Apple’s iPad “Crush” Ad Is Bleak, Ominous and Threatening
Apple’s iPad “Crush” Ad Is Bleak, Ominous and Threatening
The beloved consumer electronics company accidentally shows their cards in a grotesque, Freudian nightmare.
I don’t know if you’ve seen Apple’s just-released commercial for the “New” iPad Pro, but it’s pretty awful. It is dark, humorless, and feels like a not-so-thinly veiled threat to writers, musicians, game makers, developers, and artists of all kinds. …and children, even.
I’ve watched it at least five times today alone, and I’m left with one big question.
“Who on earth approved this?”
It’s absolutely baffling that the world’s largest technology company, with the world’s biggest marketing budget, thought this would be a good idea.
What kind of idiot—or idiots, since dozens or hundreds of people had to be involved in the writing, staging, producing, recording, and editing—felt this kind of ad would somehow create a positive emotional connection with consumers?
Seriously, it’s terrifying.
In a dank, cold warehouse devoid of all life and humanity, an industrial crusher comes to life and starts destroying a collection of musical, philosophical, and artistic devices and instruments.
For no apparent reason, everything starts getting smashed: first, a trumpet, then an arcade video game, then cans of paint, a piano, a globe, a metronome, a guitar… on and on it goes, obliterating everything in sight into a colorful, gooey, explosive mess.
Books, camera lenses, lamps, a guitar, a sculpture, and a typewriter—all tools of the liberal arts—get mangled into a garbage heap as Sonny & Cher cheerfully sing, “All I ever need is you.”
In the penultimate moment, a goofy yellow smiley emoji becomes a bug-eyed scary-clown freak as it, too, is crushed to death.
Worse, if you enable closed captions as I do by default, the video says: “[POPPING] [SPLAT]” right as its eyeballs pop out of its head when Cher sings, “Give me a reason to build my world around you.”
It’s enough to make a child cry.
It has all the comforting vibes of the burnt pink teddy bear floating in the swimming pool on Breaking Bad after two planes crash in mid-air.
I have so many questions (aside from simply wondering the names of the soon-to-be ex-employees who greenlit this abomination).
First of all, as a trumpet player myself, I am personally offended that they made me watch a perfectly good trumpet get smashed to smithereens like it’s no big deal. Why would they torture me like this?
Second of all, what is the message here? No, not that “the most powerful iPad ever is also the thinnest,” as the voiceover artist states in the last few seconds of the clip.
I mean: what is the message?
Ostensibly, pulverizing children’s toys, arcade games, architectural models, and ceramic Angry Birds into a paste implies something like “We’re taking all the best of humanity; all the collective works of Western Civilization, smashing it into pieces and putting it inside this remarkably thin device so you can have all of it in the palm of your hand.”
But my oh my, is there an elephant in this room… and he’s hiding behind the monstrous destroying machine.
Did anyone inside Apple realize that everyone outside Apple will recognize this imagery in a metaphorical sense, but not the one Apple intended?
We don’t see a crushing machine gently consolidating the greatest output of all our artistic endeavors, simply reformatted for a digital age and consumed by everyone with instant, fingertip access.
We see what is painstakingly obvious to us, and the timing couldn’t possibly be worse.
We see a giant, soulless machine consuming our work in a very different way. Right now, AI models are training themselves on our intellectual property and even our very own personally identifying data.
We aren’t the ones doing the consuming. We’re the ones being consumed.
The tech industry has become one massive gaping maw, opening wide and swallowing everything in sight, chewing it up into little bits and pieces of comminuted waste, like a paper shredder or a garbage disposal.
It’s destruction in its most literal form.
And for what?
For a newer version of the iPad that is only slightly thinner than its predecessor?
For an only marginally improved version of Apple’s tablet device that has been around for 14 years?
For increased profits?
This is a terrible look for Apple.
They may as well be saying: “All your work are belong to us.”
Personally, I am a fan of artificial intelligence. I am eagerly embracing our robot overlords and I welcome our new digital god, the CSV file (as the actual developers of AI models like to say). I look forward to the freedom and innovation that will come as a result of humanity augmenting our intelligence with AI like a force multiplier on a battlefield.
But if Apple has the same perspective I do, they’re selling it in the worst possible way.
When I see this video, I see that Apple is definitely crushing something… but I’m not sure what.
Crushing small companies that develop apps for the extremely heavy-handed App Store, which imposes byzantine restrictions on what they can and can’t do with their own apps?
Crushing competitors by limiting what they can do on the iOS and MacOS platforms with arbitrary and capricious rules about enabling functionalities that Apple doesn’t like, even if users do?
Crushing publishers and content creators with a punitive 30% fee on all subscriptions and in-app purchases?
Crushing choice and competition by not allowing app makers to make apps and programs that do the same thing that native apps already do, even if they do it better?
Crushing all human creativity and innovation by automating and systematizing everything?
In the early days of the “Google vs. Apple” fight over the web and app stores, I was really concerned that Google was becoming way, way too powerful. Specifically, in 2015, when Google came up with “app streaming,” they announced a desire to form a “web of apps.” This was concerning.
Especially when coupled with Google’s efforts to steal content from other websites and provide it to users via the “knowledge graph” results, ending up with the creation of “zero-click” search results pages, which absolutely punished website owners and content creators.
By taking the most valuable content off a website and showing it to Google users without them needing to click through to the website itself, Google had essentially stolen everybody’s intellectual property with only the most minimal attribution possible (to fend off lawsuits, no doubt, but with no intention of users actually visiting the website in question anymore).
“Google is eating the internet,” I thought and said out loud (although I probably wasn’t the first person to use that phrase)
But what I meant was purely an analogy. It was vague and ambiguous, almost silly.
Maybe I was wrong, though: maybe it’s Apple that’s doing the eating.
Maybe Apple is not only gobbling up everyone else’s work but also homogenizing it—and us—and forcing us to use their platform, pay their fees, abide by their rules, and constantly keep upgrading, upgrading, upgrading, to an ever-thinner iPad in order to use it.
Watch the video again. This is the stuff of nightmares.
To be perfectly fair, even if I were to take the commercial at face value and ignore its off-the-charts creepiness and just stick to its one stated claim—that the new iPad Pro is thinner—it still fails as a commercial.
Why? Because nobody cares how thin an iPad is. Seriously.
I’ve owned an iPad since 2010, which means I’ve carried around a version of Apple’s already-thin tablet for over a dozen years. Never once have I said to myself: “You know what improvement I’d really like to see in this thing? I wish it were thinner.”
Never. That thought has never crossed my mind, even once.
You know what has?
I would really like better battery life.
I’d like my iPad to not get hot to the touch when I use the Apple Pencil to take notes.
I wish it wasn’t so fragile: I dropped my brand-new iPad 2 back in the day when it slipped out of the arm-hold I was carrying it in, it bounced on the pavement, and the screen shattered into a thousand pieces, making it unusable.
I wish it had more storage.
I wish Apple would stop changing the type of cable connector it uses: I’ve gone from the original 30-pin connector to the Lightning connector and now to the current USB-C/Thunderbolt connector.
I wish I could view the screen in direct sunlight.
I wish it wouldn’t overheat and turn off automatically when I use it outdoors in the summertime.
Those are announcements I would welcome in a new iPad Pro commercial. None of this “now even thinner” nonsense nobody needs or cares about.
So, back to the commercial.
In my opinion, whoever made this ad should be fired. I almost never say that about other companies, especially for good-faith marketing efforts gone wrong… those of us who work in marketing make mistakes sometimes, and we learn from them.
But cases like this warrant a special exception.
Marketing and advertising are designed to make people want to buy your products. This commercial doesn’t just not make me want to buy Apple’s products. It makes me not want to buy Apple’s products, which is something altogether different.
It turns me from someone who likes iPads into someone who is almost rethinking iPads entirely. That’s not just a bad advertisement; it’s a harmful advertisement.
Apple is usually known for great commercials. The legendary 1984 Super Bowl commercial was, of course, their best. I thought the “Hello, I’m a Mac” series was absolutely brilliant.
They have made some missteps along the way, but this one is really bad. Not even their nauseatingly preachy and woke “Mother Nature” ad from a few years ago was this bad.
Steve Jobs once said it best:
“Technology alone is not enough—it’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the results that make our heart sing.”
My goodness, that last line alone is poetry itself.
This ad seems to be Apple signaling that they don’t believe in that anymore. And I don’t think all this handwringing is an overreaction to where you could say, “Oh, c’mon, it’s just a commercial! What’s the big deal?”
It is a big deal. It tells you about the values of the company and what they intend to communicate. Really, how is this the same company that used to sell iPhones by showing grandmas using FaceTime to connect with their baby grandchildren from afar during the holidays?
Everything about it is wrong: even the thumbnail they chose for it (the bulging-eyed smiley face) and the fact that they gave it the title “Crush!”
It was fun to see the reactions to the video online today. I find it fascinating that Apple shared it on YouTube but turned off the comments. On X, Tim Cook shared it Tuesday, and the video which so richly deserves to be mocked is getting it in spades.
Some people are calling it “anti-art.” One user called it “soul-crushing,” which was about as literal and logical a response as you’d expect.
It turns out Apple actually made an announcement about the commercial. In response to the (apparently unexpected) poor welcome it got, Apple wrote: “We missed the mark with this video, and we’re sorry.”
Lame response from a tone-deaf tech behemoth, but still, they hopefully got the message.
C’mon, Apple. I have seen the future, and this ain’t it.