I get through regular life okay, but this a $1T company with hundreds of billions in cash, profit driven, using child labor in China indirectly, and engaging in walled-garden policies makes it worse.
They make all these gadgets that replaces incomes from many manufactures and puts it on a single hand. That's bad enough.
Now, they destroy all these beautiful things- a piano, a guitar, a camera, and a lot of valuable things to make a point that this single silicon-made, soulless corporate company-produced, cheap exploited labor induced thing is going to replace them. Those things of aesthetics and soul are destroyed to give rise to this thing.
That hits hard for me. Seriously. I thought that I was being a real snowflake when this ad made me uncomfortable, but was glad to see this backlash in large numbers. Maybe people still have souls.
You can give a thousand lessons in "nature of real circumstances and geopolitics", and this ad with all its backstory will still be wrong to me.
I have to strongly disagree. Pianos, guitars and other instruments have a long and rich history that connects the past to the present. A long arc of human progress and creativity, with some of the most sought after instruments today being rooted in a deep history of human craftsmanship.
Cameras also have a rich history, but don’t belong in the same sentence IMO.
While you can find soulless products to buy, those are only a subset of what’s on offer.
I enjoy using Apple products, and will probably even buy this iPad because I need to upgrade. But it sits in an entirely different category than my cameras and musical instruments.
The entire arch of human history from the first rock picked up our ancestors leads up to the most complex things ever conceived by humans. Requiring a globally distributed intellectual exchange, thousands of years of scientific and technological advancement, commerce, etc.
Focusing on just the physical assembly of complex parts ignores not just where those parts comes from, but also everyone living and dead that contributed to the software which makes it more than odd object. And even that glosses over the continent spanning electrical systems used to power em etc.
A tablet, laptop, etc is the ultimate expression of history warts and all. If they seem soulless it’s because they aren’t just a product of a single culture.
Pianos guitars and violins were crafted by hand! Materials were chosen with care and cultivated over decades with the express purpose of providing a certain character to an instrument! The complexity of a harpsichord or piano was insane in a time before supply chains, and they were designed to last centuries and be passed down between generations! That's just the fancy stuff, stringed instruments can and have been made by anyone, and innovation has come from surprising places! Almost anybody can change the balance, or experiment with covering up holes or adding random metal components to see how it affects the sound. All this effort and knowledge and time goes into something created FOR FUN. You can't eat a piano or use it for any reason other than changing the way people feel, yet music has been around since language was first invented or possibly even earlier.
An iPad is a homogenous blob, it's components broken down and reconstituted at a molecular level, none of it's original character remains. They are the pinnacle of design, but there's not much room for expression left. They last a few years at most before becoming museum pieces or trash. They're impressive in their own right, they showcase human achievement like nothing else. I'd argue they have a less colorful history than music, however.
no, man. have you never experienced music in a personal way? not a recording, not a concert, but as a living cultural joy shared and created together among strangers and lovers both in the same moment - it's so beautiful, so overwhelming in a way that nothing else is.
and so often it involves a musical instrument, you know.
and it can be a story, a lesson, it is all political. people kill and die for this thing every day, and every day in history.
instruments may be more electronic these days and i enjoy my share of electronic music and computer music. but physical, acoustic instruments will always be the icon.
i think a piano or a guitar has already made more history than remains to be made by anything.
the first cultural memes were songs
An argument against my amateur analysis is of course scale. Pianos were being explored by maybe a million people and only a fraction of that fulltime. Cameras are basically a part of life for a large portion of humanity.
For those who haven't heard this term, it basically refers to the Apple aesthetic: sparse, minimal, utilitarian, and clean.
Flat UIs and Material design (out of Google) are other examples.
This ad is basically a millennial modernist manifesto. Down with complexity. Down with variety. Simple, clean, minimal.
Contrast this with the noisy cyberpunk aesthetic that was pretty common in technology before Apple 2.0 and Jony Ive and can still be found in the gaming PC area, or the 80s-90s skeuomorphic aesthetic that dominated UIs until the later 2000s.
When Millennial modernism came to prominence it was itself a revolt against noise, clashing styles, and overwhelm. I personally liked it for that aspect. But I can definitely see how it can also be soulless. IMHO the worst thing I can say about it is that it seems associated with authoritarianism. Like Brutalist architecture it's kind of an authoritarian aesthetic because it comes about by having a dictator who says 'no' to almost everything and enforces a very rigid auteur approach. Once established it also tends to remain unchanged because there's not much you can do with it. "Theming" possibilities are pretty much restricted to light and dark mode.
I myself have mixed feelings (about millennial modernism not the ad, which is awful). The biggest thing I like about this style is its association with reduced cognitive load. The biggest thing I don't like is the association with authoritarianism.
Edit:
Just realized that the Cybertruck is an ode to millennial modernism, and might just be kind of a shark jumping moment for it. This ad would count as another shark jumping moment. Maybe it's on its way out.
The problem with the Cybertruck isn't its design (although people did mock that, comparing it to vehicles from PS1 era graphics), but that it is a poorly constructed vehicle.
It was repulsive.
The issue for me is not about minimalism, so this reframing is not appropriate in my case.
A budding revolt? Equating an iPad to authoritarianism?
I think I understand and agree with some of your concepts. I see a trend back towards analog things and low tech devices, but that's a pretty simple and understandable trend. I don't think it has anything to do with authoritarianism.
Though the tone of the ad was still... Orwellian: imagine a hydraulic press, stamping on human creativity, forever.
That’s how it feels when inflation made basics jump up 50% and it feels you’re being slowly crushed.
Seeing this is an Ad for one of the world’s richest Companies, the lesson I got is the rich are slowly crushing the median.
Don’t buy their crap.
If they're mad at that, then they'd be mad at themselves for having a zoomorphic stressball and squeezing it themselves --which, who knows, is possible, but unlikely to be the case.
Mother's heartbeat. The woosh of her blood stream.
We get months of this auditory performance.
There is so much that is still only doable at least in part by hand, from making certain musical instruments to things like crochet. There are even more that use machines but are nowhere near as automated as people believe they are (see e.g. practically all tailoring, where even mass produced articles still need a skilled hand to guide the cutting and sewing machines).
But people love the fiction of some sterile production line that spits out all the cheap things they buy, in no small part because acknowledging that even "cheap Chinese shit" is made by the skilled hands of actual human beings would require acknowledging the gross exploitation that enables you to buy their work for absurdly low prices.
Separately, the ad is weird. They’re the first thing I reach for if I want to e.g. play our actual piano. I tune instruments with them, display music with them, record myself, play an accompanying track on them—I compliment instruments with them, I don’t replace them with an iPad or iPhone.
The iPads have had a hard time because, yeah, the OS was/is in its infancy but nobody (except the dgaf-wealthy) buys the $2000+ iPad Pro for "consumption" because they sell a $400 and $700 iPad for that.
The things iPad (Pro) can do are indeed far fewer than an unencumbered (by draconian lockdown, or simple lack of development resources) PC or even Mac laptop. But that's different than "none". The more hardware equipment in my studio I can shovel onto Apple's magic hydraulic obliterator, the better.
(Although it's a lot less than shown in that ad, haha. But I liked the ad, as far as ads go.)
I get it, that's exactly their point. The iPad can do all of those things. But at a time when many creatives feel like AI is going to replace them or make their skills irrelevant, it's pretty tone deaf.
And also, it's far more likely that most of those objects were made by skilled craftsmen, even if they did work at a bigger company.
This is what I realized, too. At first, I thought the outrage was dumb, but I think this is the context I was missing.
And yeah I'm not oblivious. We can replace all the engineers and artists with generated output that satisfies 97% of everyone. It was great while it lasted but like the apple commercial hints at, out with the old ...
I don't personally think that computing is a threat to art, but many people do.
I agree with everything you say except for this part: not having an emotional reaction to the destruction of objects doesn't imply you don't have a soul (whatever that means to you). Not everybody had the opportunity in life to learn to play an instrument or make art, and I can see how for people like this a music instrument is not more sentimental than, say, a hammer.
Maybe you should feel good about feeling bad after watching that ad: it means you had the chance to experience the beauty of creating art.
Hollywood does destroy all sorts of things but that's not their sales pitch to you. It happens in the background. Also it isn't replacing those soulful cars with a new car -- it's using them for a shot.
But when a company uses this in an ad, THEY are the ones that come off as nihilists, and not in a good way.
If they wanted to express that the ipad CONTAINED all of those older things within it, they could have created this as something like Dr Strange would have done. Like make those items fly into a portal shaped like a giant ipad, and then shrink the ipad with all those items still inside.
Or at the very least, they could have presented the items to be destroyed like they were worn out and broken (and no longer in use), and then presented their destruction as giving them new life through recycling as an Ipad.
This ad will definitely pop into my head the next time I consider buying an Apple device, and not in a good way.
If you can't see the difference here I think this says more about you being able to put together reasonable comparables for arguments then anything else.
For example using "Australian girl on Instagram that crushes things and dances to their shape" as a comparable is so completely different as to be irrelevant except that there is similarity in something being crushed. It's like comparing a military jet and a mosquito because they can both fly.
This ad destroys a lot of things people are really really fond about: musical instruments, painting supplies, photography equipment, and record player. And then says that all of those things will be replaced by this "gadget" that won't have the years of life of the piano, guitar, camera, record player, etc.
So it destroys things people care about AND tells you the things you care about don't matter anymore.
Is there also outcry when a Musician destroys a guitar on-stage?
My feeling at the ad wasn't particularly emotional, more curiosity at how much of it was real and how much wasnt. Speakers and art supplies aren't particularly expensive, and the Arcade machine wasn't recognizeably a machine worth keeping. There are plenty of used up pianos out there. The emoji was kinda funny...I don't know what that says about me.
I think the difference is that people are very removed from what waste actually is, and when they see what it actually happens all day every day to all those items, shock. We all generate this every day. In the big picture, someone’s old trumpet in an attic is going to end up in a landfill once they move/die/need space. Once it got produced, its final form is landfill.
Even if I don’t believe in the product, and I don’t think of the company very fondly, I lean towards considering the ad anti waste. “You no longer need to buy and store and move and hoard all these things, you only need an iPad”. It’s not saying “go crush all this items to buy an iPad”, it’s saying “don’t generate all this other waste, you can do it all here”
Volume wise at least, there is more waste in the “loved” items, and no one is recycling emoji squishy balls.
But stating that all those beautiful things "deserve" to be replaced by a thin silicon 3k USD machine by literally destroying them in an industrial crusher?
That's different.
The same Apple destroyed the Big Brother some decades ago in a commercial. The sense of irony!
(Also, a car is a car. The world doesn't share Americans' obsession and weird relationships with cars. A photographer's camera, a musician's guitar are more important.)
The world doesn’t share your own obsession and weird relationships with a camera and a guitar.
One aspect could bae related the affordability of things. Imagine that beautiful grand piano - how many would have dreamt of owning one in their homes but can’t. Because:
a) they are expensive
b) need a lot of space (so you need to have a big home to begin with)
Seeing a lot of new things being destroyed, along with the stress all emoji’s eyes popping out, was a bit much.
I'm not at all surprised people don't feel emotions around it.
The moment a piano starts selling tablature in the TabStore™, I'm sure that people won't mind to see a piano being crushed in a hydraulic press.
source: 2023 10k
But sure, I can see why people don't like it.
these hydraulic press videos are popular because they crush things. they don't create artful unions, they pulverize.
Or do you carry a bag with a camera, a dumb phone, a notepad w/ pens and markers, books, an mp3 player, a pedometer, a measuring tape, ...
No one's forcing you to buy the former, so, why don't you do the latter?
There are genuine uses for this technology, but symbolically showing that pianos, violins, paints, etc are out of date by crushing them, replacing them with an iPad removes any of the "humanity" from it.
If I swipe a violin string on an iPad, it's going to sound the exact same no matter what. But if I play a real violin I have control over the vibrato (I guess, I'm not a violinist), I can start a note slowly and then quickly cut it off for effect, or slowly fade out a note by relieving pressure on the strings. The real thing allows for artists to put their heart and their soul into the music. An iPad can only immitate the note in it's most pristine, mathematic, sterile form.
I never wrote anything remotely similar to that in my comment. I'm talking about the convenience of carrying a single thing vs. many of them.
>removes any of the "humanity" from it
No, the iPad didn't remove the humanity from those activities, you did, right now. Let me tell you something, there's some really good pieces of art out there, music, short films, photography, etc... that were created using a modern digital device like the iPad. Does that make those less human? Less artistically valuable? Absolutely not!
On your other point: Correct, there is INCREDIBLE art out there that is only possible thanks to technology. EDM music, 3D animation, the hyperpop genre (RIP Sophie), etc. The insinuation of the ad, however, is that those "old" ways to create art are no longer needed, the iPad does it all!!
Give two jazz artists the same music sheet and an iPad and tell them to recreate it and they'll both make music that sounds the exact same, because the iPad doesn't allow them to insert those little things like I mentioned in my previous comment.
Give those same two jazz artists the same music sheet but give them a full orchestra and they'll both be unique.
This doesn't make digital art less artistically valuable. I'm saying that technologies such as the iPad, which inherently remove the ability for human uniqueness to be included, insinuating that physical methods of artistic expression are outdated is both demeaning to artists, and frankly a dangerous method of thinking when it comes to art.
The thing is, people are starting to do that more and more. Even John Gruber, iPhone enthusiast extraordinaire, has started carrying a real camera around again. Fujifilm hasn't been able to keep their smaller mirrorless cameras in stock for the last four years. Notebooks and pens are back for a lot of people. Even wristwatches are undergoing an enormous renaissance in popularity.
The cultural zeitgeist is shifting. Whether it's a reaction to a sense that software is eating the world, or a reaction to the ubiquitization of AI generica, or a quest for authenticity, I'm not sure. But this ad is badly out of step with that cultural trend, and the dystopian lighting, framing, and the popping eyes on the stress ball certainly don't help either.
I have the impression that the opposite is happening.
Also while not analog, iPods modded to be a bit more modern (replacing their mechanical HDs with higher capacity flash and adding haptics and Bluetooth among other things) have also been popular lately.
Offline music is definitely seeing a resurgence.
I carry those other things because I value photography and the phone can’t replace the tactile experience of writing on paper or turning the pages of a book.
I own an aging iPad and will probably buy this new one, but strongly disliked the ad because it seems to be signaling that those things I value are being replaced by the iPad. In a sense, they said the quiet part out loud.
I actually liked the ad, and I like the underlying message of the iPad being a simile for all those things. Consider a situation where you have a limited budget, let's say you're a teen and you only get one birthday present. Me personally, I'd get an iPad or a similar device, as that's the single thing that will maximize my fun, out of all other options.
(emphasis on thing, please don't come back at me with the "I'd rather have friends" strawman, you can have friends and an iPad)
I get that people want the powerful shiny thing. I do too, I work in tech. I think it's done something dangerous to my brain though...
What exactly are you trying to achieve with this sentence?
Here’s why I disliked it: I’m one of those people who finds themselves concerned and sometimes sad at the erosion of the humanity in art. Social media and AI are changing the nature of artistic expression in a way that often feels destructive. I’ve started to intentionally unplug and use devices less in order to stay connected to what I see as the good stuff in life.
To me, this ad is the culmination of what I dislike about tech.
If they had played the ad in reverse, I think I’d have really liked it. iPad as a tool for expression. Instead, it’s presented as a tool that supersedes expression. I suspect Apple was trying to communicate the former.
Edit to respond to the edit: highly sensitive people who have visceral reactions to stuff like this are canaries in the coal mine. We need them just as much as we need substantive discussion here. Some of the backlash also originated in Japan, where culturally this was quite offensive.
Same here. And besides disliking the ad myself, I imagined that many other people would dislike it too. I also wondered how on earth it could have gotten the go sign within Apple. From the outside, at least, Apple looks like the epitome of a cautious, deliberate company. I would have thought there would have been plenty of stages in the approval process where it would have been shot down.
This feels like bait for online arguments. An aggravating theme that is obvious to many but also just enough deniability to have people complain about the people who react negatively to the ad. Boom. Free press.
I think there's also something to be said for the fact that while I agree school music programs should not be facing the cuts they do – and that's a battle I was fighting when I was in school too – digital music technology (and its analogs in video and photography arts) have probably been a net positive in terms of bringing the capability to create art to more people than just school programs on their own. When you can make art without consuming resources, without needing large studio spaces or especially in the case of music an entire band of other people, that can give freedom of expression to people that would otherwise have been prevented from participating in the arts because of their circumstances.
I'd also point out that while AI (like any disruptive tech in the arts) may have introduced bad changes, there are also cases where it's allowed for artistic expression that would have been impossible before. My favorite recent example is Billy Joel's new "Turn the Lights Back On" song and video. Watch the video and the obvious thing that jumps out at you is the de-aging / replacement effects. But if you close your eyes and really listen to the music too, you'll discover not only did they play with de-aging visually, but they also played with de-aging his voice. And though the whole song as he ages up in the song, his voice is also changing to match each era until it returns to the present day. That's a cool, artistic and emotional use of AI technology that just wouldn't have been possible before the tools we have now.
But in terms of your daughter pursuing an art career, was she hoping to work in commercial art? Like at an animation studio or graphic design house? Because I don't see AI taking jobs from artists doing work that ends up in galleries and museums. All of my friends that are professional visual artists here in NYC work with physical materials that go onto physical walls in galleries, and I don't think any of the AIs are going to take away from making 30-foot textile sculptures or oil paintings or immersive performance art transformations of galleries. They might even enhance the toolkit some of my friend's get to use.
And depending on what she considers making a living, she probably won't for a very long time as an artist regardless of AI. There's a huge gap between the artists making $100k on a painting and the long tail of those just holding on making enough to survive. But the one thing all of them have in common is that they really couldn't do anything else in their life, they're fully committed to it, it just would be impossible for them to not be artists. Maybe I'd suggest her going through the Artists Way [1] during her gap year while she tries to figure out if it's what she wants to do! The framing of it can get pretty, I don't know, annoying, weird, but the exercises over the 12-weeks I found to be helpful.
It cut the value, monetary and social, of anything but great talent and skill down to almost zero, where one middling ability had had substantial value. It shifted the reward for it almost entirely to the tip-top of the skill hierarchy.
I think the level most people engage with music making (a hobby, for themselves primarily) will survive just fine. Some of the already-tiny set of paying jobs it composition, especially, may be in trouble, but that was already a rare career.
https://twitter.com/rezawrecktion/status/1788211832936861950
Not to dunk too much on the artistic community, but when it comes to these 4 day dramas all the over the top adjectives are applied. Very eloquent but the feelings most of the time aren't even real. It's a performance.
One of these things is not like the others~...
This "Literally shouldn't be used figuratively" is a rather modern construct that was artificially created.
Instead, the overreactions are aggregated via social media and news coverage so we can see "wow look at all these people using extreme language here."
Whilst I didn't feel a great deal watching the video, this statement is very presumptive.
Reversed: How does one get through daily life _not_ feeling so strongly about things?
Should perhaps we, those who didn't feel a great deal here, not reflect on whether we might be feeling as much of life as we could, empathise more deeply, care about broader things, consider life as more than ration or reason?
It didn't bother me one way or another, but I also didn't assume anything. I can imagine a life far more rich just by feeling more, seeing more colours in the same palette, tasting more when eating food, and feeling so much more when just experiencing life... perhaps for all the benefit of feeling more, there's just the sharper edge that sometimes you feel more about something like an Apple advert.
You didn’t reverse the question. No one is advocating not having strong feelings about anything. The correct reverse would be “how do those of you who don’t feel strongly about this ad get through daily life?”.
The answer to that is “by not entering a state of frenzied stress about every inconsequential thing and being mindful of the battles worth fighting”. There is a finite amount of things you can feel strongly for in your life, and I do think this ad is incredibly minor.
No one is going to remember or talk about this in a week, regardless of if Apple had apologised or not. If only we could’ve had all this outrage and media attention about something which truly matters and is urgent to all humans (like, say, climate change) that would’ve been swell. Now that would’ve been empathetic, shown a care about broader things, and be considerate of life.
I feel strongly about important things, not all things.
And even if you pick up a crappy starter guitar, learning it is a purely human endeavor, propagating the mastery that has been passed down through generations.
And I have no idea how to reconcile “it’s all mass produced rubbish” with “craftsmanship survived unharmed”. These are in direct conflict.
That same kid also got to watch Pete Townsend (and others) get superstar status, while breaking instruments during a performance. It was heartbreaking to me that he didn't just donate those instruments to disadvantaged kids and still bothers me today.
So, while I understand the intention of the ad, when you couple that, with Apple products being too pricey for a lot of people, yeah, it bothered me.
There's no strength in disassociating from the ills of the world. Useful in short bursts, but as a default state I would say is a problem.
Now that doesn't mean the other side -- the histrionics -- are "right," but there is a balance to be found here.
You can be almost certain that people using this language don't expect to be aggregated into news articles and then be used as evidence that the world is getting too soft.
Everything has been commodified.
And Apple just piled on.
welcome to capitalism...
It's pretty obvious what marketing intended. You take a bunch of creative instruments/tools/materials, squish them inside the iPad, and you get to carry them with you with your iPad. Heck, I'm almost certain it's been done before as a cartoon gag: everything gets sucked into one super tool. There's probably an old Looney Tunes episode with something close enough--maybe stuffing books inside someone's head to teach them the material--to make my point.
In any case, the metaphor's pretty clear; unfortunately, the Crush ad completely botches it. There's no mechanism by which the props 'enter' the iPad. Instead, you just see wanton destruction, the hydraulic press lifts up, and then there's an iPad sitting on a giant chunk of steel. Paint is dripping down the side, but the press itself is oddly sterile. The mess? The parts? The paint? All gone on the press except for what's left on the floor. And if it's smashed into itty bitty bits, even if it's now metaphorically "inside" the iPad, what's the point? Did the press somehow squeeze out some metaphysical meaning from the tools that got sucked into the iPad? Now throw in some of the angst about the possibility of generative AI replacing some creative jobs.
If the idea is that an iPad will 'replace' those tools--or more likely, just let the user take them with you wherever they go--there's an implicit assumption that the user values those tools and would like them so close at hand. So literally destroying tools that, for many artists and creatives, are objects of affection closely tied to memories that are critical parts of their self-conception, is an absurd kind of symbolism that would have never made it off the drawing board under Jobs. People tend to respect their tools, and filming their meaningless destruction is going to rub people the wrong way even though it really has no actual impact. Especially with an ad that's simultaneously trying to get you to buy the product they were symbolically destroyed to revel.
Will Crush turn many people off from buying a new iPad when they need one? Almost certainly not. But it does underscore that Apple's changed as as a company. Apple users--myself included--might still love the products they buy, but it doesn't seem like they're in love with them like it once seemed (for way too many of their users).
All sorts of media - whether movies or books or games or ads - are designed to make some kind of reaction in the audience. Dismissing "I don't like this" as a valid reaction is also dismissing "I like this", which seems silly.
I think you are being extremely irrational in expecting people to not feel passionately about random things. Companies spend insane amounts of money influencing consumer sentiment for good reasons.
Destroying functional stuff with a hydraulic press is a waste of planet’s resources.
Destroying musical instruments, sculptures and other cultural artifacts is not too far from burning books, it’s barbaric.
Finally, I believe the ad is misleading because the ipad not gonna survive the press either. It’s just a consumer electronic device which doesn’t even have IP68 water protection.
The real issue with the ad that nobody is talking about.
False advertising
Focusing on just the literal few in view in front of you is missing the forest for the trees.
If someone's reaction was literally debilitating, sure, that's probably pathological, but I don't think there's anything wrong with feeling strongly about something like this, especially when such advertising is specifically engineered to evoke an emotional response.
So, while it may not feel like it to you, from those who have invested in the brand this is a betrayal and a real emotion.
Oh, and I get through the day just fine. It just reminds me to never relent on my values.
Im done with it and a lot of others are also.
Same reason people tend to hoard too much shit.
And it's typically devoid of any nuance, it's shallow, quick, and distilled down into this form that begs people to react.
I see it mostly on reddit on posts that have hundreds to one or two thousand comments where 50% of the replies have almost the identical opinion. Everyone has this need to share it, even if it isn't nearly that original.
There's probably some societal change that someone significantly smarter than I can speak to, but this whole "digital town square" approach has kinda turned into a maelstrom of the most toxic opinions that people probably don't hold _that strongly_ if you asked them face-to-face in person.
Its not the worst ad by any means, I am used to seeing russians blown to pieces in ukraine at this point, but the arrogance man, stemming from first frame was a bit over the top even for me and left bitter taste of it all when intentions were opposite. How this passed all the managerial reviews is beyond me. Actually I get it - they all thought its fine, which also tells you something.
Not shocking in any way, to me apple is subtly arrogant for many years and the main reason for me going to (more expensive but way more open) competition. That and consistently fanatical uncritical apple crowd, also visible here.
As I watched the video I found the destruction beautiful and heartbreaking. If it had been used as an artistic commentary on, oh I don't know, our underappreciation of good tools, the undermining of art under fascism, the dumbing-down and compression of culture under capitalism, etc that would have been interesting.
But the reveal at the end is that the force destroying all these artistic tools is none other than one of the world's richest companies using the spectacle to hawk their latest must-have gewgaw. And the delicious irony of Apple unintentionally positioning itself as the unstoppable, soulless destroyer of art and culture is just chef's kiss perfection. I'm honestly sad they pulled the ad.
But to your question, I haven't noticed any impact of strong emotions on a daily basis except that I get overly excited sometimes when talking about things and have to bring a tissue to movies. I'm similarly curious what it's like for people who don't really have emotional reactions to things. I work with folks like this, and I am curious. Do they feel things when they look at art, listen to music, read literature, look at photos, or is it just sort of background ambiance? When evaluating art do they plot perfection on the horizontal of a graph and importance on the vertical to yield the measure of its greatness?
I can still get a bit misty-eyed just thinking about reading "Love You Forever" or "Guess How Much I Love You", and my kids outgrew those books years ago.
If this kind of thing was done by a company I'm a huge supporter of, sunk a lot of money into, one I personally promoted to my friends and family and one that was part of my personal and professional identity in some way, it might be very upsetting. I might feel betrayed.
Personally I don't get invested in companies or products like that. Maybe you don't either. The emotional reaction makes sense if there's high emotional investment. Whether the emotional investment is rational is an entirely different question.
An animation of all those nice items magically squeezing into the iPad one at a time, each contributing to an ongoing song/theme would sell far far better.
However, i feel like apple's ad made people visualize a true deep concern about the future of art (and humanity) with regards to the recent advancements of AI. The fact that the number 1 consumer hardware company in the world blatantly acknowledge the fact that computers are going to generate every piece of content automatically in the future is quite troubling. (of course, that's probably not exactly what they meant, as someone will have to push that "generate" button on the ipad, at some point).
I think they invest too much emotion into inanimate things.
It is more than the ad. Apple is a cornerstone of many people's lives. Their online existence, the bulk of their personhood these days, flows through apple systems. Apple is basically a quazi-partner. Such people feel they must react defensively, which is the root of fanboy culture. Such people therefore get very worried when they see unequivocal mistakes. A fanboy will then turn quickly, joining the anti crowd in an effort to correct the mistake asap. As soon as apple make sufficient recompense, they will return to the defensive. (See every mistake ever made by a K-pop star.)
So they get triggered by mundane things and tweet prayer hands for every news headline that hits the 24 hour news cycle
"These things you people have, these ...feelings...these are strange and you seem weak. Boop beep boop."
Sometimes the stereotypes aren't wrong, huh.
It's the same as typing "ROFL LMAO" when you actually just lightly exhaled through your nose.
It's infantile and distracts from "meaningful discourse". They're allowing themselves to be seriously psychologically manipulated (or are playacting along with it), but it just happens to be in a negative way this time.
But the response seems outsized. it just seems like bullshit. I think most of these reactions are not genuine, just all aboard the rage-train!
Or maybe they are all just jealous because they can't afford apple products ;-)
People have to go through mental gymnastics to justify being angry at it, but do they feel the same way when these objects get destroyed in movies?
they may as well have smashing the statue of david and shown that the mac's default background is a picture of it.
and because someone has a negative reaction to an ad doesn't imply they got "angry" over it or need tougher skin or are somehome so sensitive they can't function in society. it's being able to reflect how something is making you feel. and it feels like a shitty ad on many levels.
You might not be angry but you're using pretty malicious language to assign intent to the ad that doesn't seem present to me.
Context matters. Here it looks like it's a zero-sum: iPad is crushing everything else.
Maybe it is you who needs to go outside and stop reading these comments which make you feel 'insane'?
"Why do you care about X" questions are inane.
The internet also serves to amplify their noise.
EDIT: I appreciate the amount of good-faith discussion on this comment. To be clear, if your reaction to the ad was along the lines of ‘this is distasteful and I don’t like it’, I totally get that. I’m referring to some of the comments I saw that likened it to ‘stress inducing’ or ‘like watching someone’s arm get cut off’ which are much more emotive.