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Gross Apple Marketing

jonathanbuys.com

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Re: Gross Apple Marketing

#181

Post by throwaway106382 »

knallfrosch wrote: post #110

The blog entry suffers from congratulating the mediocre Ubuntu ad, but it's right about the vile Apple ads. The Apple ads are dystopian and revulsive. She really pulls out her phone while talking to a person and then lies to her face. A wife and mother forgets dad's birthday and smugly "gifts" him 50 auto-playing photos, as shown on her phone screen?

Ubuntu nothwistanding, I found the Apple ads quite offensive.

Ads tell you what the company thinks about it's target audience and clearly Apple thinks we're all just a bunch of bumbling fools that can't do anything without our phones.

Compared to this Samsung Galaxy S24 FE, which frames everything as something that can help you out and is fun and quirky: https://youtu.be/GZ-xGBTvtO4

I've been using Mac as my workhorse my entire career, switched from Android to iPhone recently. These ads are actually making me reconsider what my next hardware upgrades are going to be.

Re: Gross Apple Marketing

#182

Post by itishappy »

paul7986 wrote: post #151
ryandrake wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what always happens when you have a technology and then desperately try to find problems to solve with it. Rather than starting with a problem and then applying the most appropriate technology to solve it. The exact same thing happened with Blockchain, but "AI" has about 100x more hype behind it.

I think people present day do not understand how to really use AI.. understand how it can benefit their life. The commercial the OP speaks and the ad agency sounds lame as they arent helping. Personally Ive been enjoying wearing my Ray Bans for the past year and have used them to do things no other glasses can like... - Translate.... was in Canada recently and a sign about Jasper the town i was in was in French. I as…

As with the Apple ads, I remain unconvinced these are benefits. Translation, yes, but your last two examples feel oddly isolating and dehumanizing. Like, estimating the number of people in a line is a trivial task, and something fun to discuss and argue about with your friends! If your friend had the glasses to, do you think it would have come up in conversation at all or would they just ask theirs?

I dunno, I'm picturing a future with everyone standing around absorbed in their own devices (not too different from today) but where we struggle to ask each other normal questions due to offloading our collective intelligence and social skills to the cloud. Destined to become Daphne totally reliant on glasses to interact with the world around us.

I'm probably overly dramatic here. You're out having fun at a park with friends! I'm just trying to imagine how future generations will interact with this tech, particularly the youth who won't know a world without.

Re: Gross Apple Marketing

#183

Post by throwaway106382 »

illwrks wrote: post #18

Appple are speaking to the “Everyman”, Canonical are speaking to the tech literate. Different audiences, Apple has power users, but its largest audience is an average person (my wife for example). The average person doesn’t care about tech, they want it to work, work well enough and be dependable. Linux is can be a minefield, and Windows is a mess IMO.

Apple's ads tell you what they think their target audience is, clearly they think it's "bumbling fool that can't do anything right".

Re: Gross Apple Marketing

#184

Post by phil-martin »

BobaFloutist wrote: post #175
briandear wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ernest Hemingway once said, “I’m sorry for the long letter, I didn’t have time for a shorter one.” With Apple Intelligence, now you do.

Why would I take the time to read a letter you couldn't be bothered to take the time to write?

Because they took the time to write a long letter, and were thoughtful enough to have it shortened to save you time when reading it?

Re: Gross Apple Marketing

#185

Post by hbn »

jfoster wrote: post #45
ahstilde wrote: post #17

If you think the Ubuntu ad is telling a story, I'd ask you what the story is.

It's just a very standard ad. A lot better than these horrible ads from Apple, though.

It doesn't even give a hint as to what it's an ad for. You could not air that on TV and expect anyone who didn't already know of/use Ubuntu to know what it's advertising. Something about a computer, and there's privacy? You think "certified" means anything to anyone outside of tech circles?

Re: Gross Apple Marketing

#186

Post by pininja »

exitb wrote: post #83
CharlieDigital wrote: post #61

I work at a startup in the AI space. We've been working with it for over a year now and I'm of the mind that AI, in it's current state, really isn't a tool meant for an end user to interact with. It feels like it's the most useful when it's transparent and you -- as an end user -- don't know that there's an LLM in the process. The best use cases seem to be those that don't require an end consumer to directly interact…

But it seems like Apple could make "fetch" happen in the past. Their ads were very aspirational, almost like you could become an Olympian if you just owned a Macintosh. These ads though, they're not about "you can do more". They're about "you can care less".

These ads feel like YouTube Short sketches. A little absurd, and a bit of a fantasy land. Would people really interact this way - word for word?

I think being aspirational with AI can feel a bit in-humane. A lot of people seeing this experience a bit of cringe when the topic of AI is brought up. Maybe they’re worried about their job, that technology is too pervasive - whatever it is, they’re uncomfortable. It’s an easier pill to swallow if I can laugh at it. Apple seems to be picking up on that in these ads.

Re: Gross Apple Marketing

#187

Post by knowitnone »

mdhb wrote: post #149
solaris152000 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yesterday I was walking in Greece and saw a sign I couldn't read so asked my Meta glasses and it gave me a translation and short explanation quickly, which was very helpful. But generally, yes the uses aren't there. In the Apple AI video, the worst is that the 'more professional' text, actually reads much less professional. If someone in a business situation sends you an AI generated email (and it's obviously AI it's…

Honestly I wouldn’t hesitate to steal and break any meta ray bands I see on the street in real life. I don’t want to see that creepy always recording without permission kind of shit normalised.

theft and violence is your solution? what a nice group of "intellectuals" here at HN.

Re: Gross Apple Marketing

#188

Post by CharlieDigital »

Ensorceled wrote: post #174
CharlieDigital wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, a really basic and relevant example might be if I have a meeting coming up on my calendar, an agent can pull info from my LinkedIn about the participants, check their socials (so I can make small talk and chat), research info about some of the topics in the meeting (e.g. pull stats, recent articles, etc.) and summarize it to prepare me for the meeting. Like, that's actually useful but probably not super sexy.

This is a good example of where we should have stigma attached to AI: a partner showed me their CRM that summarized my profile for them. It was creepy in how far into my online life it had dug. It also said, along with the creepy things, that I was "risk adverse" and "only acted when I had complete information" ... as a startup CTO this is both laughably wrong and could have career implications.

LLM's can be tuned to do what you want it to do. It can be as simple as "summarize these notes" to as questionable as "rate this candidate for this job".

The former is mostly just a reduction in task and condensation of information. The latter is the opposite: an extrapolation of some conclusion based on given information.

This is not the fault of an LLM, but the people using it and the use cases that have been designed. An AI assistant that just gave me the facts (condense) rather than generate its own conclusions (expand, extrapolate) is fine, IMO.

Re: Gross Apple Marketing

#189

Post by jajko »

paul7986 wrote: post #151
ryandrake wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what always happens when you have a technology and then desperately try to find problems to solve with it. Rather than starting with a problem and then applying the most appropriate technology to solve it. The exact same thing happened with Blockchain, but "AI" has about 100x more hype behind it.

I think people present day do not understand how to really use AI.. understand how it can benefit their life. The commercial the OP speaks and the ad agency sounds lame as they arent helping. Personally Ive been enjoying wearing my Ray Bans for the past year and have used them to do things no other glasses can like... - Translate.... was in Canada recently and a sign about Jasper the town i was in was in French. I as…

Are those glasses with camera always on sticking it into other people's faces, just like before Google glass had it?

That's an idiotic toy to use among other people, and I am keeping things polite here. Unless you ask each of them if its OK they will be recorded and evaluated by Meta company (and who knows who else).

Your convenience stops right where rights of me and my family starts. Bring it next to any small kids and expect some well deserved non-nice feedback coming your way.

Re: Gross Apple Marketing

#190

Post by Thorrez »

stackghost wrote: post #96
BugsJustFindMe wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As compared to the "schlub writes an email" video, which was compelling, funny OP is right, though. What you're calling "compelling" and "funny" seems very much also like messages telling you to that it's ok to lie to everyone around you including your family and friends. That's not a funny message to me. It's an appalling one.

Absolutely nobody is going to see these ads and to "Ah, well, now that I have seen this ad I will start lying". That person is already lying about stuff. We've all done it. I think the real indictment against Apple (and AI more broadly) is that this is the best use case for their supposedly revolutionary technology that they could come up with.

I don't want to interact with people who lie. I don't want to interact with people who say lying is a good thing. Apple is saying lying is a good thing ("genius") in some of these ads.
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