I thought the ad was great but to actually have to apologize for it ?? I am a self admitted Apple fanboy but while I don’t see eye to eye on this I really don’t see the offensiveness .
But in the grand scheme of things it might sell more iPads due to the Streisand effect.
When I was a young'n, Apple was very big on treating artists and creatives as a set of people they were humbled to have stumbled into helping.
Marketing was driven by ideas like avoiding "speeds and feeds", in the words of Steve, and emotionally connecting with users: ex. famous lore is an Apple ad is never "Buy the New Galaxy Plus Pro S6 with the 120 megapixel 240x Zoom!" it's "Soft tinkling music as smiling father takes video of 5 year old sledding down hill in snow"
I'm not saying they always obeyed those principles in every single ad until yesterday, but you'd be hard pressed (lol) to explain to someone a decade ago why Apple's first ad for a once-in-3-years iPad launch was...crushing a bunch of creative tools to communicate they shaved half a millimeter off.
It's funny being old because the thing that confuses me is why people have reactions to reactions, ex. people saying "based, why should they have to apologize anyway, it wasn't offensive"...it clearly wasn't offensive in that sense! It was just bizarrely off-brand.
> It's funny being old because the thing that confuses me is why people have reactions to reactions, ex. people saying "based, why should they have to apologize anyway, it wasn't offensive"...it clearly wasn't offensive in that sense!
Some people just really seem to object to the idea that anyone could ever experience an emotion and have it not be based on some kind of cold rationality.
The idea of feeling something in your gut, something visceral, is anathema to them.
Imagine something you care about, maybe a family dog. Now put it in a hydraulic press. Cut back to "Nintendogs now available!"
For many, musical instruments and artists tools carry not just their functional nature but a spiritual or cultural identity. A piano isn't just a box with some metal strings inside, it represents something. That guitar could have been played, instead it's destroyed.
The as is also needlessly wasteful. It communicates a sense of disregard for the value of stuff. If apple burned a hundred grand and then showed us an iPad, many folks might be like, "what the fuck?" Same sort of vibe.
This is the third time I’ve seen someone compare the crushing of a musical instrument with the crushing of living, feeling beings in this thread and I think you are absurdly off base.
People are mad when you crush their dog because it feels pain and experiences things and has some sense of self, things that inanimate objects cannot have. Not because they no longer have a dog or because of their emotional connection to that particular dog.
Perhaps a better analogy would be putting the corpse of an already deceased family dog in the hydraulic press but that isn’t too dissimilar from cremation.
Probably best to avoid the crushing dogs analogy all together.
I get what they were trying to do which is “the iPad can do all of this and it is thin”. I think I don’t have the personality to have a personal relationship with artist tools …
A lot of people have strong emotional connections to their artistic tools like instruments. It's a very common reaction to feel discomfort at the sight of an instrument being destroyed. Emotional attachments are irrational, but the point of an advertisement isn't to be rational otherwise they'd just show a spec sheet as a still in a video.
Apple really fucked up here. Did no one on their marketing team bring this up?
But in the grand scheme of things it might sell more iPads due to the Streisand effect.