My initial reaction to the ad, upon watching it in the launch event was "huh, that's a fun reference to the Hydraulic Press Channel". The slapstick elements (trumpet noise, squishy balls) made it come across as light-hearted, rather than an ominous display of force by a large company crushing artists' tools.
This idea of 'squashing all these tools down to a thin slab of glass' made sense given their somewhat unusual focus on the thinness of the device. It was a bit of a throwback to the early 2010s smartphone innovation, where the size of the devices was the yardstick by which manufacturers would outdo each other. I would charitably interpret it as an uninspired marketing team trying to spin some version of Jobs' classic "the iPhone is simultaneously an iPod, phone and internet device" - however the party trick is old, and nobody's impressed anymore.
Perhaps the blowback is a sign of a wider weariness that people have accumulated towards big tech companies over the past few years, mixed with a nebulous malaise about 'AI' and what it means for the status quo and people's livelihoods.
This outrage feels so manufactured. I'm a huge basketball fan, coach, ex-player. If they included a basketball in the ad my thought would've been "yeah, you can play NBA2k on it". I'm not mad about the destruction of a single basketball. I don't feel like its disrespect to the game. It's showing that this single device has captured elements of basketball into a small form factor.
As you note this may hint at a larger weariness with big tech -- and I tend to agree. I feel like if it was a public library crushing a bunch of things, and then ends with it lifting up and showing a library card there wouldn't be the same concerns.
Interestingly, basketballs are designed to be as standardized and replaceable as possible (so there’s no question about whether they affected the game.) Whereas musicians do not think of instruments that way. Nor photographers and their cameras, etc. The reaction might be specific to artists. They’re represented on HN, but not as much as non-artists, I bet.
Musicians might not think of their personal instruments in that way, but surely any musician will acknowledge that there exist cheaply made imitations of their instruments that can be treated as more or less disposable. I can get a trumpet on ebay for $60 shipped to my door, and I expect to be able to do whatever I damn please with it, screw what anyone else says.
As a musician, the availability of cheap instruments doesn’t reduce the impact of the symbolism in this ad from my perspective.
It’s not just a question of monetary value or quality, and is more about the implications of the imagery and the resulting questions it raises about the goals of a multi trillion dollar company.
You’re welcome to do whatever you want with your $60 trumpet, and that’s not going to bother me. I see that as orthogonal to the issues with a company of Apple’s size and reach symbolically destroying an entire room full of creative objects while selling to people who are deeply invested in those objects in their own lives.
> a company of Apple’s size and reach symbolically destroying an entire room full of creative objects while selling to people who are deeply invested in those objects in their own lives.
Is it the symbolism that's the is the issue or what's actually been happening for the past 40 years? There's a reason it is called "Garage Band". There's a reason it is called "Paint". Apple isn't investing in the camera tech for the past 15 years so people don't use it. Their ads showing the incredible non-retouched photos with iPhones seems like much more of an attack than this ad.
I think the two go hand in hand, i.e. what's actually been happening for the last 40 years is the context in which this ad was introduced, and the reason the ad feels so bad for many people.
There's a big difference between using product names that align with the analog versions of the tools and symbolically destroying a room full of tools that people often find give them purpose and meaning. It just feels gauche.
> Their ads showing the incredible non-retouched photos with iPhones seems like much more of an attack than this ad.
The difference to me is that one is saying: "look how good our cameras are now, and here's an example of what you can get out of them" and the other is saying "we can just crush this entire room full of tools now because look at this iPad".
I'm not bothered by the camera ads. As a person who carries a camera and loves cameras, the iPhone is a supplement to my kit and the better it gets, the more flexibility I have.
But crushing a shelf full of lenses just makes me cringe.
Definitely their goal is to stop people from playing trumpets and instead play angry birds.
Somebody who worked on this ad probably feels passionately about one of the things which was crushed, and thought it would just be a fun ad. Sure, marketing is their main gig, but they love to get home and throw on some Miles Davis after a long day. They probably never bothered to think too hard about the ramifications of a stupid ad because it’s just their dumb job.
Or maybe they knew 100% what they were doing and it’s evil turtles all the way down.
This means you’re scared a tablet can replace you as a musician. If you have that fear, maybe you should look into it more because from a non musicians perspective, I don’t believe it replaces them, just makes those sounds available to everyone.
Musicians become emotionally attached to instruments that have been with them for a long time. To musicians, instruments feel like they have souls and personalities of their own.
You can do whatever you want with your trumpet but it's not something I'd want to watch.
This is the correct answer. It was taken as an assault on what everyone grew up with and learned their particular trade on (and still may use).
It's also a bad comparison on Apple's part. An ipad is another creative tool and provides a different experience than other methods (like traditional painting). For example, I play acoustic and electric guitar, but also use Ableton. I love my acoustic for the feel and experience, something I can't get in Ableton. I use Ableton for digital composition and sampling, something that's completely different from the feel of strings and how the notes feel through the wood of my acoustic. They are different experiences and usage and purpose.
Okay so don’t watch it? If I buy a $60 trumpet and a $30,000 dollar ad slot, I expect to be able to show whatever I damn please involving my $60 trumpet on my $30,000 ad slot, modulo laws of the land concerning acceptable use of broadcast media. If you are emotionally attached to the $60 trumpet I have used as a prop on my $30,000 ad slot in service of my personal artistic expression: fuck off, I don’t give a a shit, and there’s no reason I should. (Apologies for the crassness, but I really do believe the laws of the land correctly provide us significant rights of “uncouthuness” on public broadcasting channels)
?? I don’t understand this response. People aren’t saying that they shouldn’t have been allowed to run the ad. You seem to be responding as if they were.
People are saying they found the content of the ad objectionable/upsetting.
Is your position that no one should find any ads to be objectionable or upsetting?
What are you arguing here?
Edit: to be clear, I’m not upset with apple over this. I wasn’t upset by the ad (which I haven’t even watched)
My position is that if people find it objectionable (and it’s not actually causing any real harm) they should carry on with their life pretending like it doesn’t exist. This pitchfork army debacle is a load of bologna.
> they should carry on with their life pretending like it doesn’t exist
No, they don't have to listen to you or pretend it doesn't exist. They are perfectly entitled to loudly express their own free speech criticism of Apple's ad or criticism of anything, really.
Creators are also likely one of the biggest market sectors for iPads, so if you were Apple it would do good for your sales to listen to their voices and not offend the people you are trying to sell to.
Did the ad suggest to you that the iPad was a replacement for cheap, low quality physical objects? That would not be very good copy for Apple. On the contrary, all the instruments etc. seemed rather nice to me. The piano alone was probably worth thousands of dollars.
Basketball may be designed like that, but trust me -- hoopers care about their basketballs. There are arguments all the time about the Wilson Evolution vs Baden Elite vs the Spalding TF-1000 vs Wilson EVO. And at AAU games the home team gets to pick the ball -- this is the only advantage they have (since there are no real home arenas) and I've definitely seen teams not be able to shoot because they practice with Evolutions (which are heavier on average) but they play the game with Evos.
Even in college the home team gets to pick the ball (except in situations like tournament play), and players definitely complain about balls (e.g., the Nike balls are horrible).
My point -- almost everyone who cares deeply about an endeavor has strong opinions and ties to their tools (I suspect just as many, if not more, kids sleep with their basketball as they do their musical instrument of choice). My bigger point -- unless Apple came to my house and took the ball out of my bag, I don't really mind that they used a ball which they probably just bought from Amazon.
Yes, a closer analogy would be "look, this guy had a basketball signed by Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant in 1996, and now it's being blown to smithereens and replaced by a 3D model on his iPad".
True but another article I read mentioned Hollywood types being "upset". In what way did the advert hurt them?
Might someone somewhere been rubbed the wrong way? Perhaps. With 8B+ ppl on the planet, anything is possible. But I agree with the post you commented on. That is, the "outrage" felt manufactured. It's been a slow tech news week and perhaps the media was bored and needed some web traffic?
Note: I recently read Kara Swisher's "Burn Book". In a way, entertaining. But when you realize that she - openly and shamelessly subjective to a fault - considers herself a journalist you quickly realize what a cluster fuck that profession has become. Editorial is not journalism. Op-ed is op-ed. We outside The Media shouldn't have to explain the difference to those on the inside.
I have to acknowledge that there’s probably a pile-on effect from people who enjoy outrage, but a lot of the negative sentiment is coming from level headed musicians and artists; a group that I identify with.
And I wouldn’t say my reaction is rage. It’s closer to a combination of deep disappointment, strong dislike, and a growing feeling that the nebulous worries I’ve felt about tech and its impact on art/music are being made very real.
I don’t find it analogous to a library. Such an ad would imply (to me) some kind of digitization, which frankly is a huge problem at a time when libraries and access to physical books are increasingly under threat.
And I find it different than a basketball, because no one is worried that NBA2K is an actual threat to the game, and basketballs are inexpensive standardized objects.
What they crushed was symbolic of thousands of years of human artistic creativity and output at a time when there’s a lot of anxiety about AI more or less crushing those fields for real.
I like the ad on the whole, but I was a little upset about the destruction of seemed like a perfectly good guitar. I play the guitar as a hobby.
But then again, rock bands have been making me upset by smashing guitars on stage for decades now. And these are the same kind of musicians who are apparently outraged now.
Can sort of understand the discomfort, but musicians have been smashing their own instruments for dramatic effect for a while now.
I think it’s the disappointment that Apple is supposed to be on the side of creators and humanity in an era where the arts have been under attack in schools. Apple makes great tools that should complement an artist and their work. It enables a kid who can’t afford an expensive studio to produce their own music. It’s not that it was an outrage machine - it was a population of creatives saying “hey, this feels a little weird”
Look at the replies to the original tweet, it's all as you say completely manufactured outrage. Perpetually-online wannabe influencers with 70 followers talking about how it's "problematic." Maybe it has to do with Big Tech, I don't know but that sounds like it could be it.
I am personally refreshed reading through the comments here and seeing a nuanced, rational response to the ad rather than the manufactured outrage you mentioned.
Lazy journalism is to blame here, as always. Newsrooms have been purged of any talent over the last decade and the only people left are the same "perpetually-online wannabe influencers" you talk about, trawling Twitter for easy stories and rage-clicks. Nobody would have heard or cared about this ad if formerly esteemed publications like NYT weren't running lazy stories about it.
I wasn't outraged, I was disappointed. No manufacturing needed.
"Let's take dozens of objects people enjoy, put them in to a gray featureless factory under a gray featureless industrial press, destroy them in a splash of color, and replace them with a bland featureless grey slab no one really asked for"
And that was my reaction as a loooong-time Apple user.
I understand the intent. The execution is abysmal.
I disliked the ad. I wasn’t outraged. I take a nuanced view that it was a piece of creative poised to be an impressive addition to Apple’s advertising laurels that missed the mark because its creators failed to account for a growing cultural unease.
Outrage is profitable, it drives engagement, and encouraged by these platforms algorithms. And when everyone sees so much outrage all the time, it normalizes it on the platform so even if you're not seeking income from it, that's the default stance.
I think the big thing here is that if you don't have an attachment to any of the items being crushed you probably don't feel as strongly. If you're a trumpet player, seeing a trumpet being crushed is going to be a bit distressing. If you're a photographer, you're putting a monetary value on those lenses being destroyed. If you're into old arcade machines, you're thinking about how many of those cabinets are left in that good of a condition.
AFAICT people are not so much upset about objects of value being destroyed as they are about the symbolism of creative tools being crushed flat and turned into an iPad. For artists and similar creatives, it evokes the way AI companies have already stolen their intellectual property, and their promise to make them all but obsolete in the future.
For me, it’s a mix of both. I’m a musician and a photographer. I felt a visceral negative reaction because those objects are sitting here in my apartment, and I’ve invested thousands of dollars and thousands of hours into them.
I also found the symbolism a bit distressing, because it takes the general worry I’ve felt about AI’s impact on art and music and animates those worries very literally.
Most AI/tech proponents are quick to point out that the original forms of expression aren’t going anywhere. But this felt uncomfortably close to “where we’re going, you won’t need these things anymore”.
And the thing is, I’m a big fan of the iPad and it’s incredibly useful as a companion to these artistic endeavors. But I’m not a fan of the idea that it supersedes them.
I'm a former professional musician. Not being able to tell the difference between your own pet being tortured and an object on tv being destroyed in a commercial would be a severe mental disorder.
People have anthropomorphised and attached sentimental value to musical instruments and other artistic instruments since the beginning of civilization. Just because someone writes an academic paper claiming it's a disorder doesn't mean we should care what they have to say.
There's a big difference between "I give my guitar a name" and "Seeing a commercial where a trumpet gets squished is the same as my own pet being tortured".
Let's not pretend you didn't say "Watching a musical instrument get crushed is like watching a pet getting tortured".
A metaphor would be "the boy was a cat as he tip toed quietly through the house".
You're thinking about what reasonable people would say and mean, but these people actually want to say that seeing a trumpet getting flattened in a commercial is the same as watching your own pet be tortured. Why that is, is anyone's guess. Maybe to seem sensitive and deep.
Remember when I predicted that you would attack me and attack 'how I asked' for evidence instead of actually explaining how watching a commercial of a trumpet being mushed is the same as watching your own pet being tortured?
Even then it's about things that someone actually owns and not something from a TV commercial.
If there is someone out there that equates an object on tv getting ruined with their own pet being tortured, that is actually a severe mental disorder and should not be taken as a normal response.
That would be a person unable to function on a day to day basis.
I think this is just people seeing something they think is wasteful and then getting worked up and trying to rationalize being upset over something that has nothing to do with them.
This response is basically just you saying "nu uh, you're wrong" again. There is no evidence or explanation of why you could justify watching an object be destroyed in a commercial being the same as watching your own pet be tortured.
Find me any example of people thinking this is normal. How would someone go to the movies or throw anything away? It's complete nonsense.
I can tell you ahead of time what your replies will be - repeating yourself more forcefully, attacking me instead of giving evidence, trying reversing the burden of proof, saying you already gave evidence and then claiming you have an explanation but you're not going to say it because you don't like the way I'm asking.
For me I can't see the symbolism part, but I have serious concerns about destroying that many things and making such a big mess just for one ad. That's just me though.
The arcade one particularly distressing given that arcades and their unique arcade hardware are rapidly vanishing across the world without replacement.
And the arcades that DO exist are often 90% shitty ticket games that cost $1, have about 15 seconds of gameplay, and then maybe after blowing through $50 you'll have enough tickets to buy $2 worth of Tootsie Rolls and maybe a balsa wood glider. If you got really lucky, maybe a plushie.
Though there are some "barcades" popping up these days that focus on classic arcade games to appeal to older the older crowd.
I happened across a nice one when I was in Denver, recently. It's called Akihabara. Tons of imported Japanese cabinets (including Taiko no Tatsujin and Typing of the Dead), and a bar with imported beers, sake and house cocktails. I wish I'd had a smartcard for saving progress, but it was only something I found out about during the trip.
I'm definitely more into the 90s and early 2000s era of arcade games than 80s stuff (and the seat-friendly JP cabinets are nice) so I enjoyed the opportunity to play games that are hard to find here, and bring back memories of wandering (relatively lackluster) bowling alley arcades with a pocket of quarters.
I understand that there is an entire culture surrounding these machines and that people enjoy collecting and restoring them. Hell, I would even like to build a cabinet myself one day.
But there's a reason they are disappearing. They're old and obsolete. While they may have value to a niche group, they are overall viewed as mostly worthless.
Secondly, there's a very simple solution to disliking what someone else does with their own property. Purchase it before they do whatever you dislike. Either from them or by beating them to the punch and buying it from the previous owner before they do.
> Secondly, there's a very simple solution to disliking what someone else does with their own property. Purchase it before they do whatever you dislike. Either from them or by beating them to the punch and buying it from the previous owner before they do
I think this kind of sums up why it was a bad ad.
"Don't be mad, you could have just outbid me" isn't a great thing to have to be saying at the same time you're asking the same person to get hyped about a new product.
The Gutenberg bible is also old and obsolete. The pyramids at Giza are old and obsolete. Stonehenge is old and obsolete. Ancient cave paintings are old and obsolete. The Wright brothers' flyer is old and obsolete.
Most of the reason that collectors have to spend a lot of money on arcade cabinets, though, is not that they have high market resale value; but rather that the machines they can manage to acquire are usually in terrible condition, requiring large amounts of conservation work to get working and presentable again. And they’re so broken down, because everyone but these few collectors have valued — and continue to value — these machines so little that they’ve allowed them to rot in warehouses for decades. Many arcade cabinets are recovered from e-waste recycling centers, or even landfill.
If they truly had market value, then people other than the collectors themselves would be making a business out of finding and restoring these cabinets, in order to sell them to the collectors. But no such business exists — because there just isn’t the demand to sustain it.
I’m reminded of a recent YouTube video about MadCatz gaming peripherals. The video’s author had to spend thousands of dollars buying the few remaining controllers on the used market to use as examples. Why so much? Not because of high demand. Because of limited supply — they were so valueless (mainly due to just being awful products even when new) that every owner of one had long thrown in away; no gaming store wanted to buy any used (being seen selling such brands was a mark against the quality of a store!); and even thrift stores had long dumped them for lack of interest. These gamepads and flight-sticks had value to this one guy making this one video — but literally nobody else.
A one-time purchase, does not a market-clearing price make. The market is still just as illiquid after such a purchase as before it.
> Why so much? Not because of high demand. Because of limited supply
Eh, "high demand" is meaningless on its own in this case. There's high demand relative to the supply.
And not everyone recognizes value in an old cabinet and throw theirs out (further reducing supply), but that just means the market isn't efficient, but that's true of the market for most things.
Your "solution" is so unrealistic for all but the very wealthiest people that it's on the verge of seeming disingenuous. My bank account would have to be quite a few orders of magnitude larger for me to be able to purchase even a fraction of all the things in the world I would like to preserve.
I was so angered by your opinion on relics being worthless that I checked your comments and you seem alright in other respects. I do like HN for this reason. So yeah I disagree with you this time but I’m not going to be rude
The console says “Space Imploder,” which isn’t a real arcade console, from what I can tell. There’s more discussion here[1], but it seems likely that a lot of the things weren’t real (or if they were real, they weren’t were junk that was broken beyond repair).
This seems to be a major point that’s missing from the discussion. If a lot of this is stuff that was fake or already headed for the dump, it completely undermines the argument that perfectly good equipment was destroyed.
The point isn't how it was produced, but what the message is. And the message is destruction of creative instruments is good, akshually, because shiny & thin.
No amount of "but we only rendered it" is going to fix it. It speaks about values the company holds.
Also, the focus on how these devices are increasingly consumer only instead of me being able to use my device to create
Disclaimer: one of my goals is to build apps for my machine on the machine itself. I had this working on the now defunct Firefox phone OS (Its apps were deployed as Zipped HTML/JS and related resources -- I cobbled together a dev environ out of a few browser based tools).
TL;DR: I'm a tool-using creator-type species, The modern "CONSUME ONLY" device craze makes my eye twitch; Ads that reinforce destruction of tools make me want to join fight club.
Man, you touched on something that has been a sore point for me my entire smart phone owning part of my life. The inability to make a simple program without huge hurdles, just for my phone and no one else.
Having a locked down tool that is so dumbed down is annoying. For example, I'd love to make a custom unit converter so that I can quickly and unobtrusively convert between metric and imperial without being online/etc. that also displays the answer with closest drill size
This reminds me of an article from Maddox in 2007 about how the Nokia E70 is better than the iPhone because he can use the terminal on it. [0] Time may have proven him right.
Art creation is creation. Muic, images, video -- they all benefit from good screens, fast processors, quality stylus integration, first party apps, and full-stack attention to latency. The iPad is about creation, just not your type of creation.
So if you own a house or car then it's distressing to see one destroyed in a movie? Both of those cost much more than a trumpet, and for many people are more personal and unique, but somehow most people manage to keep their eyes on the screen.
Depending on the context, probably? During my suspension of disbelief of the narrative, it might make me say "I don't like this destruction!" and to root for whatever might be mitigating the destruction
Honestly, outside the context of a movie or education, I find it pretty off-putting altogether. The videos of brand new cell phones being destroyed, TV's kind of less so but still, cars being crushed or vandalized, etc. If I put my psychoanalysis hat on (always dangerous when your subject is yourself, but anyway) I feel two big things:
1. A part of me just does not like waste. I'm keenly aware of our rampant consumerist culture's slow and continuing march towards collapsing our biosphere, and one of the ways those thoughts manifest themselves is being really upset with people buying products simply to turn right around and destroy them, while barely using them, usually for profit in the attention economy but sometimes seemingly just because they're wealthy and bored.
2. And another part: growing up poor, I'm keenly aware of how valuable things can be for people like me, who didn't grow up with much. Maybe that old computer that works fine that you're going to run tannerite through for a YouTube video means nothing to you, but I vividly recall many points in my life I could've really used it, and I know I'm the absolute opposite of alone in that fact.
The "artistic" angle that a lot of the outrage this is drawing didn't really hit me as hard as these things did, but that's just my subjective experience. I respect people who love these beautiful things and don't want to see (probably) completely functional, or even repairable, useful things destroyed so a multi-billion dollar company can sell more products. (And let's be honest, given the nature of video production, the ones we actually saw destroyed were likely a fraction of the ones actually destroyed.)
The artistic angle I do understand though is if it's done for something like a movie, it doesn't hit the same for me. When it's done to make other kinds of art, even schlocky hollywood crap art, at least that has... a result, I guess? It's destruction to create something. This was destruction for... another fucking ad. That will be forgotten in probably 2 weeks.
Edit: The more I've thought about it, the more gross it feels, and I find myself really sympathizing. Times are pretty tough right now and artists have it rough during good times. How would you feel if you, as a piano player, who hadn't gotten to play in years (or maybe even ever!) on a piano like that, how would you feel seeing Apple buy one that at least looks to be in perfectly good working order, and smash it, in the service of selling you a stupid iPad? I really think this is impossible to comprehend without taking into account that everyone is hurting right now: inflation, Bidenomics, whatever it is you want to call it: people are broke, our expenses are going up, and our salaries remain the same. Yeah, I totally understand why this ad in this cultural moment hit a nerve: a whole ton of people, especially creatives, are struggling right now and here's Apple, buying up a ton of awesome things, and smashing em to bits and being like "here, you don't need a piano, you need an iPad!" Yeah, no shit people are upset.
I remember Obama's "Cash for Clunkers" program where people were paid to pour sand in engines and run them to destruction.
This was all supposedly in the service of replacing them with more fuel efficient cars. The trouble was the numbers weren't run. To equal the emissions from manufacturing a car, a car would have to be driven 20,000 miles. One can easily see that the increase in fuel economy didn't add up.
Then there was the "create new jobs" fallacious reasoning, akin to the broken window fallacy.
I remember once watching some heist movie while recovering from a motorcycle crash, and the sight of all the faceless mooks crashing their bikes during its car chase scene was so viscerally uncomfortable that it took all the fun out of the spectacle. This had never been a problem before.
> So if you own a house or car then it's distressing to see one destroyed in a movie?
I think there's a difference between showing items getting damaged as a depiction of some sort of chaos or violence versus lauding it as being obsoleted by technical progress.
That's because the blown up car is not advertising anything.
Instead, imagine an ad extolling the virtues of public transport by blowing up cars in a parking lot. It sends the complete opposite message than what was probably intended.
Yeah, I do a lot of live recording from my piano to Mac and I was thinking the same thing.
But maybe the ad is saying - you're no longer programming a MIDI track, the AI piano player in Garage Band or whatever is just going to be indistinguishable from a real piano.
I wasn't initially bothered by it, but I think the people who are have a fair point especially about the generative AI implications of replacing real creative tools.
Yeah I don't care how good the AI is, it's not the same as the experience of playing a real instrument. It's taking away someone's creative experience and replacing it with a synthetic version. Even if the result is higher quality artistic output it eliminates the process of producing it which should not be discounted.
If I saw a house, that looked like the one where I grew up, being cheerfully destroyed to build a Walmart parking lot, yes I might get a little distressed. It would certainly not improve my opinion of Walmart.
if a car is like a tool that you tolerate in order to get to work, then no, you might even enjoy the recording of the enactment of a revenge fantasy you can't afford
if you spend your weekends polishing your car, buying aftermarket addons for it, modifying it, and/or considering which car to save up for next, then yeah, it's gonna fucking hurt if you watch a movie and see them blow up a car like the one you long for, especially if you think they did it for real instead of using cgi. and that's true whether that car is a lamborghini countach or a low rider
This comparison falls wildly short and completely misses OP's point.
Many people own cars, but only a small number of people are deeply into cars, and for one of those people I can definitely see a vintage car getting destroyed on screen causing a negative emotional reaction.
Many people own homes, but it's their own home that they get really attached to, not the abstract concept of a home.
My wife is a lifelong, fervent string musician and I have been with her in a film where she shouted out in pain when a string instrument was brutally destroyed. OP is talking about having that kind of attachment to an artform, not about causal ownership of objects.
It depends on the context. On an entertainment yt channel, one single real trumpet, so what. But the context apple produced is the implication that the very concept of a trumpet is being destroyed and replaced with a thin, temporary simulacrum.
The difference is subtle. In the first case, a single real trumpet. Only worth a few hundred bucks. In the advertisement, the crushed trumpet is a symbol representing everything around trumpets: lessons, spit valves, centuries/milennia of history, inherited instruments, afternoons afterschool marching around on a football field with childhood friends.
> I don’t think it is healthy if you are emotionally distressed seeing a trumpet being crushed.
My first thought was the exact opposite: watching the specific ad without being distressed, shows an emotionally damaged human being. Especially the last part where the toy gets crashed screaming is really messed up.
I would guess that if it is a real trumpet the props department went down to the local used instrument store and picked up the cheapest Yamaha in the discount bin. But, the way the trumpet crumples doesn't quite look realistic to me.
I know it's actually hard to tell. There's definitely some CGI in there. But a lot of it looks pretty real too. But the issue with it was the destruction of all of the creative tools. So it's in some ways not quite as bad if it's not real.
Some bits are obviously physically impossible, so definitely CGI.
I can be persuaded that some shots are real+CGI, and squished into the larger CGI view. They might have crushed a few "things" to see how they would fail, and then CGI'ed up a final version.
The wide shots do not look real. The lighting is not believable. The failure modes of many individual items are not believable. The whole pancaking effect of the big crush is not believable.
I understand the discomfort at seeing wanton destruction. It bothers me to see great old houses or cars get wrecked for movies, for example.
Nowadays, most of that is fake.
And I think almost all of this ad is fake as well.
Even if it is a cheap one, it's still wrong. I have the same visceral gut reaction to seeing a musical instrument get destroyed as I do to seeing a book burnt. I own a lot of very expensive, very nice instruments. However, some of my favourite music I have created has been on dirt cheap charity shop instruments.
It's just the shear waste of it all that strikes me. Like so many of those things cost so much money to the people that could use or want them. So many high-paid tech workers are already out-of-touch with what most people consider affordable that I'm not surprised their marketing team thought this was ok.
But most artists are starving, and we live in a world where waste like this isn't really morally acceptable.
It's like a dog whistle. People who care about this are not unhealthy, they are having a visceral reaction to something that you don't understand the significance of. Try curiosity instead of dismissiveness.
You’ve probably never invested hundreds or thousands of hours in a hobby, art form, craft or skill. If you had, you would find the ad at least mildly disconcerting.
If you don’t see how, maybe it’s time to get off the screen? Stop consuming and try creating for a bit?
I don't think it's healthy to have so little perception or understanding and think think everything is that simple.
No one is traumatized. It's just unappealing and tone-deaf that's all. Showing a harmless little toy head and face getting squished and then popped, and presenting that as cool and fun and good, just makes you wonder about the person who produced that imagery and thought it could possibly have those associations, that's all.
Showing a bunch of mixed colors of paint oozing down the side of something is not "emotionally distressing", it's just unappealing, especially to Apple product customers, who buy Apple products precicely because they are sleek and minimalist and clean. Steve's & Ive's entire universe was clean & sterile.
It's remarkable because Apple are supposed to be the KINGS of exactly those sorts of intangible things like impression & subconscious reaction, where things like a 0.1mm or 0.1degree difference in a shape actually matters.
> Showing a bunch of mixed colors of paint oozing down the side of something is not "emotionally distressing", it's just unappealing, especially to Apple product customers, who buy Apple products precicely because they are sleek and minimalist and clean. Steve's & Ive's entire universe was clean & sterile.
For me it was a different reaction: They literally replaced a bunch of colors with grayness. In a gray factory. Under a gray slab.
This is very different from what Apple used to mean and advertise.
"We squeezed all this functionality into this one device"? That doesn't sound that hard to understand.
No wonder everyone on this site complains about loneliness and therapy and this and that. Most humans aren't 'distressed' by this stuff. I always did wonder about the oddly neurotic opinions expressed here. Now it makes sense: people have little to no emotional resilience here. Everything is the end of the world.
I'd say that's a first world thing for the generation that grew up on SSRIs and the pathologization and medical treatment of every negative emotion from grief to mild discomfort. Not specifically a HN problem.
But they didn't actually squeeze all that functionality into a cold piece of glass, plastic, and silicon. They're only suggesting that you see it that way and to give them your money instead of buying and learning to play an instrument.
I mean, I guess just having an iPad can get you laid somehow these days in the very stupid world we live in, but the guys in the band with actual musical skills are probably getting way more action.
I guess you don't understand advertising. Emotional response is a common theme. Consider Honda's continuous "Dream" series of ads. If you think everyone is a snowflake you aren't enlightened, you're just very bad at sales.
The entire ad is a symbol for Apple's iPad replacing everything being crushed. It's not "Space Imploder", it's every single arcade game every made. It's a representative for arcade games in general. Nobody should take "Space Imploder" literally. They can't use "Space Invaders" likely because of copyright, but I'm sure that they would have in this ad if they could have just so that someone wouldn't end up missing the point and suggesting "but, Space Imploder doesn't even exist".
You mean the arcade cabinet that conveniently switches to a GAME OVER screen while it has sparks flying and smoke pouring out of it when it gets hit by the crusher? Somehow I doubt you lost an actual cabinet. I'll be surprised if it's even made out of wood and not polygons.
It's possible that some of the close-ups are practical, but the wide shots, such as when the cabinet is being crushed, look fake and plastic as hell. And quite a lot of the destruction is super dramatic, whereas real objects under real hydraulic presses are way less so.
> If you're a trumpet player, seeing a trumpet being crushed is going to be a bit distressing
Really? I play the trumpet and felt nothing watching this ad. My trumpet wasn't being crushed, so who cares? It wasn't a rare Stradivarius, nor even a high-end Schilke or anything... Even if it was - why care? They can make more trumpets after all...
You either get the symbolism of "let's crush all remaining vestiges of creative culture" or you don't.
If you don't, that's fine. Policing the extent of people's reactions doesn't make for constructive conversation, and, ironically, is merely a different form of "over-reaction."
> You either get the symbolism of "let's crush all remaining vestiges of creative culture" or you don't.
Correction: you either choose to believe that's the symbolism, or you don't.
I "get" it, intellectually, but I don't think that was the intent of the advertiser, nor do I think it's the obvious interpretation of the ad. The obvious interpretation, to me, was "hey, we can piggyback on this hydraulic press channel meme and sell iPads!"
Tellingly, few people care that the hydraulic press channel exists, despite actually crushing all sorts of stuff [1]. See also: the viral "does it blend?" ads [2], and any number of music videos or performances where instruments are destroyed [3] (practically a meme unto itself), etc.
The intent behind media matters but isn't all that matters. How people might interpret something is important (albeit often unpredictable).
I think the symbolism of "let's crush all remaining vestiges of creative culture" is a pretty obvious _potential_ interpretation from a _non-trivial amount_ of people. In that sense it is an interpretation that matters for our present discourse, even if it isn't the interpretation that the creator of the ad intended.
> How people might interpret something is important (albeit often unpredictable).
It's a big world out there. There are literally billions of possible ways that people can interpret whatever you put out in the ether, and many of them are...precious...to the extreme. Worry too much what any one of them is going to think, and you won't do anything.
The obvious conclusion, to quote every influencer on the internet, is: "Haters gonna hate", but admittedly, I don't work in Apple PR.
I don't think the ad intend this messaging. I do think it unfortunately parallels what many advocates of AI do believe, strongly. And that's what people are reacting to.
I think the ad is a bit a Rorschach test. Most people see a butterfly. Others see man violently stabbing a bicycle, and that says more about them than the creators of the ad.
basically agreed, except I think that the latter group is 90% comprised of people who see an opportunity for performative angst and/or attacking Apple.
Or, you know, _only_ seeing the butterfly and then being dismissive about other interpretations, maybe people who do that also have things revealed about them. ;)
I find it incredibly hard to believe they had no idea what message they could be sending. Everything reacts to its destruction. They choreographed the final moments of each prop to show pain.
The hydraulic press channel does not do that. Their videos convey enthusiasm and sheer glee.
If you are already weary of too many screens; and you find a world with more physical objects less bleak.
It's not so much that Apple "wants to destroy everything". It's just that they care more about the digital world than the real world. This is the same intuition that makes people weary of virtual reality.
It's in the context of how the FAANG segment of the tech industry has become overbearing and is cheerfully destroying all sorts of great things in order to replace them with more tech.
It's not really about Apple specifically, but more that the ad is graphically illustrating something that already seemed to be all too true.
It's simply uncomfortable to see a lot of valuable creative tools being slowly destroyed for no reason, especially a piano. I'm not even thinking about the symbolism.
I thought it was obvious that the entire ad is CGI. Nothing really breaks how it would. When the top of the piano breaks, all the dampers magically fall off.
Maybe so, but decisions aren't based only on what's cheapest. A lot of the objects destruct in a way that's more exciting than how they'd compress in reality.
ironically enough, the use of CGI replaces the need/demand for real instruments in making this ad just like how AI is replacing the need/demand for real instruments in creative industries
I picked up on the context of all the human experiences we perceive as wrapped up in those items - as sorts of resiviors for human emotion and symbols of self actualization. I think a more apt analogy would be: you wouldn't host an estate sale at the site of that person's funeral.
If my metronome app stops complying with iOS developer guidelines, it will stop working or Apple will pull it. This doesn’t happen to a real dedicated metronome. The App Store is a problem for iPad. Developers need the freedom to develop solutions for iPad without Apple constantly breaking their APIs or introducing new standards. Otherwise nothing on iPad is timeless.
How much of a blowback was that really anyway? I mean a social media headline that a few others pile on... is rather limited as a blowback.
If anything both ad idea and implementation are mediocre - and perhaps should have been rejected on that account. This is indeed Youtube shorts stuff. And someone pointed out the exact same ad idea from LG 15 years ago https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NcUAQ2i5Tfo with even more musical instruments.
> Perhaps the blowback is a sign of a wider weariness that people have accumulated towards big tech companies over the past few years, mixed with a nebulous malaise about 'AI' and what it means for the status quo and people's livelihoods.
I think you hit it on the head. It's not so much anger about seeing a piano or a trumpet get crushed but more about the symbolism of it. Which, I think is definitely tone deaf on Apple's part.
The fact is, artists, developers and many people from all walks of life are terrified of what AI will mean for their jobs and their livelihood, and also, afraid that it cheapens everything they've spent all their life learning and mastering.
There's definitely a lot of pent up fear and/or hatred for it bubbling at the surface for many people and this commercial just kind triggers those feelings.
It's also from Apple's long-time core audience. I'm not sure how people don't understand this, other than maybe they've forgotten the roots of Apple's comeback.
I am not a musician or photographer, but I see the emotional value of those extremely well crafted and often beloved objects.
I create software, mostly, but I practice woodworking as a hobby, and I can tell how difficult it is to build a piano or any kind of musical instrument.
I found the ad extremely distasteful, enough to trigger mild nausea.
I see the point they were trying to make, but it is both dumb and old, and frankly nobody asked for a thinner iPad.
The most annoying part is that _they_ did not feel what countless people saw and felt, they are too disconnected from their audience.
The outrage is not made up, some of us felt it in our bones, I understand that we don't all share the same sensitivity, but you can't simply brush it off as if this was somewhat orchestrated or theatre.
My initial reaction was the opposite — “wow they are kind of late to the hydraulic press channel hype. That’s odd.”
For a company that has always prided itself on having strong marketing chops, this felt out of character. And perhaps a sign of the general change in culture and standards at Apple.
Perhaps the blowback is a sign of a wider weariness that people have accumulated towards big tech companies over the past few years, mixed with a nebulous malaise about 'AI' and what it means for the status quo and people's livelihoods.
Exactly. It's not only the creative artists who are opposing, although that's what this ad targets; a lot of others not in big tech are also very displeased with where things are going. The sentiment of this resistance can be summed up in two short sentences: "You will not replace us. Machines will not replace us."
I saw the ad as trying to draw an equivalence between the iPad and all of those creative tools, as if owning an iPad is equivalent, or even better, than owning those objects. This is a lie, a deception, and apart from lamenting the loss of so many wonderful objects the lie of it is what really sticks in my craw.
It made me cringe, but only because I saw it after hearing about the controversy. It made me wonder whether I'd have had the same reaction if I just saw it "fresh".
“Perhaps the blowback is a sign of a wider weariness that people have accumulated towards big tech companies over the past few years, mixed with a nebulous malaise about 'AI' and what it means for the status quo and people's livelihoods.”
To the former point, I think it was Doctorow that coined the term “enshittification”.
To be fair to Big Tech, they’re not any worse than healthcare companies, or airlines, or any of the countless (sometimes it seems basically all) corporations that have been steadily turning the crank on making the modern experience a little worse every year for typical people (I’m not interested in silly summary statistics like per-capita GDP or the CPI, those are gamed to hell: give me an arithmetic mean and I’ll give you a corrupt system).
It’s that so recently they were so much better. When I joined a FAANG in 2011 I had no issue wearing company gear around. People would be like: “that’s awesome I use that every day it’s great”. By 2018 I was lying in coffee shops and bars about what I did for a living (one of the main reasons I left).
Regarding AI broadly construed, it could be used as a wildly powerful tool for leveling the playing field, the way Google was when it appeared. It’s in the hopes of realizing that outcome that I work on it and am so vocally critical of those who just trivially don’t want that.
But it could also become the greatest tool for oppression since the firearm, and I think the public is starting to get wise to the fact this is unfortunately the path we’re on.
It’s trite, but I always come back to this: when the robots are finally capable of doing all the work, do we get Star Trek TNG or Blade Runner.
The technology is a step in either direction depending on how it’s used and regulated.
Yeah — I liked it in general. But can completely see why artists would hate the concept of a giant weight crushing the artistic object that has fueled their life-long obsessions.
I ask myself the same thing almost everyday and then that one really cool thing comes along. Yep pretty much mental gambling in the same way other social media is. I got rid of all of that, HN is my last hold out for now.
> Backlash for a short ad crushing a few colorful items in an interesting way is simply neurotic. See the definition of neurotic for more clarification.
I can absolutely see what they're going for- something like "you're iPad contains the power of all these cultural tools", but visually that connection isn't there. It just looks like "Hooray! Culture has been destroyed, now there is only iPad!"
I took the message that all that culture is now available in an even slimmer form factor. This is the problem with art. Unambiguous messaging is impossible as one casts a wider net of interpretation
I think the mark of a good ad is that you can turn the music off and most people will get the message. The imagery of destroying the things is the problem, if you turn the music off you really don’t know how you are supposed to feel about this. Apple conveyed similar messages before with animations that did not destroy the underlying album arts, just shrunk them into an iPod. It would hit very different if they crushed a bunch of music paraphernalia people got a lot of enjoyment out of.
Very true- I wonder if the prevailing interpretation would be different if this was 20 years ago. The destruction of all those tools would probably have a much more "punk rock" interpretation from people if Apple weren't the megacorp they are today.
There's nothing anti-establishment on the commercial. They need some minimal amount of punk if they want a "punk rock" aesthetic.
All that is there is a megacorp stealing a previously popular (comical) format, to show people's culture being (quite forcefully) transformed into establishment. The commercial is repulsively anti-punk.
20 years ago there were healthier vestiges of traditional arts and culture across society - it's easy not to appreciate or miss things until they're gone.
I found it super ironic how they blathered on about all of the recycling going on in their products, then blatently show all those items being destroyed when they could clearly be recycled.
I do think that the 'rendered' idea was the best - almost thinking differently, or something...:S
It's an animation of items being destroyed. It's very fake and Apple used an exaggerated cartoon style animation so it couldn't get mistaken for reality.
It's like getting mad at road runner for dropping a piano on Wile E Coyote.
It's not about the actual instruments that probably weren't actually destroyed to make the ad. No one is mad about that. The visual of instruments being pointlessly destroyed can be viscerally upsetting. Just because you have no emotional attachment to such objects doesn't mean other people do not.
I wouldn't think most (if any of it) was real. At the most I'd expect they were destructive props in the same way the table with the legs sawn to break in the just the right way for a movie stunt is a "real" table, but not a "real table".
As the other comment says, the cans would never crush flat before the piano starts to deform at all. Then when the front of the piano comes open, a pile of all the dampers just falls out, despite that area not being touched yet. It's all done to look exciting but not realistic.
Yes. Why in the world would a director use practical effects for something like this?
The CG isn't even that good. It looks like something out of DALL-E.
It calls to mind yet another way in which the ad could have been crafted to communicate without controversy or offense -- the instruments could have been more obviously cartoons.
The ad clearly didn't communicate that message to a huge portion of its audience. There's plenty of us who can see the intent but still don't like the ad. There are so many other ways to communicate that message in a more effective way.
I think everybody agrees that that was the _intended_ message. But it's a forced transition. At the end of the ad there is _just_ an iPad. It's not as if the user has any choice now. And that makes the ad very weak. Why is Apple even going into the destruction business? They are supposed to be a creative (creating?) company, if it were an Lockheed Martin ad it would have fit ;)
By whose definition? Art is creative expression and there's no qualifiers in standard definitions to exclude work that is used to promote something else.
I'd say flyers for shows are art. or movie posters. or book covers, for that matter. Or trailer music? corporate jingles? They're all art.
By academic definition in the Science of Culture school of thought that I align with.
Art is roughly self-expression or interpretation of reality performed with symbolic means.
It's a debatable definition of course, as aesthetics are nebulous, but most others are far too broad and therefore lose their meaning and usability, at least in the academic context.
> I'd say flyers for shows are art. or movie posters. or book covers, for that matter. Or trailer music? corporate jingles? They're all art.
They are not if we're talking in generals, though there can be conditions where a specific piece can be viewed as such, of course. All the things you mentioned are products of craft most of the time. Crafts belong to the wider sphere of aesthetic culture of course, but it's not art. Of course, I know some artist/illustrators closely collaborating with authors/musicians for their posters and covers, but it's more of an exception to the rule.
Roughly speaking, the need to tailor a creation to align with the desired brand image or marketing strategy inevitably conflicts with honest self-expression.
> By academic definition in the Science of Culture school of thought that I align with.
Can you give me one example of this school of thought? An actual institution or some book/paper that goes into this topic? I have not been able to find much anything except broader topics of culturology or science of culture. I've also not found anything suggesting that my examples aren't considered art by it.
> All the things you mentioned are products of craft most of the time. Crafts belong to the wider sphere of aesthetic culture of course, but it's not art.
Crafts and Art overlap frequently. Someone can be a woodworker that builds tables and they might not be an artist. They fine tune their craft and build sturdy, excellent tables, but they're not creating art. However, if they are making creative decisions about how they want to express themselves through the tables they create, yes, it is art.
> Of course, I know some artist/illustrators closely collaborating with authors/musicians for their posters and covers, but it's more of an exception to the rule.
It hardly matters if they are or aren't, you don't need a band to participate in the creation of a flyer for it to be considered art. The art part comes in from what the artist who is creating it.
> Roughly speaking, the need to tailor a creation to align with the desired brand image or marketing strategy inevitably conflicts with honest self-expression.
Constraints are a normal part of the process of creating art. If I commission someone to create an oil painting on a canvas of a specific size, that is also requiring an artist to tailor their creation to align with an external factor out of their control. That doesn't make the resulting piece not art.
I get that physical constraints aren't the same as ones that are tied into art, like what message you're communicating. I think I just fundamentally disagree that it disqualifies something from being art. If I give a writing prompt to a writer, is the resulting piece of literature disqualified from being art because I shaped what it is to be about? I don't think so. Similarly, I don't think that defining themes to use in the creation of a piece of art makes it less honest. It just means that the self-expression is conveyed through different means.
Being true to HN guideline of assuming good faith, I can say that the place is really irrelevant, as, from my experience, you can't effectively force a definition within an institution without taking away academic autonomy. Mind it, this is a definition stemming from the Social Studies/Culturology context, and not from Art Criticism/Art History, as the former fields do not concern themselves with making a value judgement.
I'm long out of the loop, so I can give only general directions. You could say that the definition in question aligns with Riegl's idea of embodiment of Kunstwollen, perhaps in some way with Collingwood's aesthetic expressivism view of art, and also integrates the semiotics approach, which helps with underlining the importance of both the form/medium and the subjectivity of perception (this is important for looking at art in historical/sociological context).
If your question was, in fact, an Ad Locus attack - well, the name for it is Genetic Fallacy, I believe.
PS: A school of thought is located in the minds of its supporters ;)
My postscript just meant to point out the fact that since you asked a question about a school as a place while answering to my comment mentioning a school of thought (that's not a place), perhaps there's some miscommunication happening.
Me mentioning a school of thought and not a specific institution implied the fact that when it comes to culture, there could be a considerable variety of positions within one such institution. For example: when it comes to universities, students can be taught by professors from different faculties but the subjects can intersect significantly, so they get to see the varying approaches to even the basic stuff and they are supposed to make their own minds. Humanities are like that, there's no formulas set in stone until disproven.
I'm not so sure about that; the emoji with the eyeballs squeezed out of their sockets didn't exactly scream "compression" to me. It felt like they were aiming for over the top cartoonish destruction - but destruction nonetheless.
I hate ads, but I'm struggling to understand how something being an ad disqualifies it from being art. Advertising is a creative human endeavor. Ads are designed to make you feel something, just like art.
The romantic ideal is that art is not about consumption, but the reality, both historically and currently, is that art objects are by and large made to be bought and sold. If you disqualify all works meant for consumption, you would have very little left that we currently recognize as art.
There are a long list of arts with adjectives in front of them. commercial art, applied art, fine art, etc...they aren't art just because you have co-opted art to mean only fine art. Also see:
Art and design exist ubiquitously in all things and all actions. It is the people without taste who pretend art or design is a separate activity from all other human endeavors. Perhaps a subset of "pure" or obvious art are works devoid of function except to be perceived.
"Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable." - Cesar A. Cruz
Its not Apple's style, but they could have opened the ad with some cringe fake scientists discussing how to shrink and/or combine and/or smush music, books, art, etc together. And then at the end show them excitedly rushing to the IPad as if they've solved everything.
So an Aperture Labs reference? They could have Chell pick up the iPad and throw it at a screen of Cave Johnson’s motivational speech. Then it could bounce off without causing damage, showing how lightweight it is, and who it truly serves.
Beautiful, colourful, creative objects gathered together in a the middle of a grey room and destroyed to be replaced by a generic rectangle. This is like the 1984 ad with Apple as the bad guys.
Hahahaha you’ve never worked in ad creative have you? It’s full of people who have been crushed by their inability to support themselves making pure art.
This ad makes perfect sense from that perspective.
Okay, Zappa is a bit defeatist although what he says is true, I don't think it's that bad... But here it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=88zvm7-fhKo (Frank Zappa on American culture)
American exceptionalism is easy to pick apart, and George Carlin would agree.
The point he's making was (c. 1970) that much of American culture's presumption of innate superiority post-WW2 was unfounded overconfidence demonstrating a lack of humility and intrinsic tempered confidence in relation to other rich traditions that also exist. It is also true that American culture was and is intrinsically hollow and shallow in many (but not all) dimensions not replicated in other parts of the world. And to be fair, Zappa was brilliant and a guitar virtuoso but a bit off in a way the 60's-70's counterculture celebrated profusely in a reactionary oppositional mirror of mainstream American culture. Growing up, my hippie nudist neighbors with their hydroponic weed and horrible tasting tomatoes would be all over everything Zappa. Incidentally, I have a signed Zappa KSJO sticker signed at a Campbell, CA venue and its newspaper clipping provenance... going to get it framed and probably sell it on FleaBay at some point.
Frankly it’s bizarre. He was a fantastic rock musician who seemed to forget where delta blues, jazz, bluegrass comes from. They drew on older traditions but were distinctly American culture. Maybe his point was really that it’s not popular culture but you can criticize any country’s pop culture.
edit: I'm surprised at the downvote. I'm a huge Zappa fan. I know that he was into many kinds of music. That is why I find it strange that he doesn't even consider the rich tradition of American folk music to be part of our culture.
So which is it, am I wrong that he was a great musician? Am I wrong about the rich tradition of American folk music? Am I wrong about pop culture in other countries? Is it because I didn't mention country music?
I didn't downvote you (just upvoted, since you got me to stop and pay attention to that parent comment).
I understand and agree with your point that certain genres of music have significantly evolved, if not been entirely created in, the US, and that it's weird for a professional musician to take the stance that that isn't the case.
At the same time, I've often thought similar things to what Frank Zappa said (despite never hearing/reading that interview before, or knowing much about him at all). I often think about how a lot of the social/racial/religious/etc unrest we have going on in the US is because we have no national identity. We are a melting pot, but we're also just a melting pot.
Similar to convincing people to stop perpetuating racial issues in the US, when race used to be connected with nationality (and still is in some places)-- or convincing people to stop raking modern-day Americans over the coals for people 250 years ago taking the land from Native Americans-- it's going to be difficult to convince people to draw a line at a point in time where we stopped "stealing" or "being influenced by" other countries' music and started legitimately creating our own. It will simply never have been "from scratch," and people will either figure out how to accept that and (critically) move on at some point, or they'll keep being upset about it for eternity and we'll keep tearing ourselves apart.
Double-edge sword with only one surface. Just don't get it wet, expect it to last over 7 years, expect your old accessories to work with it, or for it to actually substitute for the mastery of physical artistic crafts like Mehmet Girgiç is to felt.
Missing from this extremely short and underreported article is how badly this played out in Japanese market. The culture they have states that musical instruments, creative tools have some energy and imbued sense of spirit to them. So destroying these elements of culture is really really blunt and gauche to them. The majority of the push back came from Japanese people, and then artists empathizing with their sentiment.
Not because eg one piano got destroyed; surely that happens all the time, even on camera for eg movies and such. But there was something about watching beautiful objects be destroyed, in slow motion, gratuitously, and with an upbeat/sunny tone, that just aesthetically made me squirm in my seat
It goes beyond aesthetics for me. It's like they took everyone's deepest fears about technology and AI, that it will replace or "crush" authentic human experience and creativity, and they just embraced and celebrate it by literally crushing representations of human creativity. At least I'm glad the corporate types were actually honest about their goals, though, instead of their typical doublespeak
This was what I understood it to be as well, they let it split out by accident/enough group think. I’ve worked in tech long enough to firmly believe this sentiment exists.
Agreed, that's exactly how tech companies are, and Apple is one of the biggest. Apple doesn't really care what people create, so long as they are buying an Apple product to create it on. It doesn't matter that an iPad doesn't feel or sound like a trumpet. If someone buys their product to learn to play a trumpet or a piano, then they were the fool parting with their money that Apple was hoping to find, and there's a lot of them apparently.
Exactly my thoughts - this ad does very little to invoke the desire for the product, unlike many other Apple ads.
It's not like Apple has forgotten how to make such ads - the recent one for iPhones with family members asking to not be let go while the owner tries to delete photos represented a familiar experience of people trying to free up storage, and how they wouldn't have to do that if they bought a new iPhone.
On the other hand, this ad just shows stuff being destroyed, just like some of those useless Youtube videos which shows perfectly usable stuff being destroyed under the pretext of "ASMR" or whatnot. Not only is it very difficult to watch as someone who didn't have a lot of money and was taught to make careful use of it from an early age, it just invokes negative vibes, as if possessing a musical instrument is something to be ashamed of.
Their marketing team has been missing the mark for a while. The “big and bigger” billboards with people in the distance holding up phones to the camera with a giant hand tiny body look feels like something Samsung would have done in the early 10’s
I haven’t seen anyone mention this yet, but I think the concept here was inspired by all the viral hydraulic press videos on Instagram and TikTok. Here’s a similar video showing random objects and consumer products being crushed in slow motion with similar upbeat music: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=q9BtYEnrkg4
Sure, maybe that was the intent. But most of the objects I see in the linked video are cheap and mass-produced (a water bottle, some sticky notes, some plastic toys), which makes it feel totally different
I'm not bothered by the destruction. Destruction itself can have artistic value. For example, you can't portray the Nazis on screen without showing how destructive they were.
What bothers me is the arrogance to say that an iPad, a device which will be obsolete in a few short years, can replace all those instruments and tools that last more than a generation.
This is similar to the history channels which use AI colorized historical footage which wildly shifts objects from red to blue in a few frames and have the audacity to claim this is an improvement over the original.
I had same reaction to the 'niceness' of what they were crushing. Things looked too good, like still usable. What if they were slightly older and dinged, scuffed up, looked more like they were done being useful.
For me it was just because of the damage it caused. I guess if I heard someone was throwing out a piano I wouldn't think much of it, but the destruction of everything in the ad made me uneasy. I just felt like it was so wasteful to destroy things in the way they did. But again, maybe I have a double standard, because if I saw someone throw a trumpet or an old camera in the dumpster I probably would not care as much.
I don't think these objects being real or not makes much (if any) difference to those who view the ad negatively. The underlying idea that Apple is crushing these tools of human entertainment and creative expression, only to replace them with their own "jack of all trades" remains the same.
Can confirm. I reacted negatively to the ad (in a "this ad causes emotions which the creators absolutely does not want an ad to cause" kind of way), and for me it's all about the imagery and symbolism. I hope and assume that the destruction is primarily CGI, but the visuals of destroying positive "soulful" things like instruments and replacing it with a lifeless slab of glass just doesn't sell the product to me.
In fact, I think this would have been an excellent art piece if the message was "heartless tech corporations want to destroy the good things in life and replace it with a cold slab of glass".
At first I had a negative reaction. Then, looking for comfort, noticed that the video is mostly CGI. But then again, I felt the same. It is what you say: the image of destruction of beautiful objects is bad per se, it's not what the objects are, it's what they represent.
Without expertise I would just casually guess that a hydraulic press this size does not exist, or if it did, it would not be used for that. So at least that part is CG.
Yeah, it looks super CGI to my eyes. Especially the desk and the piano. I also can't imagine anyone trying to direct this kind of a video without having precise control on what the destruction looks like.
Really interesting to consider that this might be one of the few incidents that Shintoists, or at least "cultural Shintoists," have gotten offended at a western production.
Makes me wonder if this is why Apple went out of their way to apologize for the ad. I think if this ad just had non-culturally-specific backlash, they would've simply moved on. But because this impacted a specific market's sensibilities, maybe they felt the need to do a public mea culpa.
I have seen recently a documentary about Japanese food, and an interesting fact was that the chefs at some big Japanese restaurant had a special decorated grave, in some nice yard, in which they deposited their old kitchen knives, when those were so worn out that they could no longer be used.
They felt that it would be disrespectful to just dump somewhere the main tools of their work, after they had used those every day for decades.
I think a lot of people are a little bit Shintoist. That's one of the reasons why we have museums - we regard things as some kind of reflection on people and events, and a chair in which a famous person sat or an instrument they played is different for us than otherwise identical object that doesn't bear that imprint. We may not literally believe in things having spirits, but for many the things have some qualities that go beyond their physical structure. Emotional value, etc.
The popular sentiment has changed from enthusiasm about "digital", to disillusionment about big tech inserting themselves into our lives to monetize everything.
In 2009, smartphones were a novelty, and the iPad has not been announced yet. People were wowed by the new capabilities that "multimedia" devices were enabling. They were getting rid of the old, outdated, less capable tools.
Nowadays "multimedia" is taken for granted. OTOH generative AI is turning creative arts into commoditized digital sludge. Apple acts like they own and have the right to control everything that is digital. In this world, the analog instruments are a symbol of the last remnants of true human skill, and the physical world that hasn't been taken over by the big tech yet. And Apple is forcefully and destructively smushing it all into AI-chip-powered you-owe-us-30%-for-existing disneyland distopia.
It aired on the Internet, which is available in Japan. You can see some examples of backlash from Japanese people in the replies to this tweet, if you have a twitter account. https://twitter.com/tim_cook/status/1787864325258162239
I see several people stating they're ashamed to owning an iPad, and will never buy one again. Is this a form of hyperbole to push a message, or is there really this much emotion?
The skepticism is strange to me. I think the ad is actually compelling enough that it's making some of us really examine the question of whether or not the iPad really can (or should) replace these things. Apple is making a bold statement, so strong reactions are expected.
I've known for a while now that I'm more creative with a 2H pencil and a sketchbook than I am on my iPad. I'm more creative noodling around on real strings than in an app. This has made me pause to consider whether I should ever again plug in my currently uncharged iPad.
> really examine the question of whether or not the iPad really can (or should) replace these things.
> This has made me pause to consider whether I should ever again plug in my currently uncharged iPad.
I can't comprehend this. It's not an either or scenario, and I don't believe destruction/replacement was the intended message of the commercial. These things can be (somewhat) emulated with the iPad (are inside it). You can use an iPad for those, while riding on the bus, eating lunch, whatever, or when creativity does strike you. But, I don't think any reasonable person is thinking an iPad is a parity replacement for piano or a physical paint brush, or will use it to replace those. It's a tool, available when someone wants to use it. I have trouble believing this much, and fairly profound, introspection is only happening because of a silly commercial showing things being compressed into an iPad. I think it must be something else/indirect/unrelated, possibly something to do with identity. But, I suppose this is evidence that these emotions are real, which is fascinating to me, seeing the iPad as a small form factor computing device/useful tool.
I'll just say that I have a piano at home that exists, and I can happily use, regardless of the charge state of my iPad. I can go between them, without issues. But, I will say, the objective limitations/irreproducibility of compositions that come with using musical notation is much better handled with sequencers (which can then be used to produce the under-expressed notation).
Absolutely no offense - I don't see what this has to do with Japan at all although this has been repeated everywhere. I think this is just an unfortunate natural intuition.
Japanese users normally aren't exposed to the rest of WWW at all, even on social media, so there's intuition that any notable interactions observed has to do with the four-seasons and egg sandwiches way. But it's also true that there are 0.35x as many of the people here as there are US Americans, or 1.5x more than Germans, which creates a lot of presence in itself, possibly even grossly exaggerated on Twitter due to cultural fit and ongoing collapse of its en-US bubbles. I think this instance is example of the latter being the case mistaken as the former.
I agree that the comments on Japanese culture were unwarranted, off-topic, unnecessary, offensive… and while I know very little about Japan, I feel I should ignore random internet opinions on it.
But can you elaborate on your second paragraph? Should culture always be immune to criticism?
I always understood the whole point of political correctness was to not spew hateful words about anyone and that should be the standard.
Criticism is one thing, but the poster felt the need to "educate" all of us about how an entire country's opinion is invalid because "it's not an utopia". Nobody brought that up, and disregarding an entire culture's opinion of an advertisement campaign because weebs have unrealistic expectations, in a discussion with a valid and informative point about said culture, is tastelessly petty. And why belittle liberal arts majors anyway?
Let's call it what it is: racism and intolerance of other cultures.
I feel like this ad is also a litmus test for empathy: if someone can't spot the inferred symbolism or understand why people have a problem with it...they are very impaired in that regard.
I guess I wasn’t sure what you meant by “target”. I agree with you on all counts, except that I’m not sure I interpret the comment as “hateful”. Wrong and offensive, yes.
I think they didn’t really understand the criticism of the ad, and decided that the reason people were so opposed was out of some irrational reverence for the Japanese, themselves irrational due to some spiritual heritage.
Aside from the destruction of low-tech artistic tools triggering non-tech people aspect, tonally the ad was also overly edgy, which is off-brand for Apple. As noted elsewhere, it felt like a video game commercial from the '90s: gratuitous in its attention-seeking.
Re: the Pokémon commercial, I feel like the Apple commercial put way more focus into the actual destruction of the instruments… Like, a lot of its runtime was spent on actually showing each thing getting destroyed individually, so it has a completely different energy compared to the silly Pokémon one
It’s like if the Pokémon one showed each Pokémon getting crushed with splattering and gore…
Yeah there was revelling in the visual and nuance of their destruction. Could have done the whole thing CG where the objects squished together satisfyingly like they were made of clay rather than cracking and shattering. Honestly was easier/cheaper to do also.
Yeah, I think if they did than then it would have actually been a good ad. But focusing on the destruction/actually having destruction at all took away from the point that "it's compressing all these things into one" and made it interpretable as "we're destroying all these things, cause iPad can do it all"
1984 was edgy for its time. I think the difficulty is that the iPad is no longer an edgy product. The least edgy thing you could be these days is an iPad owner, and this ad wasn't the one to change that.
1984 [1] was edgy precisely because it worked as a criticism of society and culture, and then showed a way to 'break free' of mindless dystopia. This [2] ad is pretty much the exact and literal opposite. It essentially takes a sampling of the great things that culture and society has produced, destroys them, and then shows the Product, while literally singing "All I Ever Need Is You." Here [3] a guy basically reversed the ad, with the iPad being crushed, and then slowly lifting it up to have all the great stuff in society come out of it. And suddenly it's actually quite uplifting and positive!
Today's "1984" ad would have to include someone throwing a sledgehammer through an iMac, and similarly destroying an iPhone. It wouldn't be an advertisement for any corporation though, because a truly game-changing act today would be to opt out of the extractive and coercive cycle of modern proprietary technology.
Rebellion can't be bought, but in the 1980's I think it was still an open question whether computers would ever be something that non-nerds wanted. In hindsight, it seems inevitable that general purpose, user friendly computers would crush everything, but was that really a given? Isn't there a possible world where IBM and/or Xerox do own everything and never make it past huge, expensive systems that were only made for specialists?
For everyone here that loved our C64 or DOS PC, how many of our peers actively rejected early computers because they weren't fun to use?
Besides which it seems to me that Apple has never really been against having a single giant corporation controlling everything you can see, do and say, they were just against that corporation not being Apple.
What about rebelling against the cultural elements of rebelling? Much of the image of rebellion has been a futile cycle of (ironically) trying the same thing repeatedly and failing to make any changes. Not falling into the bullshit of old bearded white men who never had to work for a living, were total economic illiterates even if they called themselves economists, and have been dead-for centuries.
"1984" was edgy in a cool way, but that's not the type of edginess I'm evoking. Most '90s video game commercials that were edgy did so in a puerile, juvenile way as befitting the target audience. And not just video game ads, there was definitely a big "xtreme" trend as well.
The Apple ad taps into that xtreme vibe by embracing destructive energy to depict a physical contrast. Which is visually attention-grabbing, but it puts the focus on the act of destruction, and reduction, and people who like the destroyed objects feel miffed.
"1984" I'd say was edgy in a rebellious way as you point out, which I'd argue gives it more substance. The sledgehammer hitting the screen isn't even the focus, it's the climax to a sequence that carries more of a meaningful message than "wow look how much functionality we fit into this thin shell."
> "1984" I'd say was edgy in a rebellious way as you point out, which I'd argue gives it more substance. The sledgehammer hitting the screen isn't even the focus, it's the climax to a sequence that carries more of a meaningful message than "wow look how much functionality we fit into this thin shell."
Well, it just wasn't focusing on empty slowmo destruction of a big screen. It had an emotional message behind it. A bit like original Star Wars vs Rebel Moon.
For low-tech I meant analog as opposed to digital. And I meant nothing pejorative in non-tech; these days, there's fewer and fewer positive connotations in being techie.
we're on a technical forum, but "low tech" isn't inherently inferior. All the MIDI's in the world can't truly replace a good ol' acoustic sound. That's why we still have Orchaestras.
The other half, sure. To think that all tech people are welcoming the current portrayal of AI/LLM's/Generative Art is simply tone deaf. Some of the most cynical detractors are in fact highly technical people.
On the contrary, I wish this was dismissive. It's about time that the Overton window gets shifted about the overly nostalgic articles that get praised by "the right people", which means we need to "read the room" and share the same opinions.
It is an absolutely good thing that an inexpensive device is replacing an expensive one, and that impoverished children will be able to create music with an inexpensive iPad and will not be forced to learn obsolete methods to "finger" an instrument.
How to even start here..
Calling the ipad inexpensive will make people in most of the world to laugh at you (even the discounted stock of ipad 9th is unapproachable for many).
While a guitar at a local store (just looked it up) costs under 80 EUR, needs no apps, no power, no subscriptions, has no EOL, doesn't have a battery that will go bad.
Yes you need time to learn, but you do not necessarily need to invest more money with an analog instrument.
I’ve never seen a guitar under about $300US new that was actually playable without some serious attention from a guitar shop, and on the lower end they’ll probably just tell you there’s not much they can do to make it better. They may need frets filed down to remove rough edges, neck adjustments, to simply have the tuners replaced because they’re so poorly-made they basically don’t work, et c.
Guitars that cheap are similar to crappy small-key $40-80 electronic keyboards that can only sound like three notes at a time and sound terrible doing it—they’re so bad that they will tend to frustrate and turn off even a beginner.
I bought my German made mandolin that's like 100 years old for less than 10% of an ipad, and it'll never be obsolete, that's the whole point...
It'll always be up to date, I'll always find the parts to fix it, and even if one-day it somehow gets damaged beyond repair I can recycle it in my fireplace in about 30 seconds
I feel like people making your point don't see the fundamental difference between a functional tool like a hammer and an artistic tool like a musical instrument, and it's kind of scary tbh.
> I can recycle it in my fireplace in about 30 seconds
not disagreeing w/ anything else (beside responding to a sarcastic comment, usually 'caring for the children' [esp. out of place] is a decent giveaway + repeating 'inexpensive'); however burning stuff is not recycling. If anything it releases all the carbon (CO2 + CO) in the atmosphere, compositing in the ground is a tad better option, but the lacquer might prevent that part... for a while.
>Not more than burning my regular fire wood, and infinitely better than fossil fuel
Not recycling still, recycling would be making something out of it, e.g. a plate, a toy, whatever.
Another option is making fiberboard alike material out of it from sawdust.
Dunno about termites, it'd depend where you live, but then again, I am not sure how that came into the discussion. Anyway compost is used in gardening, so it's a form of recycling.
> It is an absolutely good thing that an inexpensive device is replacing an expensive one.
Professional musician (pianist) here. It’s an outlandish take on solving affordability by destroying acoustic instruments and replacing them with iPads. Let’s see someone play the Prokofiev Toccata in real time using Garageband, no MIDI files allowed.
Aside from whether the iPad is inexpensive or not, it just doesn't replace an actual piano or trumpet.
If your use case is really covered by the iPad, you could also make do with a refurbished corporate DELL costing half the price or 3 years ago's Surface Pro, same way the track makers were doing 2 decades ago.
So no, Apple's marketing would sure want us to think so, but impoverished children are probably not saved by 2024's thinner iPad in any significant way.
I can just visualize the post iPad high school jazz band -- twenty kids sitting in chairs with their tablets, rhythmically tapping virtual buttons on their touchscreen. One stands for her solo, tapping her screen at a different cadence. Oh, she's playing trumpet? I thought she was a saxophonist!
What artistry! What musicianship! Thank God for Apple and the new iPad!
There's a lot to break down here, but I'll take the less obvious angle. If you're calling the shiny new iPad an "accessible, inexpensive device for the impoverished", Apple's multi-billion dollar, decades long marketing has clearly failed you.
Yeah, how dare people have emotional connections with musical instruments! The great (and very inexpensive) iPad will finally allow humans to become equals and set poor people free. Nostalgia is exactly what's wrong with this world.
Yes, this is very over the top, but the iPad is neither inexpensive (compared to your $50 garage sale guitar and synthie) nor is it sufficient to make music.
People enjoy music from instruments not only because someone was able to compose a song on it, but because the instrument carries emotion, there is sweat and pain in learning it, people become masters of their instruments and have actual connections to them. The iPad is a powerful device for making music, sure. But it's not exactly the device I would choose to allow impoverished children to create music. And I, personally, enjoy music more when I know it's actual people playing instruments rather than just a producer mixing some stuff and only recording the singing. Calling playing an instrument obsolete and "fingering" is insulting.
I get your sentiment, but I feel like your view on iPads and there being no musicianship to it is just wrong. The instruments in garage band have velocity sensitivity and can be played expressively by tapping the screen just as you can tap the keys on a piano or hit the marimba with some mallets.
In fact on some of the synthesizers you gain an additional mode of expressiveness because you can adjust your input as you're playing notes, similar to MPE synthesizers like the Osmose.
An iPad is more than sufficient for making music.
I say this as someone that really enjoys playing my instruments (mostly guitars) and wouldn't trade the experience for an iPad ever.
I mean that's just a nonsense statement. You can say "make music (that I don't like)" but you 100% cannot say that an iPad is insufficient to make music when thousands of people do that every day and tens of thousands of people enjoy their output.
Between the fact that you think that entry-level instruments cost more than iPads, that somehow "fingering" an instrument is a bad or obsolete thing, and that you think iPads are affordable to the impoverished, I'm really not sure where to begin correcting you.
Just... yikes. I hate to be flippant, but you're so out of touch that my only thought is to tell you to touch grass.
Yeah, why learn to play an instrument with your caveman hands when you can rent an iPad and make something that sounds the same with the AI in Garageband!
I'm not so optimistic these days. Poe's Law has long since died. Even if this was misunderstood sarcasm, you can probably find this opinion around the net (mayeb even further down the post).
> Aside from the destruction of low-tech artistic tools triggering non-tech people aspect...
604 comments on this HN post (at the time of writing this), the bulk of which appear to be opposed to this video, and you're trying to tell me that tech folk aren't, to use your word, "triggered"? C'mon now.
Yikes, that was really offbrand for Nintendo also, but it fits within their 90s "Play It Loud" marketing strategy wherein they tried to compete with ow-the-edge Sega and later Sony.
It accurately shows how tools are being replaced with digital and cloud. It’s a violent process and precious things get destroyed along the way. It totally hit the mark.
But true, it doesn’t make people want to go grab an ipad, so I get why they don’t want to use it.
> It accurately shows how tools are being replaced with digital and cloud.
No it doesn't.
Throwing away all other sentiments, I really would like to see a 100lb digital piano replacing a 500lb upright piano while keeping its action, feel and sound, if not a grand piano. That hasn't happened yet, not even remotely, after all these years of technology advancenent. Anyone who is serious in learning and performing piano would be doing that on a real piano. And of course iPad isn't even in the conversation -- what can you do with a touch screen?
You’re talking about whether an iPad can accurately reproduce the quality of the original tools.
While I would certainly agree, like it or not, many of these things are being replaced by iPads/iPhones and other smart devices.
Many people used to carry around point and shoot cameras, calculators, watches, flashlights, etc. but those things are just short of completely depreciated.
Sure, this ad included things that aren’t quite as deprecated, but the trend is in that direction, and not away.
> I really would like to see a 100lb digital piano replacing a 500lb upright piano while keeping its action, feel and sound, if not a grand piano.
I get the impression that you’ve not played a digital piano lately.
While purists will definitely not touch an electric, most casual players — and especially beginners — will be fine with, and are buying — and preferring! — a good electric piano over a grand or even uprights these days.
I wanted a grand myself for years, but couldn’t justify the cost or space consumption of a grand.
We’re now the happy owners of a Roland FP10, and it’s great! The sound, IMO is amazing, and about as close as an electric can get to the real thing.
We recently sold the digital piano after 3 years of playing on it and replaced it with a traditional piano (an upright). It's true that a digital piano works for beginners. But for someone with dedication, they outgrow digital pianos extremely quickly.
EDIT: it actually depends on what you play. We usually play traditional pieces, especially those by Chopin so a digital piano definitely doesn't cut it.
The r/piano subreddit is full of amateur pianists who own a high-quality digital piano who share their experiences playing a grand piano for the first time. 99% of the time, they express astonishment, amazement, and their wish to someday own a grand piano. 1% of the time, they complain that the grand piano they played on was way out of shape and was difficult to tame.
For a lot of people, and it seems yourself included, a digital piano is an excellent compromise. It gets the job done, but if all else were equal and circumstances permitted, such people would still prefer to own a grand piano, for significant and non-negligible reasons.
Without a doubt. I’ve played on a grand and upright, but I’d still call myself just barely above beginner. But I do have a good ear for appreciating music and acoustics, and agree that they’re definitely much better.
But it’s crazy the progress they’ve made in the past decade or so in reproducing the sound — and particularly the feel of the hammer action — of acoustic pianos.
And whether it’s budget, space, and/or experience level, a digital piano serves as a great replacement.
When world-class artists come to the NPR studio, a place with high end upright and grand pianos, to perform; many of them bring Nords Korgs or Rolands. Why do you think that is?
We are not talking about the same kind of piano here. And different artists value different things or just need other features, and the "authenticity" of an upright piano is very likely what they are looking for, which is totally fine. This really is another topic. Sorry.
> I really would like to see a 100lb digital piano replacing a 500lb upright piano while keeping its action, feel and sound, if not a grand piano. That hasn't happened yet
It absolutely has. The sales of upright pianos are down, while sales of digital pianos are up. I'd call that replacing.
"Hybrid pianos have gained immense popularity among music lovers. These pianos are increasingly being used to provide keyboard lessons as they combine the electronic, mechanical and acoustic aspects of both acoustic and digital pianos. In addition, hybrid pianos take up limited space and can be easily moved due to their small size and lightness. In addition, these pianos require little maintenance. Temperature and humidity do not affect their configuration due to amplifiers and speakers. They can also be connected to digital interfaces, laptops, iPads and other devices. As a result, pianists are increasingly preferring hybrid pianos, prompting vendors to launch more innovative products that will boost market growth during the forecast period."
I know someone learning piano for fun. They carry their lightweight digital Yamaha to the couch, plug it in, and start paying, walk up to their room, play some more. Digital keyboards/pianos are great, if creating music is your concern, rather than the instrument.
There is the kawai novus5 which is a digital piano with the action and soundboard of a real upright piano and enough speakers to sound almost exactly like a real piano. There are also some new roland models I haven't tried. Many dealers lump these into their acoustic piano offering and don't market them differently because they are that good.
Dude, that's not an argument and not how you discuss things.
You need to at least put a link to some article that says someone built it, and other pianists agree it can replace both the ACTION and the SOUND of a piano. Oh, it should weigh about 100lb, not 500lb.
(And if such a thing exists, why wouldn't it commercially be available so that everyone can buy it? Plenty of people include me would want it. Why wouldn't Yamaha or Roland build this 20 years ago, as if they don't have the resources for that?)
Also, looks like your comment only focuses on the sound part of it -- if real at all -- and ignores the mechanical part of it. That's a big no.
Before seeing more evidence, I'll just assume such a thing does not exist.
That would've be hilarious as parody of this commercial if the hydraulic press shot out flames too and burnt some books. Make that message even more ambiguous lol.
Burning books certainly doesn’t have the connotation it used to, given that the idea of a book is now mostly divorced from the physical implementation.
You could burn every physical copy of most recent books and no data would be lost; I assume most authors write with a word processor.
I agree. This is a rare gift of truth and honesty in advertising.
You might not like what the industry is doing but don't kill the messenger: they just gave you a short glimpse behind the curtain. The company will keep the same goals even after they give their ad team sensitivity training.
Agreed. This will be considered a huge win by Apple's marketing department. People (online at least) are talking about the iPad like I haven't seen in years.
If anything, an ad like this is too real and lets slip the mask that is "Apple is for artists". Nope, Apple is for expanding the existing Apple-only ecosystem.
A classic arcade game experience is not going to be reproducible with a subscription to Apple Arcade. A stradivarius violin is not going to be replaced by Apple Logic Pro.
In my opinion, it's one of those ideas that are so obvious that I wouldn't necessarily think it's plagiarism.
> It's a small electronic device that replaces so many real world things. It's like all these things 'zipped' into one... Okay good idea, but how do we make it look cool?... Epic music... And Explosions!
The ad is actually less embarrassing than the fact that how uncreative this is.
On the other hand, it's also hard to imagine that a bunch of people working in the ad business / phones / creative marketing, and not one of them said while working on this ad: "hey guys, aren't we just redoing that phone ad from 15 years ago?"
> how uncreative this is ... aren't we just redoing that thing from 15 years ago?
People of a certain age are informed by shared cultural touchstones.
Those making ads in these timeframes are ages where they all experienced the Star Wars trash compactor scene as a visceral moment pressed into their psyches:
As a child, the blasters and light sabres are make believe, but the compactor closing in slowly on Luke, Leah, C3PO, that felt real. Kids could feel that big squeeze. It was ... VIVID.
When you start making create visual experiences (ads in particular), it's not uncommon you'll reference such touchstones. You'll get approved by marketing committees because they too have that touchstone in their pasts.
The original scene plots out as an increasing stress, but ends with a relief. Ad creatives often "quote" these if they feel they can match/replay the original emotional beats, here implied looming threat, visceral danger building agonizingly slowly, realization of total destruction, saved by suddenly revealed relief.
Nintendo, LG, and Apple all tried to have their "product placement" land in that surprise moment revealing the pressure relief: a sleight of hand where this moment, this thing, is the MacGuffin associated with the stress vanishing.
Is this uncreative? "Aren't we just redoing Star Wars New Hope?" Sure. But ads that connect to the beats of touchstones inside the viewer do evoke more reaction, and the ads aren't quoting each other, they're quoting the original.
Art often quotes art, the quoting considered both creative and effective.
On the other hand if your product has become a commodity and the new version barely changes from the previous one, you are entering detergent advertising territory.
Wow, you're not exaggerating. That actually does bring a legitimate accusation of plagiarism to the table. Compare 0:13 in the LG ad to 0:37 in the Apple version.
Never mind that the artwork itself looks straight out of DALL-E 2, with its orange-bluish cast. Who is calling the creative shots at Apple these days?!
The amber/teal stuff is mostly because it makes the foreground warmer and the backgrounds colder drawing the audience's focus. Or so the theory goes. I think it's just more of a case of "fuck it, no one is going to complain if we do this"
Check out the transformers films - those are the canonical punch in the face in that department.
That's what I really want to figure out. I feel like I wouldn't have a problem with it if I knew it was 100% fake and not actual items being destroyed.
Eh, It's a pretty obvious premise. I think it's reasonable for two creative teams to come up with the same unoriginal/uninteresting premise. The execution of the Apple version is also miles ahead.
LG in 2008 was not on Japanese people's map regarding to phones, their "Chocolate" line was an utter failure that got the brand promptly forgotten. I doubt that spot was even aired in Japan.
and to your claim, no. its a minor player (far behind the Japanese makers). You will have a hard time finding anything with a LG logo in stores in Japan. the market is heavily skewed towards local players.
If you claim is that LG makes parts used in phones sold under other brands - then sure - it's present in that sense. But LG as a brand name to sell products has poor recognition / poor value perception in Japan.
Not specific to LG, from the chart. Seems like all brands, including Sony are an afterthought. (Note that LG doesn't currently sell LG branded phones. They sell to other brands.)
Following your rationale, I'd guess the top selling brand is getting backlash specifically because it's the top selling brand by a large margin. And other brands, like LG, can make "outrageous" ads without causing outrage because Japanese people either don't see or don't care about ads from brands that don't hold a majority market share.
Is that close to what you're saying? If so, is that true for other market segments? It'd be interesting to note. I don't know that I have a similar example for the US market.
This ad feels unnerving for, I think, non-obvious reasons, beyond just the raw destruction of artistic tools.
In music and sound effects from horror genres and other "scary" things, playing very high pitches with very low pitches makes us anxious - our brains are wired to perceive high pitches as safe and low pitches as menacing[1]. If they're both happening at the same time, our brain gets stuck trying to figure out WTF IS GOING ON, which makes us anxious.
A similar thing happens with this ad: cheerful music while apparently senseless destruction (the reveal doesn't happen until the end) is taking place. IIRC one of the Fallout games did this too - post-fallout world but upbeat country music as the theme? The gasoline fight scene in Zoolander. Etc, etc.
Anyway, these kinds of juxtapositions are SUPPOSED to make our brains feel uncomfortable. I imagine this was interpreted by the ad people as "edgy" or "surprising" or "innovative". But it's still going to make people who aren't sensitised to it feel uncomfortable.
This is a really good observation, it's uncomfortable to watch and listen to even beyond the really obvious but apparently unintended symbolism. The music is off, the sound is off, so many weird decisions here ... some ad exec using ChatGPT instead of doing their job?
Yeah, I got these vibes too, but especially from the cinematography. It was kinda _lingering_ on all the little ways each item strained and broke under the weight of the press, almost like it was something to savor. It was weirdly voyeuristic, in a way.
I didn't like the ad. I think the people creating it wanted to imply that it's as if they took all these things and put it in an iPad, where you can still achieve all the creativity while carrying a thin device.
I don't think it's impossible to convey that message without destroying instruments and creative tools that are precious to so many. Maybe if they had made the animation very fast it would've appeared as a joke and not something intended to be taken literally.
Also could've had some artist exit a studio, take the iPad, do a whole bunch of stuff, then go back to the studio and kind of test out/use the tools while reading from the iPad or something like that.
I know some people are saying the reaction is too strong, but trust me if you practice on a piano daily you will not feel good watching it get crushed.
I don't even work in marketing or own any Apple devices.
The original idea is sound: "we are squeezing all tools into the iPad".
The problem is that you can't squeeze an object without resorting to animation. So instead they went for crushing, which carries destructive undertones. A lot of people have strong emotional attachments to objects like pianos and vinyl players; destroying them is a powerful trigger.
If this had been done with animation, with some djinn magically squeezing everything into an iPad, it would have been just fine.
This said, there is no such thing as bad publicity - here we are, talking about the umpteenth version of a product we would otherwise take for granted. The ad might have been distasteful but it did the job.
There definitely is such a thing as bad publicity, I wish people would stop using that phrase to make dumb things sound smart. Of all the companies out there, Apple definitely doesn’t want to trade on negative sentiment, it clashes with their overall brand strategy. In particular this iPad Pro launch is riskier than normal, given that it has brand new screen tech and is the thinnest device they’ve ever made, and it’s possible they pulled this commercial to avoid creating associations between this iPad and the act of “crushing” things.
Furthermore I doubt that anyone on HN (except like 2 people who will definitely reply to this comment) who didn’t know about the new iPad Pro before this commericial learned about it from this post.
Allow me to be the first of the two to announce themselves.
I agree, though. Although I only learned of the product because of the outrage over the ad, it certainly hasn't moved me toward wanting to purchase one. And I'll actually be in the market for a tablet in a few months.
#2 checking in. I pay almost zero attention to what Apple does. I'll pay attention if they start allowing Mozilla to ship add-ons with Firefox so I can run adblock on mobile like on Firefox!
#3 of a vast number: I don't pay attention to what Apple does, choose not to own any Apple products even though I do respect their technology, particularly Apple Silicon; would not have been aware of a launch of a new iPad if it weren't for this controversy.
You can run ad-blockers on iOS Safari (they're called "Content Blockers", I use Firefox Focus's) granted you're still stuck with Safari/WebKit for the time being.
Yep, I had considered getting an iPad. I probably wouldn't have, this doesn't prevent me bur it is a point in another directiom. Things like the Minis Forum V3 give me more options and the company knows "how to read the room".
>There definitely is such a thing as bad publicity, I wish people would stop using that phrase
the phrase "there's no such thing as bad PR" is meant to make you realize that there's more to PR than you... realize. It's in the style of something like a Buddhist koan. it's not meant to be taken literally or to an extreme. It's not a proof but it does describe a real phenomenon. You can't reject the phrase without rejecting its wisdom.
I hope, on that hill, you don't die as you plan to. Because you are very literal, aren't you.
My issue is that people take the idea that “bad PR” can actually be good for a company (which is common knowledge these days) and just stop there. They don’t go a step further and contemplate where the phrase applies, where it doesn’t, and what makes those situations different. They just bend over backwards and try to figure out the way it applies in every situation (even if in reality, it doesn’t). It’s that line of thinking that I find annoying.
I think the phrase has outlived its usefulness. Nowadays when I see it used it’s often in exactly the kind of extreme or overly literal way you yourself criticize.
Exactly. This saying is much like Confucius famous sayings in that you have to think it through, trying it both literally and symbolically, and move several steps forward logically to try and understand the wisdom it is conveying.
It's not saying literally that no publicity can ever be bad. That's obviously not true and is easily disproven nearly every single day by current events. It's a broader conveyance of truth regarding the difficulty of getting noticed in a world crowded with content. Even if it's "bad publicity" there are still benefits of becoming more well known, for example. Apple is one of the few companies where that probably won't help, but it doesn't "disprove" the saying and mean we should reject it.
I don't understand what you are responding to. The GP comment never said anything about "dying on a hill" or being overly literal. They weren't making some grand pronouncement that there's no wisdom behind the "there's no such thing as bad PR" saying. They just pointed out that in this specific case that the bad PR is most definitely undesired and not a net benefit, and that the "no such thing as bad PR" phrase is often overused in places where it's not warranted as a sort of lazy "sure, this is fine!" explanation.
I feel like it’s pretty easy to disprove. I mentioned Humane AI in another comment, so here I’ll use a different and more flamboyant example: the 2019 movie Cats.
After putting $85-110M into the production of the movie, Universal released a trailer that went super viral and had every person on the internet talking about how terrible it looked. When the movie actually came out there was a second viral wave of gawking. Did this drive tons of people to the theater so they revel in the movie’s epic badness for themselves? No, the movie (which had over a dozen stars and was based on a hit musical that is popular around the world) failed to make back its budget at the box office. For reference (in case someone tries to pull the “maybe it would’ve made less money without the negative publicity” card) Tom Hooper’s previous movie musical Les Miserables earned $442M on a $61M budget.
The fat lady has not sung yet - terrible movies often become cult hits once they are "rediscovered" for their badness and prices go down. I wouldn't be surprised if Cats eventually became a streaming staple.
I expect the majority of people really aren't bothered about this though - just a vocal minority, so although maybe a bad ad for some, I expect the benefits of the publicity of this ad far outweight the downsides.
I wouldn't have paid any attention to a new iPad launch or known that it was the thinnest one yet, without this 'bad' press.
If anything, I'd say I'd be more likely to purchase a new iPad as a result
The publicity might be a short term win but there is a dangerous narrative for Apple that it feeds: that they are no longer a design-obsessed company that prizes art and creativity and channels that obsession to build the best products.
A vocal minority of artists and creatives who are precious about the tactile and aesthetic experiences of using the tools of their trades could also be called “Apple’s target market for the iPad Pro.” So Apple would definitely need to care about the sentiments their ads engender.
Bad PR works on controversial things, for example if someone wants to sell courses to become “Alpha Male”. People who are into that become suddenly aware of it.
Apple ad isn’t controversial because people react indifferent at best and very negative at worst. Everyone already knows what an ipad is.
Let's be honest here: people are going to watch the video on their iPhone, fleetingly think "well that's a weird ad, really did not like that..." and then move onto something else on their iPhone. Apple has been untouchable for many years now. Basically Trump "I can shoot a man on 5th Avenue and people will still vote for me" level
Since my argument is “there is such a thing as bad publicity and I will die on this hill”, I’m going to shift from this sloppy ad rollout to an example that I think proves my case (that bad publicity is a thing that exists) pretty definitively.
Although it no doubt produced tons of brand awareness among people who had never heard of them, I doubt that the folks at Humane AI would argue that the recent flood of bad reviews or even the backlash against the bad reviews were helpful to them in the long term. Like sure, tons of people know about them now, perhaps they even sold a pin or two to the folks who heard about them through the controversy. But there’s a good chance they may not be able to stay solvent as a company long enough to actually capitalize on their increased brand recognition.
I agree with most of your comments here, but I actually don't think the Humane AI stuff is a good example.
By all accounts, the new iPad Pro is a good, solid product. The problem is that people don't like the ad.
The problem with Humane AI is not really "bad PR", it's fundamentally bad products. Or perhaps to put it a little more generously: as has been very common of late in the tech world, the Humane AI products are technologically interesting marvels that solve literally 0 problems people actually have and are basically worse in every way compared to a smart phone.
That is, the iPad Pro's problem is really just the PR. No amount of good PR could save Humane AI's products.
I disagree. I own zero apple products but pretty soon I will be purchasing a tablet for the kids.
I was looking at ipads, but this ad and the comments have reminded me why I dont like putting money in Apples pockets. So I shall definitely be buying android when I buy one.
I have a lot of Apple products, but my recent work projects on Android have brought me around a bit on the Pixel line; if I had to switch to Pixel I wouldn’t be mad (though I don’t intend on doing that any time soon). With that being said, I don’t know of any Android tablets that match the iPad in terms of quality or performance, and I’ve been watching the market closely for years (I would love a tablet I can do real programming work on). What Android tablet are you looking at?
Have you tried the Pixel Tablet? I'm on the fence mainly because I have very few tablet needs and my Samsung S6 Lite has been wonderful, but I love the idea of docked mode where it becomes a Google Home. It makes it incredibly useful as both a desk companion (love getting meeting notifications and such on a screen liek that), an alarm clock, a digital photo frame, a music player, a quick way to see my doorbell camera, etc.
> The original idea is sound: "we are squeezing all tools into the iPad".
Hard disagree. Yes, I do agree that a big part of the emotional reaction to the ad were seeing all these beloved tools of craftsmanship being destroyed.
But another underlying current is people reaching the conclusion that they do not want all of their individual, sometimes quirky tools being subsumed under a single flat silicon panel. I'll just speak for myself, but I often find myself craving more real, physical interaction and not just something that exists on a screen.
Some of us actually crave a little more of the chaotic, interesting world of WALL-E over the sleek perfection of EVE (which was, somewhat unsurprisingly, reviewed and blessed by Jonathan Ive).
But that's the history that makes the flipping of the script so stark. Anybody embedded deeply enough in the company should be aware of that exact loss of reputation.
And if the company fails to know its own history well enough that even they are missing the point that speaks volumes about how they value institutional knowledge.
So go short AAPL, Jim Cramer. My bold prediction is this ad does diddly to their bottom line. You really think people are going to boycott Apple over it?
Stock is short-sighted, and I don't expect any boycott.
The consequences of the slow degradation of a brand are measured in decades.
If you take a look at the Vision Pro, they didn't expect selling them like hot cakes, given the price, but from what I've heard they still missed their projections, by a long shot.
This pattern will repeat, one failed or tepid product launch at a time, eroding confidence, and ultimately, yes, the stock will plunge.
stock is not short sighted. It does react quickly to information (which means it was too late to short a while ago) but to think that you can make money by not buying stock now, but waiting to buy it at another time is really terrible advice, and it's been refuted.
To believe that stock is short-sighted is to believe that investers as a group are dumber than you are because they've put their money into the market but you know better.
> To believe that stock is short-sighted is to believe that investers as a group are dumber than you are because they've put their money into the market but you know better.
There is a saying you may not be familiar with, "Markets can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent."
the market doesn't know the future, it just incorporates current knowledge and opinion. Is AI a bubble right now? the vast riches afforded those who make the right call when AI is ready is justification enough for current enthusiasm, no irrationality needs to be hypothesized. And like people who lost their bet on the 49ers to win the Superbowl, there's no reason to posit irrationality if a bet doesn't pay.
The stock market, or any kind of market really, is nothing else than a huge distributed pricing machine.
It is incredibly good at doing that. But it is short sighted. It is able to integrate risks to some extent, on a short time scale, but it is very bad at processing second or third order effects, and can't do strategy.
In other words, the famous invisible hand is completely unable to predict the future.
Humans are also notoriously bad at that, but still better. This is why we have states and CEOs.
at the beginning of every day, the market has a greater probability of going up than down, and a risk adjusted positive expected value (which is a different thing)
Therefore, your money should always be "in the market", not out of the market. Therefore, it's very difficult to make the case that the market is short sighted. I think what you are trying to say is that immediate risks are better understood than longer term, so the more distant future has higher volatility.
Maybe the strongest sense is that the iPad comes from the island of broken toys?
Slightly less emphatic but more sinister is that an iPad cannot help but involve itself in the destruction of the arts.
I do agree that the ad does not have any observable moral upside, and it was a mistake to run it.
But then again, if Apple did have a YouTube collection of ads that they chose not to run and discussion of why, it might be easier to trust them. They are so opaque at the moment that trust is a very big ask.
You're reading tea leaves now. Meanwhile Apple has actually measurable problems like plummeting iPhone sales in China, and I guarantee that's not because of a stupid ad.
Executive dysfunction seems the root issue. Tim, Phil, and Craig have been running on Steve and Jony's fumes for years, and now have no ideas beyond incrementing numbers and buying back stock. It's like ol' Gil all over again.
Apple is the default choice for grandparents again, but they don't even have the schools anymore (Google conquered edu with Chromebooks).
The two are different, but not unrelated. One reason Apple can run the margins and move the product that it does is because it's Apple. If it were "random company" and didn't benefit from its RDF, those numbers wouldn't be sustainable.
Which, in a nutshell, is the Tim Cook problem -- you can make all the sales numbers go in the right direction, but that's not the product magic that Apple has historically benefited from (and been valued at).
To be clear, I don't think the ad itself is the issue, I think this is pretty benign given their scale.
But I think they have a leadership problem. Tim Cook is a glorified bean counter, not a creator, not a visionary, and it shows.
I know that most people are looking at the stock and will say that everything is fine. Sure. I am looking at the products, and except for M series of SoC, this is all boring.
Apple's valuation is up over 1000% since Tim Cook became CEO. His greatest failing is that he isn't Steve Jobs, but most corporations would literally kill to have a bean counter like Tim Cook. Yes, he's in the hot seat, and Wall Street is very "What have you done for me today?", but I don't see shareholders calling for his head.
All empires fall, but today is not that day for Apple.
I would not bet against any company on the basis of people whinging on the internet unless it's about their actual product or service being bad at it's job. (e.g. Humane and Rabbit are probably doomed)
Consider that when talking about something measured in decades the examples that come to mind are things people said in the last few weeks. But what were people talking about a decade ago? Which of those things actually reflected the long term trajectory of the company?
The creative tools just had to be sucked in like a wormhole. It's just surprising it got this far without someone intervening. Shows that someone high up couldn't be backed down.
There is no such thing as bad publicity when you are not yet established. When you are already a recognized and popular brand, such as Apple or AB InBev, it can hurt revenue, such as how AB InBev suffered from lower revenue following their own advertisement backlash.
This exactly. There are many other ways to express "squeezing into one" but both bizarrely and shockingly Apple (or whichever ad agency) went for "crushing with hydraulic press" instead. How did everyone miss on the negative undertone before this ad was released?
Could be extrapolating this incident too much but it feels it encapsulates the transformation of Apple from this quirky, unconventional upstart into a monopolistic leviathan the past 2 decades. There's also a sense of hubris at suggesting your single electronic device can replace all those creative tools.
A djinni with Tim Apple's face would be funny. Comes out of a home pod and magics the whole recording studio into an iPad. Probably too whimsical for an Apple's taste though.
There is a growing backlash against technology and its harmful effects though. People are rightfully getting suspicious about that handful of tech companies and their intentions. Few are willing to give up on technology, nor should they as it's futile to fight progress, but the debate and guard rails are being shaped, and the tone deafness of some of these big technology companies is not helping their cause.
The astronomical user base of companies like Google and Apple should not be an indicator about the actual goodwill of people towards these brands. Getting away with something does not mean your behaviour isn't causing increasing animosity and feeding general discontentment.
Have you confirmed there are no practical effects in this — definitely it seemed like a lot had to be animated from the timing of events, to cutesy thinks like the smile ball squeeze.
Like if this was hand drawn animation, would anyone care? I think people think real instruments (even ones that were junk, ie old pianos are worthless) were destroyed.
I wouldn’t be surprised if there was some practical effects at play but it honestly looked too simplified to be real. Crushing a lot of stuff like that would be messy and ugly. Also unsafe with things like broken metal and shattered glass. It’s feels more like CGI. And personally I think that would be the better way to do it. As someone who’s watched a weirdly high number of YouTube videos of things getting crushed by presses, it’s not pretty like that video was.
If, and if think that’s a big if that was mainly practical effects, then those props would almost certainly be fake instruments made from different materials that crush in more visually appealing ways.
I was replying to the previous posters who said it was already animation. There certainly is some animation at play but was wondering of the mix of practical effects and CGI.
> An iPad will never replicate the beauty of a human playing a piano or a violin.
I mean, one of its primary uses is to replicate the beauty of a human playing piano or violin via videos and recordings.
Aside from that, isn’t this just an appeal to tradition? An iPad is a tool just like a piano or the violin, people make beautiful music with them all the time.
I am sure there were curmudgeons saying that the piano and violin would never replicate the beauty of the human voice when they were the top technology of the day.
I don't personally play an instrument, but I can also understand that the physicality of keys, strings and pedals is innately different from tapping on a glass screen. A digital piano aims to replicate the sound a specific piano, and provide a piano-inspired interface for playing it.
A real piano is a big single use device, in theory yeah, but I imagine for the people playing it the direct control over the things making the sound that is irreplaceable. There's things that will always be impossible on a VST instrument because it's construction (Prepared Piano [0]), and vice versa [1]. They seem like two different avenues of artistic expression to me.
> They seem like two different avenues of artistic expression to me
I agree completely, this is the point I was trying to make.
People are treating the iPad and the piano as fundamentally different despite both being tools that are equally as capable of making beautiful music in the hands of a talented musician in my eyes.
They might make beautiful music but not beautiful piano music. The piano must exist in order to be recorded into the ipad, and recording isn't unique to ipads. You could play the piano samples via midi from the ipad but hundreds of other devices can also do that and that still wouldn't replicate from the player's perspective, actually playing a piano or and audiences experience of actually hearing a piano.
It’s for this reason I have a minstrel that follows me everywhere. There’s really no substitute for the original analog sound - it’s warmness and the subtle imperfections of the original - can’t be substituted with a consumer device manufactured by a soulless megacorp. It does become problematic on flights as the imperialist cryptofascist lackies of capitalism require my minstrel buy a full ticket and doesn’t let her play my tunes on the flight. People at work get pretty irritated and complain about flow and focus and whatnot and keep insisting I submit to the consumerist mediocrity of a sound cancelling headphone - and I’ve tried in honesty to build a portable sound proof booth with an ear trumpet attached but it’s kind of bulky and I’m not really that handy with tools to begin with. It was also really hard to get a badge for the minstrel but eventually HR just gave me a neurodiversity exemption and classified her as a support animal, which in my opinion is kind of sexist but there’s only so many things one can get outraged about. The real issue is that a single instrument is kind of insufficient to fully capture a wider range of sound and experience so I’ve been trying to figure out how to pull off a quartet - really some of the best music is done by a four piece band anyway - but the above problems just seem to get worse but I’m sure I’ll figure out how to scale this solution.
Minstrel "music" is perhaps problematic itself. On the one hand, you have music as an emergent property of the gathered individuals' culture and skills. That blurs when a tavern sings to a traveling minstrel rather than a neighbor. But professionals can enhance rather than displace. Consider European acting troupes traveling a US West steeped in discussion of Shakespeare. Or printed "poems" to be spread and read in support of real spoken poetry. And minstrels do collaborate with local players... but they can also displace. Something is lost to a community when the local kid or elder can no longer make a bit of money piping in the harvest. Or neighbors play the gather fiddles. When music becomes for a community a spectator sport, rather than something embedded. A train car singing together, versus an occasional platform busker. Like trust-fund kids who see strength of knowledge and skills as something to buy not build in themselves. Or a merchant who doesn't value strength of body for farming. And then there's the my-tower-is-taller-than-yours of court "professional music". With richly textured diversity, complexity, nuance, and surprise consequences, these can be hard to think and discuss clearly. Like struggling now to appreciate the impoverished isolation of people's un-musical experience of tunes before AR's ambient-rendezvous-and-collaborate jamming apps.
And really it’s turtles all the way down. That’s why I’m considering joining a hunter gatherer tribe that’s never had contact with the modern world. As I worked through the profession of institutional oppression of the natural state of man I realized there’s no other option. I just hope I don’t wipe them out with my imperialist diseases - the least of which is the social cultural ones of modern consumerist capitalism!
(In all seriousness I do agree btw, there’s value and worth in all the art and forms of art we’ve created … but I’m reacting a bit to the “one step backward in historical progression is the pinnacle of achievement” … plus I have to say I’m pretty impressed with the visual and cinematic quality of the Apple ad itself and find the contextual outrage a bit weird - comparing it to the Ridley Scott ad is wild too - not every creation has to be an iconic achievement of a master, but is untrue this particular ad wasn’t interesting and well executed and I feel bad for the creative crew that developed and produced it)
Excuse me, but real musicians use butterflies. They open their hands and let the delicate wings flap once. The disturbance ripples outward, eventually producing a freak weather event which sounds out an awesome cacophony carefully honed to activate homo sapiens' most dormant primal instincts for rage, love, mourning, and triumph.
Anything less is a crude shortcut afforded us by our decadent culture of consumption.
I am quite confident that a skilled musician with an iPad (or, even more obviously, an electric keyboard with a MIDI cable to the iPad) can create music that is indistinguishable from a human playing a piano. The synthesizer will be able to replicate the sound of the best concert grand in the best auditorium, direct to your studio headphones.
I'm also quite sure even unskilled musicians will prefer the feel of practicing and playing on a slightly out-of-tune old upright to a cheap electric synth-action keyboard or (ugh) a glass touchscreen.
> I am quite confident that a skilled musician with an iPad (or, even more obviously, an electric keyboard with a MIDI cable to the iPad) can create music that is indistinguishable from a human playing a piano. The synthesizer will be able to replicate the sound of the best concert grand in the best auditorium, direct to your studio headphones.
Perhaps this is true, but it is entirely limited to replicating a _recording_ of the instrument. An iPad cannot replicate (or even come close to) the sound of a human playing a piano that you hear in person.
I'm a hobby musician and let me tell you that I can hear digital instruments and to me they sound like "they cheaped out on hiring some guy to actually play this"
Have you ever listened to the difference between a piano and a digital keyboard? The difference is night and day. Digital tech can only imitate the sound of a string piano, but it can never truly be the real thing.
its like smelling fresh apple pie vs smelling an apple pie car freshener. The idea gets across, but it can never be the same.
Best would be pianoteq, but let's be serious, nothing will come close to an acoustic piano.
After for YouTube consumption and for the mass, yeah, it will be good enough, afterall most people don't realize that Rousseau is/was not only a team but rearranging midi for their output and still are playing poorly.
I would have preferred the reverse of crushing our tools into something. I would have preferred pulling them out of the iPad to create. As a d&d fan, I could imagine a bard with a black hole pulling instruments and creative tools out in order to render magic.
I felt like I was watching the end of Terminator 1 when watching that iPad commercial.
is why I think Tim needs to get a forceful visionary as head of both design and marketing...the 2 departments where there seems to be a ton of turnover. Would this ad have passed muster w/ people like Katie Cotton/Lee Clough? At the very least, have someone w/ a better sense of this be the final editor before releasing...
The funny thing is that reversing the ad doesn't change the fact that all those things were destroyed. If people like the reversed version it means they actually never cared about the destruction in the first place
> they actually never cared about the destruction in the first place
For the most part, they don't. I think what people are reacting to is the perceived symbolism of the whole thing. Reversing the video in this case is kind of reversing the symbolism to something more like what I assume Apple was going for in the first place.
> I don't think it's impossible to convey that message without destroying instruments and creative tools that are precious to so many.
This is how I felt seeing rock musicians destroying perfectly good instruments and amps. Growing up my parents didn't have the money to buy me a guitar (or didn't want to buy me one), so I would see these performances and would just think, can't they just donate that guitar to some poor kid or a school instead of destroying them? It really annoyed me, but it didn't stop me from loving the band and their music. I'm a late Gen-Xer and watching Nirvana destroy the stage after a performance just made me go "aw, those were good instruments someone else could have used". I don't know if it's "cool" to do that anymore, but I never see any other artists calling that out like they are for this ad, and it's been going on since the 70s.
Interesting point. The Clash even celebrated the destruction of instruments on the cover of London Calling (the cover being a photo of their bassist smashing his bass). And though the Apple ad seems like it’s trying to convey they idea that all these devices are within the iPad, the smashing of instruments and equipment by rockers seems to just be about…reveling in the destruction of instruments and equipment.
You see this in other art as well. For example, the Dadaists took a lot of functional tools, messed them up, and displayed them as art. Moving beyond art, destruction that accompanies political unrest is often dismissed.
It’s interesting that the Apple ad is what touched off this discussion, because it’s actually fairly tame with regards to a lot of intentional destruction of equipment.
Or have a giant scale, show people loading all this stuff into one side of the scale, and then placing the iPad on the other side, and the iPad side sinks. There's a million ways to do this idea
Agreed. I was thinking along the same lines. Some Wonka-like contraption where all this on-going creativity in a room was captured, fed into a whimsical pipes leading to an assembly line, with an iPad reveal at the end.
I'm not sure but I think this ad was fully animated and nothing was actually destroyed. A hydraulic press of this size, if any even exist, is going to look a lot bulkier and not like a cartoon stomper coming down from the ceiling. We don't see the side bracing which would needed if you didn't want your hydraulic press to rip a hole in your ceiling.
Especially with all the angles they have it would have been incredibly difficult and dangerous to get all the shots, and every shot came out perfectly.
It was painful to watch and i won’t have a second look.
It would have been as simple as adding a short “Professional CGI Artists. No actual instrument and tools were harmed.” to set a lighter tone and take the pain away.
Given the raging discussion and thus reach, this won’t hurt sales in the slightest - pretty much the opposite and i guess we’re left with giving kudos to marketing well played.
It seems odd to complain about one old upright piano being crushed for the video when thousands upon thousands of them are out on the streets, living under bridges, because no one wants to move the piano anymore, or wanted the convenience of an electronic keyboard.
I implore you all: adopt a piano today! You may find yourself saying "I didn't rescue it, it rescued me."
I think this misses the mark. The ad is inherently symbolic—it’s not this particular piano, but the fact that they’re destroying all of these beloved instruments of creativity in such a gratuitous and evocative manner. That’s what upsetting, not the literal fact that one piano was destroyed in the making of the ad.
We adopted a piano while we were overseas and moved it to San Francisco. We ended up giving it to a church after my son decided he couldn't abide the high notes that could never quite get into tune. Still have fond memories of it though.
Anyone remember the original awesome Google Chromebook ad where they meticulousoy showed destruction of several laptops? I know it’s not the same thing but it reminded me of it and I can’t find it anywhere in YouTube! Anyone got a link who knows what I’m talking about?
They probably figured it would be really strong imagery to see the items being physically crushed in a giant press. It definitely invokes feelings, but not good ones.
If you think of yourself as skeptical, agnostic, materialist. I don’t understand how you can be upset about cheap in-animate objects get destroyed for an entertaining video.
Im not a skeptical agnostic materialist, but those objects were far from being cheap. Those instruments cost thousands of dollars each. The arcade cabinet as well(there aren't exactly a lot of those left).
The entire point of the ad is that the entire human creative experience is consolidated into the ipad, which is a pretty dystopian way of looking at things. Even if you ignore the cost and rarity of these items, the symbolism is pretty horrible.
You know there are reproductions of those arcade cabinets right? And used instruments cost hundreds, not thousands. A guitar with a broken neck or stripped screws could be propped up long enough for a scene such as this and be useless to actually play. And busted pianos are easy enough to find.
>And used instruments cost hundreds, not thousands.
A guitar, sure. I tried getting an used string piano and couldn't find one...used...for less than five grand. Used violins and other instruments are also usually very highly priced.
Try craigslist or a local piano mover. Local piano movers are often asked to haul off abandoned pianos and will resell them [1]. This company's stock at the moment is a bit pricey compared to what I usually see, but it's not unusual to be able to get even a baby grand for ~$1,000. The catch is you've got to pay to move them, which is a bit of an ordeal.
You are trying to get a working piano. This ad only required a non working piano.
Someone bought me a broken piano once thinking I would be able to repair it. We ended up letting someone else have it for free. It wasn’t expensive to begin with because it didn’t work.
Everything in that press was a representation of a real and useful thing, and the people who hate this commercial the most seem to have substituted a real and useful thing for the simulation of one. Whereas the moment the cans on the piano were crushed, I thought, "wow that old (busted?) piano is holding up well."
Practical effects are not only full of fakery, they're also the origin of a lot of the tricks known to the world.
No one is actually upset about any specific objects that were destroyed in the making of this ad. This sort of advertising is all about eliciting emotions and shaping a message--a vibe--about a particular product. This ad triggered visceral feelings related to the emotional connection a lot of people--even skeptical agnostic materialists!--have with the tools, instruments, and products of creativity and art. And based on the reaction, the ad clearly elicited a lot of negative emotions and a negative vibe in what is presumably the iPad Pro's target audience. Thus, I'd say that even from your ultra-rationalist point of view, it's a bad ad.
I mostly agree. My point is I don’t think the audience here would give the same empathy to flag burning, Christian trolling etc. just want to be clear if these are the gods we worship here
Another person on social media noted that no Apple ad has ever depicted older generation iPads or MacBook Pros being crushed by a hydraulic press to signify them being made thinner - I suspect Apple wouldn't even greenlight that ad pitch.
Try a car analogy on for size: a new Corvette might be superior to a classic Porsche in all the ways that matter, but nobody at GM would greenlight an ad depicting a C8 emerging from a crusher that had just destroyed a '63 911. They would understand how disrespectful it would seem.
That's an indication that you're not a good fit for the sports-car advertising business, just as whoever approved this ad isn't a good fit for the creative business.
If it has to be explained to you, you won't get it.
I don't think anyone's losing their mind and crying. It's just interesting to see something like this from a company that has historically prided themselves on mutual respect (if not outright symbiosis) with artists, musicians, and other creative people.
Somewhere within Apple there was a failure of taste, and that was always the proverbial "sin unto death" from Steve Jobs's perspective. Doesn't happen every day. You hate to see it, but you can't help but watch.
Hey if you think it is so ridiculous for someone to be significantly offended by the ads that you don't even believe that people were, then you are basically agreeing with me.
I am glad that you seem to now agree with me that it would be dumb to be personally offended by this in a significant way.
You agree with me so much, that it is so dumb to be mad about this, that you actually don't think that people were!
You actually believe this argument even more that I do, because it isn't even conceivable to you that people were very upset about this.
I am glad that I convinced you at how dumb it would be to very mad about this ad.
If you had ever put the time and effort (and blood!) into learning how to play the guitar, you too would have a visceral reaction to seeing a guitar getting destroyed for nothing. It's not the objects themselves that are the problem, it is our connection to those objects, and our innate feelings about those objects, that Apple has smashed in that video. That's a marketing 101 mistake and how this ad ever got greenlit is beyond me.
If it weren't offensive to someone, somewhere, they wouldn't do it.
Apple, on the other hand, will never be punk. They left that path when they realized it was more profitable to become the guy on the screen in their earlier ad.
I think the part that was really upsetting is they crushed real good objects. After all of that talks about climate friendly. They could have crushed 3D renderings and up the clip with “rendered on iPad. No harm was done on real objects.” And that would have been a good ad.
It's almost certainly mostly CGI but even if it was done with practical props, they are still not "real good objects." They are props. No one crashes real Ferraris in an action movie. You use fakes and empty chassis.
They do crash real cars in movies though. The Wolf of Wall Street saw an actual Lamborghini Countach with a VIN get crashed quite a lot, John Carpenter's Christine went through like twenty Plymouths and The Dukes of Hazzard TV series destroyed hundreds of cars ("an estimated 309 Chargers were used").
>I think the part that was really upsetting is they crushed real good objects. After all of that talks about climate friendly.
Considering how much global e-waste and environmental damage, companies like Apple(and others of their size) are responsible for with their products, destroying a few objects for an ad is like spitting in the ocean in the scheme of things.
People complaining about the waste generated from this ad, are really missing the big picture, and is one of the reason companies like Apple mostly focus on posturing the image of climate friendliness and environmental sustainability, rather than actually enforcing it across their entire supply chain where it actually makes the big difference.
"Sure, the minerals in our devices are mined by kids in Congo with chemicals dangerous for the environment, and assembled by workers in sweatshop factories with suicide nets, but our posh donut-shaped HQ in Cupertino runs on 100% renewables and serves only vegan food with soy lattes, that's how environmentally conscious we are here at Hooli." </gavin_belson.jpg>
^Because this greenwashing is what people buy into from advertising.
Reminds me when Formula 1 switched form V10 engines to hybrid V6 to be more "environmentally friendly", when actually, the gas burned by those V10 engines during races only accounted for <0,2% of the total emissions, being far offset by the massive emissions of transporting that entire circus around the planet bouncing across continents all year round, yet nobody addressed that, just the engines for some cheap greenwashing.
> if Apple actually cared about the environment they'd release new models every several years instead of several times yearly
Thankfully last year’s model still works and is supported for several years. Nothing prevents you from ignoring the new models and act as if they didn’t exist.
Auto manufacturers release many new models every year and most people do not buy them all. Nor do they wish that appliance manufacturers stopped releasing new models so they could keep their fridge for longer.
> Auto manufacturers release many new models every year and most people do not buy them all. Nor do they wish that appliance manufacturers stopped releasing new models so they could keep their fridge for longer.
Generations of vehicles seem to be sold for at least half a decade, with maybe slight facelifts but largely functionally unchanged. My 20 year old truck, perhaps barring some safety features, also does basically the same job as a newer truck and drives down the same roads and so on. Thankfully the auto manufacturers haven't yet found a way to make your car or truck obsolescent in 3-5 years.
As far as appliances I swear to god I know I and a large number of other people would absolutely kill for an older Kenmore washer and dryer as they basically run forever and are easier to service. We keep jamming useless crap on everything (of course my refrigerator needs an embedded screen and internet of shit connection, so that it can spy on me and generally be another worthless shiny doodad that's going to break) while making things simultaneously harder to service. My 15 year old fridge does the exact same thing as the newer shitheap Samsung fridges they sell at big box retailers but without needing to be replaced every 5 years. Barring some marginal advances in refrigerant and insulation, some of the old stuff legitimately is better.
It's like when I read arguments such as "Aramco most polluting company in the planet by CO2" or "eating a burger pollutes more than driving an SUV for 100 miles"...
Apple, Aramco, your local butcher are merely serving your needs. Aramco ain't forcing you to buy 5L V8 trucks, and you're butcher ain't forcing you to eat beef rather than poultry or vegetables.
Apple releasing new products is just a normal tech company serving the need of users to have the latests shiny gadget, shareholders to see equity and employees and contractors having jobs.
What do I mean? While in principal I agree that many companies should do a lot more to limit their pollution, at the end of the day this pollution is a direct consequence of us average Joes neverending consumerism.
If average Joe doesn't give a damn about using public transport or using a used hybrid or to adapt his lifestyle to be less polluting, legislators and companies are gonna adapt to people not giving a damn besides whining on Twitter.
> at the end of the day this pollution is a direct consequence of us average Joes neverending consumerism.
However the subliminal advertising of big companies causing manipulation of weak human minds is what drives the never ending consumerism. Take away the ads, and the buying of crap will drop significantly.
> Apple, Aramco, your local butcher are merely serving your needs. Aramco ain't forcing you to buy 5L V8 trucks, and you're butcher ain't forcing you to eat beef rather than poultry or vegetables.
Marlboro wasn't forcing you to smoke either, yet too many people did against their own health and own best judgement, so we had to get government regulators to rule them in to protect people form damaging themselves and others with their own desires.
Just because consumers want something, doesn't mean it's what's best for them and that the capitalist free market should just be free to unregulatedly deliver whatever consumers want, at the expense of societal health or the environment, because then that's just "privatizing profits while socializing losses" with extra steps.
We also had governments regulate car emissions to save our air quality which meant engines had to be much more efficient and less environmentally damaging. All for the greater good, and few people complained about the cleaner smog- and tobacco- free air despite loosing a few HP on their engines and Marlboro selling fewer fags.
What makes you think e-waste should be exempt from such regulations?
Devil's advocate: RAM on SOCs is not upgradable due to technical limitations on frequency and latency needing the RAM chips to be as close as possible to the CPU. You can't beat physics.
I do hold them accountable for the non-upgradable SSDs, which are not needed to be soldered to achieve their full speed, and slim PCB connectors for PCI-E speed connections do exist.
>Devil's advocate: sell replacement drop-in boards and reuse the chassis.
Apple's response if regulators push for that: "Sure, that'll be 1600$ for the board please. (on an 1800$ new machine). Oh, and BTW, the board is paired to your iCloud account so you can't then re-sell it on the used market, for your own protection of course. You're welcome."
> Devil's advocate: RAM on SOCs is not upgradable due to technical limitations on frequency and latency needing the RAM chips to be as close as possible to the CPU. You can't beat physics.
That just came out, let's see if it goes anywhere and if they keep pushing it in other products, or if it's just a marketing exercise for one product, but I'm skeptical its here to stay.
I also remember how upgradable GPUs in laptops using MMX slots were pushed by Dell and a couple of others a few times 10-15 years ago, but abandoned each time.
I hope this catches on though, but like I said, I'm skeptical.
> destroying a few objects for an ad is like spitting in the ocean in the scheme of things.
I understand your point but the greater irony of the expression is that, at scale, our spitting (flushing, dumping, spewing) into the ocean has created an ecological disaster.
> destroying a few objects for an ad is like spitting in the ocean in the scheme of things
Yeah I think the biggest lesson from this is that people don't understand the amount of resources it takes to build an iPad.
Another example: Apple removing the stickers because they're plastic. A tiny tiny bit of plastic. Probably 0.001% of the plastic used in the production of an Apple device but people think it's significant because they can see it, and all the other plastic is hidden behind closed doors.
This idea of 'squashing all these tools down to a thin slab of glass' made sense given their somewhat unusual focus on the thinness of the device. It was a bit of a throwback to the early 2010s smartphone innovation, where the size of the devices was the yardstick by which manufacturers would outdo each other. I would charitably interpret it as an uninspired marketing team trying to spin some version of Jobs' classic "the iPhone is simultaneously an iPod, phone and internet device" - however the party trick is old, and nobody's impressed anymore.
Perhaps the blowback is a sign of a wider weariness that people have accumulated towards big tech companies over the past few years, mixed with a nebulous malaise about 'AI' and what it means for the status quo and people's livelihoods.