Apple just unveiled an ad for their new iPad Pro, and you can bet that people have some thoughts about it.
The commercial shows creative tools like musical instruments, paints and paintbrushes, art supplies, cameras, books, sculptures, arcade games, turntables, and TVs being crushed and destroyed in a giant hydraulic press as Sonny and Cher's "All I Need Is You" plays. Then it reveals the new product that they're selling: a really, really thin iPad.
"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," Apple CEO Tim Cook tweeted alongside the advertisement. "Just imagine all the things it’ll be used to create."
Shockingly, viewers weren't thrilled with this handy visual representation of the tech industry brutally crushing the entire history and spirit of human creativity beneath its mechanical weight in service to unfettered capitalism and the inexorable march of technological progress.
"Why did @Apple do an ad that crushes the arts?" asked actress and filmmaker Justine Bateman, who became a vocal critic of the use of AI during the twin film industry strikes in 2023. "Tech and #AI means to destroy the arts and society in general. This is not making things better. This is just making some people insanely wealthy, at the expense of all of us."
"The destruction of the human experience. Courtesy of Silicon Valley," Hugh Grant added on X, formerly Twitter.
A whole of people flocked to social media to lambast the ad as "tone-deaf" and "dystopian" as it continued to spark widespread backlash.
"Like iPads but don’t know why anyone thought this ad was a good idea," documentarian Asif Kapadia wrote. "It is the most honest metaphor for what tech companies do to the arts, to artists musicians, creators, writers, filmmakers: squeeze them, use them, not pay well, take everything then say it’s all created by them."
"For years on here I’ve been talking about how the fortunes of tech companies are built on destroying artists, and now @apple has an ad celebrating it," said film critic and author Matt Zoller Seitz.
"This feels like the first ad that is a tone deaf miss from Apple," one user tweeted. "An ad showing beautiful tools of human creativity being crushed to be replaced by the newest and thinnest gadget feels antithetical to Apple. I’d expect this from an AI company not Apple.
"I find this new Apple ad extremely ugly and dystopian," another said. "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."
"This new ad by Apple perfectly depicts what Big Tech has sadly come to stand for: crushing human creativity in the name of technological innovation and selling it to us as progress," an artist lamented. "It‘s tone-deaf at least, malicious at worst, in the current climate of Ai replacing human arts."
Still others compared the ad unfavorably to the iconic "1984" commercial introducing the Apple Macintosh personal computer that famously aired during the Super Bowl.
"Apple's new 'Crush' ad (let's call it '2024' is a visual & metaphorical bookend to the 1984 ad," one user posited. "1984: Monochome, conformist, industrial world exploded by colourful, vibrant human. 2024: Colourful, vibrant humanity is crushed by monochrome, conformist industrial press."
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Apple announced the new iPad Pro, which features "a new thin and light design, breakthrough Ultra Retina XDR display, and outrageously fast M4 performance with powerful AI capabilities," on Tuesday.
Available in 13-inch ($1,299) and 11-inch ($999) models with silver and "space black" finishes, the new iPad Pros are available to order online now and will be in stores starting May 15.
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