Apple’s ‘Crushing’ Of The Good And Beautiful Is Step One In Demanding Our Compliance

Those who insist on progress decoupled from human mediation destroy all that is good, true, and beautiful.
'We missed the mark': Apple apologizes for iPad ad that depicts the crushing of instruments, books, and other tech

'We missed the mark': Apple apologizes for iPad ad that depicts the crushing of instruments, books, and other tech

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Apple apologized for its latest promotion for a new iPad, after there were complaints about the company signaling that it wanted to destroy various forms of culture.

A commercial for the iPad Pro was posted by Apple CEO Tim Cook to X, stating that it was "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," the CEO added.

In a clear attempt to display all the products that its latest tablet could replace, the "Crush!" ad showed a giant industrial press destroying various forms of instruments and tech.

Items that received the death penalty were: TVs, a record player, a trumpet, a guitar, cameras, books, paint cans, a typewriter, and an old-school arcade game reminiscent of Space Invaders.

The ad closed out with showing off how thin the latest iPad is and a voice that said, "The most powerful iPad is also the thinnest."

Hollywood did not opt for claims that the product was fat-phobic but rather that it was an attack on culture.

"The destruction of the human experience. Courtesy of Silicon Valley," actor Hugh Grant wrote.

"Unintentionally perfect metaphor for how we are destroying beauty for profit[.] Bravo," said video game director David Goldfarb.

"Truly, what is wrong with you?" added filmmaker Justine Bateman.

"We missed the mark with this video, and we're sorry."

Meet the new iPad Pro: the thinnest product we\u2019ve ever created, the most advanced display we\u2019ve ever produced, with the incredible power of the M4 chip. Just imagine all the things it\u2019ll be used to create.
— (@)

Two days after the release of the commercial, Apple distributed an official apology.

"Creativity is in our DNA at Apple, and it's incredibly important to us to design products that empower creatives all over the world," Apple's vice president of marketing communications, Tor Myhren said, according to Variety.

"Our goal is to always celebrate the myriad of ways users express themselves and bring their ideas to life through iPad. We missed the mark with this video, and we're sorry," the statement concluded.

The ad had nearly 60 million views at the time of this writing on Cook's X page alone.

"Even if I were to be super courteous and assume Apple had the best of intentions with the ad, and merely expressed themselves poorly, the idea that the iPad replaces all of those objects is a total lie," said director Cody Clarke.

"I almost feel like the controversy was intentional in order to distract from that. We're all busy being up in arms about the offensiveness of the weird, almost ritualistic ad, and we're not stopping for a second to say 'wait—there's no way that iPad renders all of those things obsolete.' It's impressive, but not paradigm-shifting like the iPhone was," Clarke added.

Interestingly, the TV spot mimics a 2008 LG phone commercial that shows the industrial crushing of a violin, speakers, drums, and cameras.

The LG KC910 Renoir boasted an eight megapixel camera, a touch screen, and wi-fi connectivity.

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Apple's awful iPad ad shows it has run out of ideas

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Crush! | iPad Pro | Apple www.youtube.com

Given the prominence of psychedelic drugs in the Big Tech mythos, I doubt it’s a faux pas to share the story I’ve heard about Steve Jobs and the devil. As the story goes, asked what he learned on LSD, Steve replied that he sold his soul to Satan for charisma. Funny or not, given his way with marketing, it’s a plausible tale — as is the sad outcome wherein, it’s claimed, he believed his pancreatic cancer was the devil come to collect.

However, it’s Steve’s corporate heir, the substantially less magnetic Tim Cook, who faces a related reckoning. After dining out on the cult of Jobs and the totemic devices Steve sold as the one true way to Think Different, Cook coasted through increasingly narrow shoals and now finds himself pitched for the falls.

Beyond war, beyond rule, the most profound reason to keep stretching the human form to fit the tech, rather than the other way around, is because if we don’t do that we might question everything about the value of progress.

Decent buzz and functionality haven’t been enough to lift the Apple Watch to the iPhone’s stratospheric heights — a lofty realm where, today, each subsequent model in the crowded field of commoditized smartphones feels more inessential than the last. Victim of its own success, Apple’s stalwart effort to change the game once again has coughed up a series of doubts.

The Vision Pro is a bridge too far for all but a handful of self-style visionaries. The new iPad, introduced by a flashy, obliviously creepy ad, has triggered a wave of pro-human backlash that, in turn, has prompted an extremely uncharacteristic company apology. Public press chatter about Cook’s most likely successor has already begun. At this point, Cook may be asking his bathroom mirror, “Am I the App-hole?”

The problems are myriad, the solution elusive. For a company as powerful as Apple, existential challenges are most likely to be found only at the most stubborn of limits — such as those that describe the form of humanity and technology themselves.

Americans are no strangers to the way leading technologists eyeing a full-blown digitization of governance like to cast human limits as a problem that can be solved. But a simple look at the Vision Pro gives pause. The human field of vision is adaptable but finite, with bounds of comfort defined by your big-screen TV at one end and your smartphone at the other.

Of course, we can and do push those bounds for the benefit of the high that comes from limited exposure to unsustainable extremes. IMAX can be breathtaking, but, as some recent social media pics of "Dune Part 2" in the third row make plain, at the margins, the image is too distorted to be useful or genuinely entertaining. Likewise, a smartwatch can offer some fun features for the person who doesn’t want to have to keep checking their phone, but you don’t want to watch "Dune Part 2" that way, either.

That’s why the Sphere in Las Vegas, although improving on IMAX in terms of reducing distortion, worsens the experience by distorting us, the audience, shrinking us down into specks within what from the outside is often seen as a monstrosity-sized eyeball. The Vision Pro causes an inverse but similar effect: Instead of being trapped inside the all-encompassing screen of a vast eyeball, a small screen is brought so close to our eyeballs that it seems to be inside them. I can hear legions of neuro-tech nerds salivating over the prospect of finally getting the screen across that flimsy barrier and straight into our optic nerves.

Yes — I’m sure there’s a way to achieve these machine dreams and even a way to do it without killing people or turning their brains to lentil soup. But what purpose is so important as to justify all the trouble we’ll have to go to in order to do so?

The classic answer for runaway technological development is that it’s needed to defend ourselves militarily, or might be one day, probably soon, and after all, the best defense is a good offense, right? Even now, however, we’re starting to see that logic leap as a barrier of its own — rather than saving us from some foreign enemy, full-blown technologization is being pushed on us as the only viable form of government going forward. From the pharaohs to the Trump administration, we are told, all human forms of rule have been tried, and all have been found wanting. We need justice we can’t achieve, and the only place we can turn for it is the machines — programmed correctly, of course ...

It’s a logic that reveals the primary use case for so many of our most cutting-edge technologies to be compulsory, not liberating. How far we’ve come from fifty years ago, when John Lennon commanded us to “imagine all the people” — today, Apple’s iPad demands that we “imagine all the things” the device might create. Our journey from subject to object is nearly complete!

Yet, somehow, no matter how many people our dehumanization projects maim, torture, or kill, we human beings keep on ticking. Beyond war, beyond rule, the most profound reason to keep stretching the human form to fit the tech, rather than the other way around, is because if we don’t do that we might question everything about the value of progress. When that happens, the collapse will surely be nigh. Like it is right now? Hey, wait a minute.

Much like “art for art’s sake,” tech for tech’s sake is a recipe for disaster. However prone to extremes we are, choosing just one extreme in the hopes of channeling all that self-destructive energy into a godlike creation project brings us back to a very ancient form of ruin, one we are always tempted, in ways large and small, to bring repeatedly on ourselves.

Quite a lot for a humble technology company like Apple to wrestle with. But the titanic burden shouldn’t be much of a shock if your mission is really to Think Different about stealing a bite from the Garden of Eden. Just ask Steve Jobs.

Apple’s iPad Ad Boasts Of Replacing The Real With The Fake

Our addiction to digital devices is making us lonely, isolated, and miserable. It doesn’t have to be this way.

Apple's new ad met with widespread disgust and resentment over 'dystopian' messaging

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Apple's celebrated "1984" television commercial, which first aired on Dec. 31, 1983, depicts a bleak dystopian reality wherein shaved, uniformed, and altogether interchangeable persons file ant-like through gray steel structures and into a theater. Awaiting them in the dark is a giant screen whereon a Big Brother-esque talking head spews propaganda.

The Orwellian monologue is interrupted by a colorful and athletic woman, who storms in armed with a sledge hammer. Having outpaced her faceless pursuers, the heroine hurls the hammer through the screen, shorting the mass programming exercise and possibly liberating the audience.

According to the ad, the Apple Computer would ensure "1984 won't be like '1984.'"

This week, some 40 years later, Apple released another provocative ad entitled "Crush." This time around, in its confrontation with a colorful humanity, the standardizing screen wins.

Apple CEO Tim Cook shared the ad to social media Tuesday, writing, "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."

Cook's creation theme was coupled with visuals of destruction — specifically of the various tools and means for real-world artistic endeavors and in-person activities that his new device will apparently replace and virtualize.

As with the "1984" ad, the 2024 ad, entitled "Crush," takes place in a bleak and gray setting.

Upon what appears at first blush to be a stage sits an arcade game, a piano, books, DLSR cameras, a tailor's mannequin, a chalkboard, various paints, a chess board, a guitar and trumpet, and a sculpture of a human head. It quickly becomes clear that this is no stage at all but rather an industrial-scale crushing machine.

Over the course of the one-minute ad, the crusher flattens and destroys to the tune of Sonny and Cher's "All I Ever Need Is You."

"The message seems to be that everything beautiful and analog that involves practice and focus is pointless trash, easily replaced by a disposable computer," wrote King's College London finance professor Patrick Boyle.

In the final shot, the crusher opens to reveal the 5.1mm thick, 13-inch iPad Pro. A voice-over states, "The most powerful iPad ever is also the thinnest."

The Drum indicated the ad was created in-house by Apple.

Meet the new iPad Pro: the thinnest product we\u2019ve ever created, the most advanced display we\u2019ve ever produced, with the incredible power of the M4 chip. Just imagine all the things it\u2019ll be used to create.
— (@)

Critics on X sounded off about the ad, many asking what the advertising team at Apple was thinking.

Fr. Steve Grunow, CEO of Word on Fire Catholic Ministries, asked, "What level of hell did the idea for this ad come from?"

David Goldfarb, founder of the Swedish game studio The Outsiders, called the ad an "unintentionally perfect metaphor for how we are destroying beauty for profit."

Hugh Tomlinson, an English barrister and translator of philosopher Gilles Deleuze, tweeted, "The destruction of the human experience. Courtesy of Silicon Valley."

"I find this new Apple ad extremely ugly and dystopian," wrote King's College London finance professor Patrick Boyle. "There is no recognition of how artists love the tools of their trade[.] The message seems to be that everything beautiful and analog that involves practice and focus is pointless trash, easily replaced by a disposable computer."

Babylon Bee managing editor Joel Berry noted, "This is a sad and disturbing ad."

AppleInsider indicated that the possibility that at least some of the ad was created with CGI did not diminish the disgust most people appear to feel in reaction to the depiction.

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