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UPDATE (May 10, 2024, 9:05 a.m. ET): Apple apologized for the ad later on Thursday, saying in a statement to Ad Age that it “missed the mark with this video.” The commercial will not run on TV, the company said.
Apple has usually been successful at drumming up excitement for its new product launches. But that was not the case this week for its latest iPad Pro, which was unveiled in a characteristically sleek advertisement on Wednesday — to extremely poor reception.
The ad shows a range of musical instruments, artworks, books, music players and toys all stacked on a platform as a giant hydraulic press slowly crushes the objects to the accompaniment of a jaunty Sonny & Cher song. At the end, nothing is left but the iPad Pro.
“The most powerful iPad ever is also the thinnest,” the voiceover says.
Apple CEO Tim Cook shared the video on X, writing: “Just imagine all the things it’ll be used to create.”
But the ad struck a nerve. Filmmaker Justine Bateman wrote on X that such technology “is just making some people insanely wealthy, at the expense of all of us.” Actor Hugh Grant called it “the destruction of the human experience.” One X user wrote that the ad “lacks respect for creative equipment and mocks creators.”
In an environment where there are deep fears that AI and other tech advancements could replace human creativity, Apple managed to conceive the most apt metaphor for that process. It made a fundamental mistake here by quite literally showing its latest device rendering obsolete the various objects that people use to express thought and creativity. Instead, the ad seems to suggest, you can use a single digital product to replicate the creation of music, art and play for a mere $999.
Sure, you could say that people are overreacting to the video. After all, an ad — no matter how poorly received or disastrous its metaphor — is simply an ad. But Apple should probably have thought twice before serving up an image in which creative, cultural objects are literally obliterated and replaced with one of its products.