Apple Apologizes for iPad “Crush” Ad

This is one of the dumbest things I've heard. It's a prime example of one of the biggest problems with the Internet, holding a megaphone up to every idiotic thought. The resulting bandwagonism leads companies and individuals to think that they must respond, lest they be 'canceled'. "Oh no! Apple is literally crushing the artistry of Hugh Grant! This will not stand!"

Excuse me while I pick myself up off the floor, having fallen over backward after rolling my eyes a little too hard.

Not sure why they feel the need to apologize. Just kill the ad like they killed other bad ads.

But why is it the VP of marketing that is sent to apologize?

Is he the guy that runs Apple and who was leading the Apple Event that introduced this ad?

@Gruber: "The Man".

Yes. But there's also the fear of tech taking people's jobs and replacing them that is growing, thanks to greater surveillance, more censorship and overblown claims about AI.

Also, the 2008 LG advertisement seems a lot less violent to me, and therefore somewhat less repulsive. Let's watch that emoji's eyes be crushed out of its head again! That's the feeling we're aiming for.

Not sure what apologizing about it will change though. Apple's been seen for what they are, and it looks like they're apologizing for the mask slipping.

This captures it.

I guess I'm not cynical enough. I saw the ad as just saying that all of those analog/physical things can be done on this super thin new iPad. And I'm sure that was the intention.

If this ad is what has opened anyone's eyes to the coming wave of digital replacements, then they've been living in a cave somewhere. Progress happens. There are far fewer jobs these days for buggy whip makers and ice block deliverers than there were 100+ years ago, too.

Relax. Apple is not coming for your analog metronome.

At least, the old G3 steamroller ad only crushed computers.

While Apple's intent may have been so how all those things have been squeezed into a small device, there was way too much focus on the destruction side. I wasn't angry at the video, but it did just seem sad and dark more than anything.

@DJ They could have expressed your idea by making the various objects becoming liquid and pouring into a iPad Pro mold. Or the objects could have become ghostlike and gone into the iPad suggesting their souls went into it. Or they could have naturally become flatter and fitted into it. Or we could have seen the inside of the iPad and seen its components were a piano, a trumpet, whatever.

But instead of choosing any one of an infinite number of non-destructive options, Apple chose to use the visualization of two very large anvils of metal to pulverize and destroy heirlooms and things people love, to be replaced by an iPad Pro that will last at most a couple of years before being tossed out because of software incompatibilities or a dead battery.

In one of the Star Wars movies, Luke and Leia were being crushed by the trash compactor, symbolizing the Empire's heavy handed crushing of its citizens: "The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers". Crushing things is rarely associated with positive feelings.

By the way, you're right about buggies, carts and plows. No more jobs for horses. What did it do to them? Oh, the population of horses fell between 80% and 90% in the US. I'm sure tomorrow's "useless eaters", to quote Harari, won't mind dying to make our economy more efficient, having been digitally replaced.

And yet the human population has not suffered for lack of jobs making buggy whips and delivering blocks of ice.

@DJ: Given that productivity has been rising since the 1970s, yet the benefits have been going to fewer and fewer people, many would quibble with your point. This was not unexpected. Indeed it was already expected in the 1800s. I hear plenty of gripes from Zoomers about this these days.

It boggles my mind how many people consider it no big deal. The ad is a bad taste, period. Regardless of where it comes from. But the fact that it comes from Apple tells how rotten things really are.

The irony of DJ’s megaphone thought is that it’s exactly what I see when I see people whining about the measured response to this total misfire of an ad.

People have stated in very specific terms why the ad is a misfire. Meanwhile, the response from the noisy internet — that everyone speaking out is whining just to whine — may as well be shouted at a mirror. One side is making a point; the other side is just complaining, and it’s the side that’s complaining that is fed up with complaining.

Apple’s response to the response — opening its eyes, acting appropriately, signing its response with a name — is smart in every way. I guess the megaphone made its point better than the whining contrarians did.

It is a very bad ad.

I get what they were trying to say, but the semiotics are all wrong. It's destruction instead of creation. It's lol at us instead of look at you.

In classic Apple fashion they let spectacle trump function.

And then it turned out to be a rip off... a bigger budget version of what others have already done. Heh...

Anyhow, I think that thing where they gave stuff to a bunch of rich baseball players was even more on the nose/tone deaf.

*look at us, instead of

@Old Unix Geek or as someone else said, simply playing the video in reverse would have been a much nicer message - creation that comes from the iPad rather than destruction.

It should have been a magician pulling things out of the iPad and putting them into peoples hands. It should be about users and what they can achieve and not Apple and what they can achieve.

It's marketing 101 ffs.

I would guess that you could show the ad to a room of 100 people, and only 1 would truly be offended by it. A few would empathize with that person because "I had a metronome, too! *sniff*", and a few more would sympathize with that group. At the other end of the spectrum, a few people would really like it. Most people wouldn't have strong feelings about it one way or the other. Apple should *maybe* feel strongly about that aspect, since the purpose of any ad is to move as many people as possible in your direction.

And those things with the squished-out eyes? They're designed to do exactly that.

If mechanical metronomes weren't so expensive and unreliable and didn't remind me of the least enjoyable aspects of practicing the piano, I might have fonder memories of them. They can be fun to play with and make nice decorative objects.

There's a pang in my chest upon the destruction of actual pianos. Depictions in commercials do not elicit the same response.

Exactly!