Apple apologizes for out-of-touch iPad commercial

One of the most polarizing aspects of Apple as a company has long been their marketing. Some see the classic Macintosh “think different” ad campaign as a brilliant campaign that put the company’s values in focus. Others saw it as a manipulative and shallow attempt to associate the Mac in people’s minds with the greatest thinkers of their respective generations. Some argue that this ad campaign alone is the reason for the Mac’s success.

There’s no doubt that advertising has a powerful effect on people. That’s arguably part of its purpose. But what happens when an ad tries too hard to be evocative? What if it plays the wrong notes too loudly? This is what we saw with the 2024 iPad Pro “crush” ad.

Basically what they did was they put a bunch of musical instruments and other art supplies into a giant hydraulic press and smashed it all to pieces. A grand piano, several beautiful wooden stringed instruments, cans of paint and canvases, all flattened in service of showing off how thin the new iPad is.

I can imagine how this conversation went in their marketing department. “Yknow, because it can do all these things but it’s so small. It’s like we fit all that into this small space.” And in their defense, some parts of it arguably looked cool.

Okay, but what about those instruments? They don’t exist anymore. That was a perfectly good piano they ruined for a joke basically. It’s the kind of thing that some rich California executives might find it hard to see any problem with. That’s what scares me.

It’s not just about this commercial or what it directly represents, but the path it shows that Apple seem to be on. They’re increasingly out of touch. I had minor reasons to suspect this was happening but this ad shows me that I was more right than I wanted to be. They’re like, no one needs a real piano anymore because we have iPads now. And if you wanted to be pedantic you could make that case. But here in the real world, physical objects still have value regardless of whether their functionality has been surpassed by something smaller than it.

I count myself among the people who really didn’t like this ad. While the ad was playing for the first time I felt a distinct sadness watching the destruction of those instruments. I felt a series of negative things ranging from “how could they do that to those perfectly innocent things?” to “someone could’ve played that, it would’ve been fine.” I’m not trying to be dramatic when I say it was the worst I think I’ve ever felt from an Apple advertisement.

Everyone is allowed a misstep. Even the top executives are still human and we all make mistakes. This one is just so specifically out of touch with reality, that I find it discouraging that this is the mistake that was made out in the public eye. It’s upsetting that this was allowed to be shown.

When they announce that they got an LLM like ChatGPT running locally on their chips, are they gonna line up Einstein and Schrödinger and all the other famous smart people and smash them into the size of a phone?

To their credit, Apple has issued an official apology, stating that they “missed the mark,” and that their goal was to empower artists, not to diminish the arts. It also cancelled plans to air the spot on television.

This might mean they do have their ear to the ground when it comes to criticisms, and they respond to the ones they feel the need to respond to. It may show that they are in fact willing to take feedback seriously.

Honestly some parts of it made me smile, like the emojis, and that makes me feel like this whole idea could’ve just been executed a lot better. Like if they used something other than actual real expensive equipment or represented the idea of those things fitting inside of something that small. But everybody knows a hydraulic press destroys things. That’s what those viral videos are about; destroying various things with a hydraulic press and seeing what kind of paste they turn into.

It might just be a sign of the changing of the guard in their marketing production pipeline. It could also have been because of that creative blind spot that forms sometimes, even in groups of creatives, when everyone has been looking at something for too long and gotten used to a bad part of it.