The Apple iPad Commercial: That’s Not What’s Meant By ‘Crushing It’

The Apple iPad Commercial: That’s Not What’s Meant By ‘Crushing It’

Image by Clker-Free-Vector-Images from Pixabay

“Meet the new iPad Pro: the thinnest product we’ve ever created, the most advanced display we’ve ever produced, with the incredible power of the M4 chip. Just imagine all the things it’ll be used to create,” Apple CEO Tim Cook tweeted last week, proudly showing off his company’s latest product – and setting off a media and Twitter/X firestorm.

In the commercial, the company that has long been the standard bearer for providing creator tools showed a hydraulic press pulverizing a number of the physical tools on which its very core market – artists – depends: musical instruments (including an upright piano), cans of paint, an 80s arcade game, a sculpture, to name a few.

“You destroyed all the creative tools and effort of humans. Worst. Commercial. Ever,” was just one of the comments in the Twitter/X feed.

Has Apple totally lost its way, or did we miss something? We believe it’s the latter, given the direction Apple has been taking of late (Monopoly Round-Up: Apple Spanked in Antitrust Suit), like basically giving the middle finger to U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, who in 2021 “found that Apple violated California’s unfair competition law by barring developers from “steering” users to make digital purchases that bypass Apple’s in-app system, which Epic contends could save them money with lower commissions…When Apple released its new guidelines, its process was unusable. To date, not a single app developer is using the alternative payment model that Apple set up. And this is because… Apple refused to comply with what the judge ordered…It charged a 27% commission on any sales outside of Apple’s own payment system, which is equivalent to the old 30% fee when you add in the credit card processing fee. It also put up scare screens when a user clicks on a link to go to an app developers website.”

Like the other tech monoliths, Apple has been increasingly incorporating AI into its offerings. Case in point, “Apple is preparing to include an AI-based privacy feature in the Safari browser in the next iOS 18 software update that will remove ads or other unwanted website content,” Yahoo!finance reported. Which will kill ads, the lifeblood of publishers, but as we saw with the Epic case, Apple is Apple and bugger all to everyone else.

And what does ‘unwanted website content’ mean and who decides? Just asking.

So, was the new Apple commercial actually a message that one didn’t need to have, say, musical or any sort of artistic talent to be a creator? AI would take care of all of that for you.

“I’m not sure ‘wanton destruction of all the good and beautiful things is (sic) this world’ was really the vibe you were trying for,” said one commenter on X.

Or was it?

Note the song that accompanies the commercial: All I Ever Need Is You. In case you missed it.

Apple changed the world with its iconic 1984 Macintosh commercial, where a sledge hammer was thrown at a black and white Big Brother like image announcing that. “On January 24, Apple will release the Macintosh. And you’ll see why 1984 won’t look anything like “1984.”

With its latest commercial, for which Tim Cook has apologized and removed, but too late! The cat is already out of the bag as it seems that with this new iPad, no doubt AI enabled, Apple may well succeed in making 2024- and beyond – look a lot like “1984.” Onward and forward.

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