themselves Apple after the Beatles Record Label

Wikipedia has this to say:

According to Wozniak, Jobs proposed the name “Apple Computer” when he had just come back from Robert Friedland's All-One Farm in Oregon. Jobs told Walter Isaacson that he was "on one of my fruitarian diets," when he conceived of the name and thought "it sounded fun, spirited and not intimidating ... plus, it would get us ahead of Atari in the phone book."

It's not an unusual name, and wikipedia lists about three other companies named Apple besides these two. I feel like the name being coincidental is pretty credible.

I'm not saying they're not capitalist fucks, but that's not a great example of it.
posted by vibratory manner of working at 6:01 PM on May 12 [2 favorites]

“About That Apple Ad...” [15:48]—Pillar of Garbage, 13 May 2024
posted by ob1quixote at 7:13 PM on May 13

Samsung provides a lovely follow-up.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 6:12 AM on May 16

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