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Apple apologizes for iPad 'Crush' ad that 'missed the mark'

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Re: Apple apologizes for iPad 'Crush' ad that 'missed the mark'

#981

Post by throwaheyy »

7thpower wrote: post #243
endisneigh wrote: post #239

Man, people get offended about everything these days.

Yes. I am questioning whether I have some emotional deficiency because I just don’t get why people are reading so far into it and, to me, it perfectly encapsulates how people are constantly looking for something to be offended by. I thought the ad was bad, but for different reasons. The ads and presentation have become so over produced that it feels like some giant inside joke for a company that is out of touch. I th…

> Yes. I am questioning whether I have some emotional deficiency

Yeah, you probably do. Take a hobby or art form that you’re really passionate about and have spent a lot of time on. Something that when you’re doing it, all is right in the universe. Doing this activity your tools become an extension of yourself. They are valuable and beautiful things to you, and you become somewhat attached to them.

Now someone crushes these, your favourite tools and instruments and equipment, in a hydraulic press and says that an iPad can replace them.

If you still don’t see how this could be unsettling to someone who gets so much enjoyment and purpose out of them, and instead view this as looking for a reason to be offended, you probably have some sort of emotional deficiency. You could be autistic, or have psychopathic or sociopathic tendencies.

Re: Apple apologizes for iPad 'Crush' ad that 'missed the mark'

#982

Post by eddyzh »

And because of the pushback the ad is talked about and watched even more. I am sure this was anticipated and taken as calculated decision.

Whatever your response, the product and brand is so big that the point that the ad wants to make remains.

There is no such thing as bad publicity when your goal is getting attention.

I personally find it very rude.

Marketing wise doing rude things is smart.

Re: Apple apologizes for iPad 'Crush' ad that 'missed the mark'

#983

Post by uwagar »

sudhirj wrote: post #959
kenjackson wrote: post #879

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This outrage feels so manufactured. I'm a huge basketball fan, coach, ex-player. If they included a basketball in the ad my thought would've been "yeah, you can play NBA2k on it". I'm not mad about the destruction of a single basketball. I don't feel like its disrespect to the game. It's showing that this single device has captured elements of basketball into a small form factor. As you note this may hint at a larger…

I like the ad on the whole, but I was a little upset about the destruction of seemed like a perfectly good guitar. I play the guitar as a hobby. But then again, rock bands have been making me upset by smashing guitars on stage for decades now. And these are the same kind of musicians who are apparently outraged now. Can sort of understand the discomfort, but musicians have been smashing their own instruments for dram…

hmm i thought the guitar was cg

Re: Apple apologizes for iPad 'Crush' ad that 'missed the mark'

#984

Post by lionkor »

llm_trw wrote: post #421
lionkor wrote: post #233

I like it. You throw away all your hard-earned, expensive instruments, tools, and crush them to be sure. You then go buy an iPad, and the circle is complete: You're now a next-generation Apple consumer! Just turn on YouTube kids and watch slime videos for the rest of your life. Reject culture, consume the slop.

>Reject culture, consume the slop. Culture from the last 20 years has been the slop and the people complaining loudest here have been making the sloppiest slop of all.

Absolutely not, you can still go to theatres, concerts, etc. theres plenty of culture to be had

Re: Apple apologizes for iPad 'Crush' ad that 'missed the mark'

#985

Post by huimang »

There is something deeply, viscerally upsetting about watching creative objects get destroyed by an industrial machine. I understand what they were going for, but I can't believe this got greenlighted.

The symbolism of physically destroying a handmade instrument or a precision-made item like a camera lens is unbelievably disgusting. On top of that, the current era we're in has artists fearing for the future as generative AI (which is trained on stolen artwork by humans) is coming to replace their livelihood.

All I can do is shake my head and wonder why tech people have such utter contempt and disdain for artists.

Re: Apple apologizes for iPad 'Crush' ad that 'missed the mark'

#986

Post by CatWChainsaw »

nonrandomstring wrote: post #141
thejazzman wrote: post #5

It really exemplifies the culture change from Steve's obsession with the INTERSECTION of humanities and science. Silicon Valley on a mission

> Silicon Valley on a mission Seriously and sincerely, I'd like to hear a dozen definitions of what people think that "mission" is in 2024. I think we long departed from "making the world a better place". And yet the change simply cannot be explained by greed, money, or obsession with growth. Surely a lot of the venture capitalists that frequent this forum must be as confused as the next person if they still hold on…

Between e/acc+singularity, hyper-libertarianism and the actual locked-in, rent-seeking, culture-choking techno-feudalism we're getting, it's always been pretty obvious to me that the "mission" is to become the secular equivalent of a god, and then reign eternal, just like the world-building genre of games primes them for.

Too bad it's a big club and everybody here won't be in it, eh.

Re: Apple apologizes for iPad 'Crush' ad that 'missed the mark'

#987

Post by CatWChainsaw »

ada1981 wrote: post #734

I thought it was cool. A bunch of stuff that would end up in a land fill anyway. People love to be offended these days.. and then apologizing for an ad? Apple went from 1984 to this…

That iPad will end up in the same landfill in less time than the objects would have and be toxic to boot...

Re: Apple apologizes for iPad 'Crush' ad that 'missed the mark'

#990

Post by benreesman »

maxrobeyns wrote: post #506

My initial reaction to the ad, upon watching it in the launch event was "huh, that's a fun reference to the Hydraulic Press Channel". The slapstick elements (trumpet noise, squishy balls) made it come across as light-hearted, rather than an ominous display of force by a large company crushing artists' tools. This idea of 'squashing all these tools down to a thin slab of glass' made sense given their somewhat unusual…

I think this is exactly correct:

“Perhaps the blowback is a sign of a wider weariness that people have accumulated towards big tech companies over the past few years, mixed with a nebulous malaise about 'AI' and what it means for the status quo and people's livelihoods.”

To the former point, I think it was Doctorow that coined the term “enshittification”.

To be fair to Big Tech, they’re not any worse than healthcare companies, or airlines, or any of the countless (sometimes it seems basically all) corporations that have been steadily turning the crank on making the modern experience a little worse every year for typical people (I’m not interested in silly summary statistics like per-capita GDP or the CPI, those are gamed to hell: give me an arithmetic mean and I’ll give you a corrupt system).

It’s that so recently they were so much better. When I joined a FAANG in 2011 I had no issue wearing company gear around. People would be like: “that’s awesome I use that every day it’s great”. By 2018 I was lying in coffee shops and bars about what I did for a living (one of the main reasons I left).

Regarding AI broadly construed, it could be used as a wildly powerful tool for leveling the playing field, the way Google was when it appeared. It’s in the hopes of realizing that outcome that I work on it and am so vocally critical of those who just trivially don’t want that.

But it could also become the greatest tool for oppression since the firearm, and I think the public is starting to get wise to the fact this is unfortunately the path we’re on.

It’s trite, but I always come back to this: when the robots are finally capable of doing all the work, do we get Star Trek TNG or Blade Runner.

The technology is a step in either direction depending on how it’s used and regulated.

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