ok mr tim cook you owe me Some Money. here is your link: www.patreon.com/pillarofgarbage kind regards, Pogger of Goatbage :-)

If they did this as a cartoon/obvious CGI, it would have worked. The way it was actually done... It's an accidentally brilliant anti-consumerist piece of performance art.

the opposite would have been so much more effective. imagine a big room with an ipad in the middle. A sterotypical party magician comes in. He goes towards the ipad, reaches into it and pulls out a trumpet. etc. you could use slowly more total camera shots to show the amount of things escalate

I saw someone point this out on Twitter and Ill never not think of it when this ad is discussed (paraphrasing): "In 1984, Apple made an ad where the Mac represented freedom and colour, destroying a cold, grey world with the throw a hammer. 40 years later, Apple made an ad where they destroyed freedom and colour with a hydraulic press in favour of the cold and grey."

There’s just something so viscerally uncomfortable about watching everything get smashed, explode, shatter. Intentional or not, the ad isn’t about compression; it’s about destruction.

"All press is good press..." except when it's a hydraulic press apparently.

I can just imagine a Kindle ad showing a book burning.... because those books on on your kindle! Why is everyone so upset???

I think there’s also an underlying hubris in thinking that people will be totally on board with the suggestion that a fuckn iPad will be a valid substitute for a $20,000 film camera or a real physical guitar, not just in actual ability but in visceral and personal experience

"Creativity is in our DNA" - Takes away beloved hardware such as the headphone jack - Makes proprietary chargers and software updates which make the device useless and force you to buy a new one. - Haven't made an actual change to their phones since the 1st. - Predatory storage pricing which manipulates you into buying the most expensive model. Yeah, sure Apple, sure.

Theres an angry birds piggy bank in a few shots that I had as a kid, I was a very sensitive kid and I put a lot of sentimental value into my belongings, so when mine broke I’m pretty sure I cried. I had forgotten about it, but seeing the same one being crushed reminded me, and also just made me sad. They don’t make those anymore, but the people who made this commercial probably didn’t know or care. It was just another thing in the pile to be crushed for spectacle. Everything in that pile could have been used and loved, and to me this is just an example of the waste and lack of humanity of capitalism and the corporations that uphold it.

this is my first time seeing or hearing of this ad, and honestly a big part of what gets me about it isn't even the actual destruction of all these objects (which is terrible), it's the way it's framed. the surroundings are grey, cold and dismal, not a shred of humanity to be found. the floor is covered in the remains of the crushed objects, the paint seeps out of the press like blood. it reads like a piece someone would make to criticize silicon valley and consumerism, and not a particularly subtle one. it's crazy to me that a company would put this out and honestly believe it's a good ad, that people will love it and love them in turn.

This ad taps into a visceral feeling. It's trying to play even a simple melody on a touch screen piano when you've felt the weight of the keys on an upright. The frustration of getting a decent photo when you've used even an entry level DSLR. The way digital journalling is interrupted by neverending push notifications, a $2 notebook and 20c pencil will leave you alone in a way that the iPad won't. The way MIDI brass always sounds like a fly buzzing in your ear. I'm no luddite, tablets can be great for reading on the go, consuming media, lightening your schoolback by turning your 1000 page textbook into a thin glass rectangle. The iPad is also still the king of digital art on the go, it is in a league of its own. The ad is a failure because it reminds people of all the things they hate about technology. If you put the iPad on top of an upright piano and showed someone reading sheet music without having to page through a stack of it, or showing someone using the apple pencil to render a gorgeous artwork, or showed someone transferring a photo from their camera to their iPad and editing it... It would have worked. The tech is supposed to work for us, not against us.

This is very "children's hospital color theory - like yes you can say putting trails of red paint on the floor of a children's hospital plays on the natural positive energy of the color but that does not change how the overall effect feels to the audience

It'd be like Facebook making an ad crushing all your friends and loved ones with a hydraulic press into the Facebook app running on a phone.

Advertisers and marketers, I say this as someone who used to be one in a previous millennium, have deluded themselves into thinking they are artists. They think what they do is art. Not that there is AN art to it, nor that it requires art to make an ad or a campaign. They see the ad, the campaign, the IDEA of it, as ART. And the more risks they take, the more money they spend (and waste) and things of value they sacrifice for that art, the more arty they feel their art is. If they had a client who could afford to buy the Mona Lisa and feed it into a woodchipper, they would do it. For the statement. For the buzz. For... whatever. It's art. Art that is so arty that it is worth destroying something that expensive (the cultural significance and historical value might not occur to them) just to art their arty art. There are actual artists who would do the same. I sort of feel like they are just frustrated advertising execs who don't realise that their "art" is entirely self promotion. Artists who would tie up a dog in a gallery and let it starve to death for, the statement? The... whatever. It's art. It must be very arty art to need to let an animal suffer and die horribly. How art. Filmmakers used to do it too. Kill animals. Kill people. Do things on camera they should spend a life in prison if they did it for... not art. Ad people, marketing people, they think they are artists. Of course they'd smash a guitar some poor kid could use to make real art. Hell, if they could get it on camera, they'd find a poor kid WITH a guitar and smash it in front of them if they could sell it as the message - of their "art." I may have some feelings about this.

The way it looks like the squish toy tries to “escape” and gets crushed anyways, as it stares directly into camera… it really doubles down on the horrifying tone.

I've never felt more uncomfortable watching an ad and I remember the weird sexual fast food ads from the 2000s. Combined with Apple's relentless planned obsolescence, so many of those things crushed would've lasted so much longer than this new ipad. (As an artist, seeing all that paint and such get wasted and knowing how expensive it can be, good golly) It's such a slap in the face to all artists of all kinds. Even though I primarily do digital art, the erasing of everything tactile to be cold and lifeless *feels* antithetical to everything that makes art, art. It didn't even really register to me consciously that all those things were crushed and being turned into the new ipad. I was way more preoccupied with the feelings of watching those things get destroyed instead. They made an anti art ad even if that wasn't the intention.

Intent vs Execution is so fucking important. It’s why conceptually the “Martha” scene in Batman v Superman should be really poignant and emotional. When in reality it’s a fucking meme because the execution is fucking silly.

I can‘t quite put my finger on it, but I could have sworn that I have seen ads about things being compressed, smashed together or otherwise (violently) combined into a new thing before. It‘s just that these ads never actually show the violence of that process. Just hide the actual crushing behind shots of the machine or some special effects and show the end product, preferably with all the original stuff in there or on the screen, because that’s the message you probably wanted to send.

It is especially noteworthy to me how they seem to treat all of these meaningful and sentimental objects as incidentally disposable in service of a device they effectively treat as disposable. A guitar can last a lifetime and lenses made decades ago can still be useful today. How much does Apple expect this new iPad to last until they start hawking the next one?

'they told the truth'... this line slaps

Wow, that ad looks like its ripped straight out of a dystopic cyberpunk setting to "subtly clue the viewer/player/reader" that the mega-corporation running the world has playing on every reflective object they could feasibly jam it on

it’s an ad that just exponentially gets worse the more intimate of a connection you have to art, the stronger your connection to reality, & the more rational you are. it’s artistically gruesome & grotesquely dystopian. from the bleeding of paint onto a mini grand piano, the pressing of a human clay face against a cold, unrelenting, massive, metal plate of industry. one of the most massively widespread emojis being the last thing to survive only ads insult to injury. tools are an extension of oneself, they know this. they provide us with tools afterall, that is their job. they know the meaning behind this & they just don’t know how much it really hurts, because to them they value their tool as an equivalent to all they’ve destroyed. it’s the issue of “oh i’ll just replace it with something of equal or greater value!” without properly addressing the real issues of morality that they so casually & unthoughtfully discarded

I feel like there's nothing really clearly intentionally malicious about it, but it is kind of tone deaf. It's obvious the intention is that they're pressing all this creativity down into a sleek package. But also they want the visuals of hydraulic press crush videos, which is something being completely destroyed and smashed. They mix their metaphor.

its the lenses and paint that get me, as someone that cant afford a 60-200 lens , or paint, or canvases, its just disgusting

Someone mentioned Tsukumogami, the belief that artisan tools can have a spirit, is another reason why it's extremely distressful.

As someone who works in ads (hi, animator who sold his soul here!) marketers and ad agency types are so up their own ass. Most of them make ads to be seen by other people in the ad industry. It's all award bait. Therefore it's all about "how high concept can I make this ad?". Which other ad people understand and lavish awards for. But most of the time, the average viewer of the ad either doesn't care or understand what's going on behind the ad. It's all wank in a dumb industry. Why should they care or want to understand? So no doubt the agency on this was seeing all the awards that were going to come in for this "super high concept" and also super high bugdet, highly produced ad. While completely misreading the room on who's actually using iPads and what for. They're betting so hard on generative algorithmic bullshit, they didn't see how the core audience of creative professionals were going to interpret this ad. Ad people don't have imagination. Just campaign goals.

All I know is, if I put an iPad in a hydraulic press and it breaks, I'm sueing. Because this ad clearly shows an iPad surviving a hydraulic press.

Your point about what it means to destroy a guitar is especially interesting in light of 1960s rock stars like the Who and Jimi Hendrix destroying their guitars as a centerpiece of their concerts. It just goes to show how the same physical act means something very different when it's coming from a tech advertisement versus when it's coming from true artists.

I don't like apple

This ad feels like one thing in a line of a thousand pushing AI and new "innovations" as the answer to all our problems, the cheap, simplified, and more effective version of art and labour. Execs that don't even understand the technology are punting billions on it, and it's humiliating for everyone involved. I'd find it funny if it wasn't so detrimental to society.

OH MY GOD I can't believe the agency is literally called "Iconoclast". My first reaction to the ad was _"This seems like nasty iconoclasm."_ I am immediately skeptical of iconoclasm. There's something unpleasant about people who revel in the destruction of the past more than the creation of the future.

What immediately stuck out to me is the way the objects being crushed are anthropomorphized /in the ad itself/. Like, the arcade cabinet saying “game over,” the mannequin with its hands up like it’s fearing for its life, the clay human head painfully twisting in on itself. Also the cartoon character looking up with a concerned face before exploding. These objects are presented as if they are aware of what’s going on and fearing their demise. The concept was fine, but the execution was telling its own story. Coulda just… put the previous iPad Pro on a hydraulic press and replaced by the new one when it lifted back up. But that wouldn’t have been flashy enough. Anyways, I want to acknowledge that this is a really well-written and well-presented essay! Introducing and explaining the different points, acknowledging the criticisms and respectfully rebutting them, and the organization overall just 👌 I mean I know those are the goals of an essay but you don’t always see this level of quality haha

The symbolism isnt much better. Yea its compressing those tools into one item. But that item is under the iron grip of Apple. A monopoly. A company that will take you and shake you until all your money falls out. Companies should not ever hold our creative abilities in their hands. No matter how slick and easy to use it may be. Anyone who struggled with Adobe will understand that very well.

'Big things go small' doesn't work because the ad doesn't show the big things being turned into small things. It shows 'big things smashed into fragments'. If they wanted the ad to say 'big things turn small' they should have used CGI or something to show the items being compressed but not broken, and then when the press raises you see all the items except they've been miniaturized.

The smiley's get me I will admit. I think a life time of movie explosions and Mythbusters putting things in microwaves has numbed me to the destruction of objects, but anything you can anthropomorphise, or which represents a person (or animal, I've got a rubber duck on my desk and when it cracked I described it as 'I think my rubber duck died') has a habit of getting to me. Especially the eye popping. I get that that's supposed to be the joke, but I viscerally dislike it.

there's just something about seeing several colorful things (that don't belong to one singular entity in a way) being crushed into small monochrome thing owned by a terrible corporation in a perfect monochrome factory background that does it to me, really got that life sucking visuals

Even if you put aside the connotations of 'destruction' the message of the ad is still one of replacement. "The new iPad means you dont need all that old stuff now." Like I can imagine (since it's been done before) an alternative tech advert that portrays "our new gadget will perfectly *fit perfectly alongside* your lifestyle". It honestly makes me not want an iPad and not in a boycotting apple way, just that it makes me think of how much of that tactile experience of real objects is lost when everything in the world is done via a screen.

This was the result of an environment where people are not empowered to question the decision makers. It's clear that someone at Apple felt they were being very clever by incorporating the Hydraulic Press Channel, that it would make them look in the know and with their finger on the pulse of cultural trends. They were so enamored with their idea that they went full tilt into it and no one in the room anywhere along the way was empowered to say anything critical or even ask the question of how this will play from a different perspective. It's Apple's version of the Super Soaker goo ad.

Ad/Marketing/PR guy here The only important metric when it comes to ads is, "who is your target market and how did they react to your ad?" Basically, who are you selling to? And did they bite your message? The key idea about advertising is not the immediate buy. Even in a world of one-click, next-day-delivery e-commerce, most advertising is still about putting a product top-of-mind to the target's decision-making process at the point of purchase or deciding to. When the target market is thinking, "do i want to buy a gadget and what brand is that?" is when your ad comes in. So this ad of Apple's has to be taken in that context: who was Apple selling to? Because no amount of yea or nay means anything if the ad doesn't make the target audience buy that new IPad. Like that person who said they're part of the millions who sub to a pressing machine channel. So what? Are you buying an iPad?

My mom's cousin worked as an ad executive in NYC at the *height* of the 1960's fashion-- she was responsible for some insanely iconic and successful print and commercial ads, mostly print. There's no reason in heaven, hell or purgatory she'd have approved something like this-- it's so tone deaf, especially when elder Gen Z has embraced the arts after having it squeezed out of public schools due to lack of funding. Half of my entire friend group (a mix of elder Millennial and elder Gen Z) have bought cheap musical instruments to learn how to play, they pick up art supplies as a way to unwind and relax on their days off work. The consequence of arts getting stripped out of learning centers is we discovered a lot of it on our own, and while I don't doubt a lot of the ad is AI, that's not the point. The point is the ad said the quiet part out loud, "all creativity will be subsumed by electronics, and we are proudly leading the way." They are screaming to the heavens that all art, all creativity will only be able to exist in a space where it can be wrenched away from you at the press of a button. I also feel you on the guitar, my mom was self taught and my best memories of her are playing Joni Michelle and when I was *really* young, "Puff the Magic Dragon"-- to see one literally explode is very jarring. Unfortunately, Apple is a cult and there are people who are willing to die on the hill of defending a commercial.

"At Apple, we hate you and everything you love, now give us money like a good little piggie."

I think the context around this ad is worth noting too, though. It comes at a time when the context is *very* bad. Most artists I know (and I know quite a few) use Apple devices, but most artists I know are at the end of their tether when it comes to technology in general. So artists and audiences are more primed to see this ad as destructive, because that’s how they see technology. And we can know this because this is not the first “hydraulic press squishes artistic tools into a consumer device” ad; LG made a very similar (smaller-but-not-that-much-smaller scale) ad in 2008: kzfaq.info/get/bejne/hMmFdLRjzpu4lqM.html

So what your saying is that one cursed Pokemon bus commercial but if it was actually full of adorable small animals, got it

The whole "don't you get it" thing reminds me of that one Tumblr post where someone was trying to justify red paint smeared on the floor of a children's hospital with colour theory.

Are you cussing telling me they had the BALLS to do this to real items instead of making it all CGI? Which would probably have been cheaper in the long run.

The hydraulic press thing is funny, cause it’s so 2017 to be watching a press crush things. The ad symbolically crushing creative tools in pursuit to an old idea: Make it Smaller. And we dont want it smaller anymore.

I like how pog makes very in depth, intelligent video essays in which he tackles very broad and interesting subjects, and also pauses to laugh at the fact that he said “do do”

I had a realization recently that, when a corporate or political decision looks dumb on the surface, 99% of the time, it's dumb all the way down. My favorite corporate conspiracy theory was that Coca-Cola messed up New Coke on purpose in order to juice sales of "Coca-Cola Classic." Then I found out that they actually got screwed for an entire summer because of New Coke, and it actually took a bit to recover. Figuring this out made me rethink all of the 4D chess theories I subscribed to, and I realized, on a much deeper level, that the elites are all morons! They would all rather you think they're playing the wounded gazelle gambit, when the reality is that most of the people running our society are idiots who got where they are due to nepotism and brown-nosing.

Immediately was thinking of a better way to convey "compressed" or w/e would be to have a person walking around with the ipad, spotting the creative objects they want to put into it, and then taking them: the guitar, the paint can, the clay, etc and smoosh it into the ipad like a cartoon, or like a bag of holding in D&D or whatever. It's just wild to me no one objected to this ad until the public got ahold of it.

Seeing Blackmagic Design editing/color panels and keyboards really hit me hard. If I’m a fanboy of a company, it’s Blackmagic products and DaVinci Resolve. So seeing apple do this to products from a partnering company(they helped BD with their apple silicon. Not even just them, Affinity works so well on Mac’s and iPads that it saves me money from having to pay an adobe suite subscription) really feels like a conflict of partner interests.

I had Marketing classes in college, and something the teachers emphasized above all else was that you have to know the target audience you're advertising to. Because even the most technically impressive, most mindbendingly conceptualized ad will fail if it doesn't speak to the people who actually pay for the product or service its advertizing. Its like a professor said "You can't stand alongside a billboard or a screen saying to people 'with this I meant to say this, you see'. If you wanted to comunicate something and the audience understood another thing, you have failed as a communicator" ... The Apple advertizers are a bunch of faillures, there's no way arround it

Could it be that they are not feeling the current pressure of layoffs, ai replacement, not projecting themselves under the press among everything that represents human experience. Get inside the box. This razor sharp box. This is way more relevant than they intended imo.

All those instruments and materials put together are probably worth 5x more than this new iPhone, but you could probably buy them all for half the price of one

your idea of the artist giving away his stuff because he doesn't need it anymore because he has an ipad is BRILLIANT

That is why bands like OK Gp only use faulty instruments as props.

The reason this ad comes off as tone deaf is because most of us do not live with the excess that the rich take for granted. For them, a piano costing thousands of dollars is just a drop in the bucket. For ordinary people, that same piano would be a major investment, and to see it crushed in a hydrologic press like garbage for a stupid commercial is horrifying. The rich live in a totally different world, and the fact that they didn't see the backlash coming is just proof of that.

10:11 for me, it's the arcade machine. But all of them hurt.

To be honest, just looking at the ad myself, all I see is "we smushed all these little things into one big thing so now it does all the things you used to need all these big things to do". I never saw the ad before this video, didn't know people were upset about it, and if I'd seen the video first it never would have occurred to me to be upset about it. But now that I've seen your take on it, I understand. Apple isn't just saying "it does all the things these things do", they're going on to say, "and thus these things have no value."

I think it lacks a sense of magic of what having a device that comprises all of those things in one could mean. Instead it feels cruel and needlessly violent. And it looks like a parody of a Silicon Valley episode where some tech bro says «disrupt this shit» 😅

I will admit thatbthe dirst time i saw this ad Skill Up was using it as an analogy for the video game industry. He didnt say heaps and thats very telling for how accurately this ad is being seen. I immediately got that this was all if this big stuff but now in this little stuff! I got the minimalism. I have also watched the lay offs in so many industries, especially creative ones. Ive seen the uncreative movies, heard the uncreative songs that im pretty sure were made by AI because of how meh they are. 'They told the truth' you completely nailed it.

It really is a great encapsulation of whats wrong with this moment in tech. They are trying to "empower artists" but there doing it by reduceing the number of them nessacary on the payroll. Its weirdly artful? The years of training required to hire a team of concept artists are being compressed into a tool that can replace that team with a manager. The metronomes we used to train musicians are no longer nessacary. Death of the author i cry it doesn't mater what they thought they were doing. Its in the name of AI which only represents one thing in the creative feild. The replacement of jobs that previously would of taken many artists to make bulk amount of art to use in a project being widdled down to an artist skimming the cream off of what stable defusion puts out.

I just had to find Hanlan's Razor: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity" It seems pretty apt for this discussion. Btw f*ck Apple, what a pillar of garbage!

An acoustic guitar doesnt need to be recharged, can be used without reception and doesnt make you bump into people or lightposts because you are staring on it while walking on the street.

To be honest they should have put a Congolese kid amid the pile. For me it is not a marketing slip … this is a sign of Apple (big tech) not understanding how far away from regular lives and problems they are.

I also thought that they wanted to jump on that Tiktok Trend were people crush all kind of stuff with hydraulic presses. Because now they also started to crush valuable items. Such a weird trend.

I think too this is incredibly poorly timed in the post "let them eat cake" backlash to consumerism and consumer culture. You touched on it with the idea someone would give their arm for one of those instrements and now they cant be removed. You pitch at the end would be so much better to.convey the point.

"You don't need all of that GARBAGE! Our new iPad can replace ALL of it!" is what it looks like to me

I think what truly pushes me over the edge for this is the whole “game over” screen in the arcade machine. I just don’t see how anyone doesn’t find that antagonistic in the slightest.

It perfectly encapsulates the tech industry and what it represents I’ll give them that. Encouraging people to kill their own creativity so they’ll be more dependent on technology, hopelessly out of touch with what the public actually wants to see, repackaging the same product from 10 years ago but easier to break. You name it, it’s present in this whole fiasco

The ad triggered ppl because of the color scheme, the unnerving jittering of the objects as they get crushed and finally the final short showing a face being crushed. It pulled some subconscious strings in our minds.

Fantastic video, as always! This ad definitely struck a negative tone with me, and you really hit the nail on the head why. What really blows my mind on top of everything else is that a good ad exists here. Pretty much just hit "reverse" and it's almost a proper follow-up to the classic 1984 ad. I wouldn't be surprised if they did, at some point, realize the likely outcome of this and release it anyway.

This ad would have fitted right into the movie Equilibrium, where they had scenes of enforcers burning art pieces because the rulers believed suppressing all emotions was the only way to have a stable society.

time to get a pearphone

What marketing thought: "You can do so much stuff with an iPad!" What everyone else understand: "We will crush everything you love and we will be the only ones left"

It's not even a new concept. We have seen this 'big things go little' A LOT (pokemon being crammed into a Gameboy pocket comes to mind). It's a low hanging fruit idea as far as 'creative' goes. It's what you do with it. I agree the issue is not the concept, it is totally the execution. It screams compressing for destruction, not for synthesis. Like seeing a gummy teddy bear being crushed by teeth in excruciating detail instead of it amusingly dissolving in acid or something. I hope this inspires people to touch grass more, if anything. Apple's pocket will not be hurt AT ALL from people not liking an ad. Realize the disconnect we live in.

This is why social media literacy is essential for advertising and marketing something Apple failed to understand.

Someone made a version that plays in reverse and it relays the “big thing made small” messsage much better, references the popular hydronic press content, and still displays how flat the new iPad is.

there are so many ways to think about this. One way is to think of that often posted meme, that in the past we were sold on big tech so we didnt have to work, and free us up to be creative. Yet today the AI is being creative, and all work long hours for less and less reward. The press is the capitalist owned AI crushing all of our creative dreams. A kinder reading, would be "Sure you can be creative, but only on our £3,000 tablet, and using our software, is going to feel like we own how you be creative, how you share what you creative, they might as well own what I create with the melding of software and hardware."

"We compacted all these things into one product" (ipad can be used to draw, make music, 3D modelling, etc.) I *really* do think they just went for that and didn't really put any more thought into it. They maybe should've put some more thought into it, but I really doubt there's many people working in marketing who are deep into metaphors about capitalism

I think you really have a point about there being no apple products like former iPhones, iPads, even apple computers in that commercial. This isn’t a compressing of all previous technologies and tools used for the creation of that thin little device. This commercial is showcasing all previously revered instruments that Apple and to an extent popular society views as old and unnecessary. Also last line goes hard not gonna lie.

Perhaps a blender, rather than an hydraulic press, would have conveyed the same idea less directly and violently, and without the implied destruction.

Dunning-Kruger is probably an overused reference at this point, but all the condescending “you guys it’s just saying big things go small” takes on the palpable failure of this ad just scream “Mount Stupid” to me. The fact that they’re apologizing and pulling the ad should tell these Media Understanders something. Apple wanted to be cool and splashy, but the public saw the ugly reality of the side effects of big tech reflected in this ad. Especially considering what a weak payoff “iPad slightly thinner now so go buy another one” is for all the destruction p*rn they set it up with. Apple fell on their faces here, which should give us a glimmer of joy and hope. No they’re not the avant garde geniuses they pose as, they are dum dums just like the Muskrat.

Just more signs of their increasingly creepy and detached cluelessness......with a smile.....a crushed one!

This feels like a slipup of timing rather than a deliberate attempt to provoke. "All your creative tools in our thinnest product yet" (And I feel this intention is given away by the games that get represented - if it was just intended as provocative I don't think we'd have seen emoji and angry birds in there) feels like it comes from the same school of thought that gave us the pokemon yellow ad with the bus full of pokemon getting crushed down into a... I think a gameboy pocket? Just instead of 'oops we accidentally made a horror film' we got an 'oops we accidentally made a visual metaphor for the tech industry's apparent desires for the creative arts'. Less traumatized 7 year olds, more frustration and anger at the company for being so lacking in self awareness. (You know, while I think no one would deny the pokemon ad as being memorable, I don't tend to hear it being remembered _positively_ - I think I've seen it more on lists of 'weird' or 'unintentionally terrifying' ads, not lists of 'nostalgic' or 'iconic' ads. Now, it could be a coincidence, there's only two data points, but maybe 'depicting stuff getting crushed to advertise your product' is a bad idea?)

actually it is killing creativity, the original add was made by LG in 2008

never really got the obsession with making tech smaller. tbh.

They could've made the exact same ad crushing obsolete Apple products into the new Apple product, but then tech execs would have seen what the rest of us are seeing in this ad.

The fact that everyone at Apple was so pleased with themselves that they released the ad to the public is hilarious, especially to non-Apple users. "Come here, darling, and all your little toys will be crushed to become one-a multi-thousand-dollar subscription technical prison."

Your ad suggestion at the end would be a perfect, tug-at-your-heartstrings little short

YES! You got it exactly right! I was watching the WAN show and I just can't agree with Linus position. The ad is not bad because it's trying to put all these tools and the iPad on one level, it is bad because it hurts every single artist who has to see their beloved tools destroyed before their eyes. It just hurts to see this ad. It's not about the symbolism or anything deep. Just that seeing this destruction hurts...

All Press is Good Press

Back in the day, there was an ad that kind of did a similar thing for advertising Pokémon Red and Blue, where a bus driver gathered all 150 Pokémon and left them in a bus, and then proceeding to crush the bus, where it became a GameBoy with Pokémon. The difference between this and Apple's ad is that the Pokémon ad was a lot faster in compressing the creatures into the GameBoy (probably to fit within the 30 second ad frame) and still showing the same idea of you can do all of this with this tiny device.

"We don't just make your old phone obsolete by making an identical looking one out of even *more* finite resources... We destroy pianos too! Look at us!"

I'm old enough to have been in the demographic who watched a busload of Pokemon being crushed in a hydraulic press, the result being the Gameboy Color, a much faster, more cartoonish example of this concept. But even then I was like, "This idea makes me feel uncomfortable and I don't know why exactly."

that wasnt the metaphor. the metaphor was that the ipad is all of these great things pressed together into one object. its pretty obvious

As someone who did have some studies on marketing and the likes (albeit minors) and visual communication, media culture, etc. the "it is just compacting/compressing/blending into a smaller shape line doesn't really hold any water for me. The obvious focus on all the things breaking strongly implies they're obsolete, they're being replaced by, yes, a technically more compact tool (which is a delusional claim and weakens it even further, but this is not the point I am making so moving on). At best, the idea of "compacting" is in addition to the very clearly, very strongly communicated idea that those other things, they're quite literally destroyed, they're being crushed. They were not subtle, not the name, not the visuals. To say there was no intention, it requires that everyone who saw the ad before release at all the stages of production of it, that all of them are extremely incompetent and uknolwegable in terms of visual communiation, marketing, etc., so that no one at all noticed that this extreme focus on the destruction of the items in question would not just send the "they're being compacted and combined" message. Because if even one person in the process raised the point, we arrive at option B, appel as a company, a collective (i.e. not talking about any one individual, we don't know how the internal mechanisms turn, so I can't comment on that level), it sent out more or less the message the company wanted to convey. I rest my case.

I swear that I just said “doo doo” right before you did 🤣

To be fair, the ad for the first Pokémon Games was a guy luring pokémon into a bus and then putting the bus into a trash compactor. The ad was not seen by anybody as Nintendo wanting to destroy pokémon, but Pokémon being compacted into the Game Boy. The Apple ad might attempt the same, but context matters.

4:58 HPC has used 2 different main presses. A 150 tonne and a newer 300 tonne. NEITHER of these are what a normal person could even hope to get. They are extremely expensive, MASSIVE industrial machines.