I have to strongly disagree. Pianos, guitars and other instruments have a long and rich history that connects the past to the present. A long arc of human progress and creativity, with some of the most sought after instruments today being rooted in a deep history of human craftsmanship.
Cameras also have a rich history, but don’t belong in the same sentence IMO.
While you can find soulless products to buy, those are only a subset of what’s on offer.
I enjoy using Apple products, and will probably even buy this iPad because I need to upgrade. But it sits in an entirely different category than my cameras and musical instruments.
The entire arch of human history from the first rock picked up our ancestors leads up to the most complex things ever conceived by humans. Requiring a globally distributed intellectual exchange, thousands of years of scientific and technological advancement, commerce, etc.
Focusing on just the physical assembly of complex parts ignores not just where those parts comes from, but also everyone living and dead that contributed to the software which makes it more than odd object. And even that glosses over the continent spanning electrical systems used to power em etc.
A tablet, laptop, etc is the ultimate expression of history warts and all. If they seem soulless it’s because they aren’t just a product of a single culture.
Pianos guitars and violins were crafted by hand! Materials were chosen with care and cultivated over decades with the express purpose of providing a certain character to an instrument! The complexity of a harpsichord or piano was insane in a time before supply chains, and they were designed to last centuries and be passed down between generations! That's just the fancy stuff, stringed instruments can and have been made by anyone, and innovation has come from surprising places! Almost anybody can change the balance, or experiment with covering up holes or adding random metal components to see how it affects the sound. All this effort and knowledge and time goes into something created FOR FUN. You can't eat a piano or use it for any reason other than changing the way people feel, yet music has been around since language was first invented or possibly even earlier.
An iPad is a homogenous blob, it's components broken down and reconstituted at a molecular level, none of it's original character remains. They are the pinnacle of design, but there's not much room for expression left. They last a few years at most before becoming museum pieces or trash. They're impressive in their own right, they showcase human achievement like nothing else. I'd argue they have a less colorful history than music, however.
A homogeneous blob wouldn’t do anything. You’re discounting complexity because it’s not staring you in the face.
> History of consumer electronics goes back maybe a century
Ceramics go back 9,000+ years and people where making glass 4,000 years ago but that history doesn’t count because…
Capacitors, batteries, metals, etc each have their own long history of development without which you didn’t get an iPad.
> The complexity of a harpsichord or piano was insane in a time before supply chains
They don’t use glass, ceramics, etc. It only seems complicated because you have some idea of all the steps involved. Meanwhile you can’t conceive of everything involved in making just the machines required for a single component.
Sorry, my phrasing was poor. As a product line, iPads are homogenous. If we both order one, they will be nearly indistinguishable. Their component materials have been homogenized before manufacturing to remove as much of the character of the original sand or rock as possible.
> Capacitors, batteries, metals, etc each have their own long history of development without which you didn’t get an iPad.
These were not developed with consumer electronics in mind. Electricity itself was only discovered 300 years ago. Electronics absolutely built upon the shoulders of giants, but I don't believe they can claim all human progress as their own. The iPad air doesn't have 5000 years of history because that's when we started refining metals.
> Meanwhile you can’t conceive of everything involved in making just the machines required for a single component.
My work makes optics for the chip industry, so I like to think I have better idea than most, but I haven't been to anywhere like Shenzhen yet, so I may be out of touch...
no, man. have you never experienced music in a personal way? not a recording, not a concert, but as a living cultural joy shared and created together among strangers and lovers both in the same moment - it's so beautiful, so overwhelming in a way that nothing else is.
and so often it involves a musical instrument, you know.
and it can be a story, a lesson, it is all political. people kill and die for this thing every day, and every day in history.
instruments may be more electronic these days and i enjoy my share of electronic music and computer music. but physical, acoustic instruments will always be the icon.
i think a piano or a guitar has already made more history than remains to be made by anything.
the first cultural memes were songs
An argument against my amateur analysis is of course scale. Pianos were being explored by maybe a million people and only a fraction of that fulltime. Cameras are basically a part of life for a large portion of humanity.
For those who haven't heard this term, it basically refers to the Apple aesthetic: sparse, minimal, utilitarian, and clean.
Flat UIs and Material design (out of Google) are other examples.
This ad is basically a millennial modernist manifesto. Down with complexity. Down with variety. Simple, clean, minimal.
Contrast this with the noisy cyberpunk aesthetic that was pretty common in technology before Apple 2.0 and Jony Ive and can still be found in the gaming PC area, or the 80s-90s skeuomorphic aesthetic that dominated UIs until the later 2000s.
When Millennial modernism came to prominence it was itself a revolt against noise, clashing styles, and overwhelm. I personally liked it for that aspect. But I can definitely see how it can also be soulless. IMHO the worst thing I can say about it is that it seems associated with authoritarianism. Like Brutalist architecture it's kind of an authoritarian aesthetic because it comes about by having a dictator who says 'no' to almost everything and enforces a very rigid auteur approach. Once established it also tends to remain unchanged because there's not much you can do with it. "Theming" possibilities are pretty much restricted to light and dark mode.
I myself have mixed feelings (about millennial modernism not the ad, which is awful). The biggest thing I like about this style is its association with reduced cognitive load. The biggest thing I don't like is the association with authoritarianism.
Edit:
Just realized that the Cybertruck is an ode to millennial modernism, and might just be kind of a shark jumping moment for it. This ad would count as another shark jumping moment. Maybe it's on its way out.
The problem with the Cybertruck isn't its design (although people did mock that, comparing it to vehicles from PS1 era graphics), but that it is a poorly constructed vehicle.
It was repulsive.
The issue for me is not about minimalism, so this reframing is not appropriate in my case.
I do agree that there is more wrong with the advert than this. I was just pointing out something nobody'd brought up.
I may be over sensitive to generational comments as I've been 'feeling my age' for several months. And the comment you posted makes sense to me better now. <3
A budding revolt? Equating an iPad to authoritarianism?
I think I understand and agree with some of your concepts. I see a trend back towards analog things and low tech devices, but that's a pretty simple and understandable trend. I don't think it has anything to do with authoritarianism.
Though the tone of the ad was still... Orwellian: imagine a hydraulic press, stamping on human creativity, forever.
That’s how it feels when inflation made basics jump up 50% and it feels you’re being slowly crushed.
Seeing this is an Ad for one of the world’s richest Companies, the lesson I got is the rich are slowly crushing the median.
Don’t buy their crap.
If they're mad at that, then they'd be mad at themselves for having a zoomorphic stressball and squeezing it themselves --which, who knows, is possible, but unlikely to be the case.
Mother's heartbeat. The woosh of her blood stream.
We get months of this auditory performance.
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.