Apple, Inc. had a difficult yr. Or possibly deserved?
One of the richest, most profitable and precious (at least in terms of its capabilities). stock market capitalization) tech firms around the world released a latest Vision Pro “spatial computing” headset, an entirely latest product category and the first since the Apple Watch in 2015, only to form of flop, receiving diverse opinions AND allegedly poor sales AND decline in consumer interest.
Then Apple got it forced by the EU to make the iPhone available to third-party app stores and sued by the US Department of Justice for an alleged monopoly on the sale of smartphones and smartwatches.
Now, this week, lower than 24 hours after a special event to showcase the latest, record thin (0.20 inch, Apple’s thinnest device yet) iPad Pro with M4 chip insidewhat the company claims optimized for artificial intelligenceis receiving loud and rapidly spreading public response to one of the latest tent video ads promoting the device – a spot titled “Crush“
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The video depicts a giant, industrial-scale hydraulic press – a category of device famous for appearing in viral videos over the last decade and a half – literally pressing down and destroying dozens of other objects and creative instruments, from trumpets to color cans. The ad ends with a press release revealing that this stuff have someway been transformed into the latest iPad Pro.
The metaphor and message are quite obvious: the iPad Pro can absorb and replace all the legacy instruments and technology that resides inside it, all in a more portable, sleeker, and more powerful form factor than ever before.
This parallels similar observations and advertisements that other fans and creators have made in the past about how desktop computers and smartphones have replaced just about all individual gadgets – stereo radios/boom boxes, magazines, calculators, drawing pads, typewriters, cameras video – from the past, offering many of the same basic features in a smaller, unified and more portable form factor.
Why the response?
So why are users massively rebelling against the latest iPad Pro ad?
Read some of their reactions – the most important takeaway, as you will see below, is that individuals are outraged by the bluntness of Apple’s metaphor, the destruction of beloved traditional instruments and objects that individuals hold in high regard and ascribe intangible value to for their creative potential and overarching and perhaps unintended message that Apple desires to literally flatten creativity and brutally crush yesterday’s creative tools in favor of lots of of dollars value of luxury technology whose operating system and application ecosystem tightly controls and limits.
Some users even reworded the ad to reverse the effect of the objects being crushed and show that they were coming out of the iPad Pro somewhat than being condensed into it.
Part of a larger wave of anti-technology public sentiment
Is this part greater “tech buzz” or backlash against tech firms that has emerged in the public consciousness over the last few years?
If so, this is probably one of the strongest and most peculiar expressions of anti-tech and anti-gadget sentiment I’ve seen. But on the other hand, critics say that the Apple ad itself sends a strong anti-art message.
In many ways, it also jogs my memory of the growing class consciousness – if you may call it that – among visual artists and creators opposing AI firms scraping creative works without explicit consent or compensation and training models on them to compete with the original authors.
We’ll see if and how this sentiment affects Apple’s sales or Apple’s fame among consumers more broadly in the coming weeks and months.
Either way, for a company famous for its marketing and promoting – The “Think Different” campaign stays one of the most generally respected and iconic of all time — the indisputable fact that the latest iPad Pro ad received such a false response among many users does not appear to bode well for Apple’s fame at this time.