The observation that this ad is a bookend to the classic 1984 ad is interesting, in 1984 Apple is destroying a screen and freeing people to work on creative, human expression. Meanwhile in the M4 iPad ad, they're crushing the tools of creative human expression into a screen.
Edit: I bet the reaction to this would have been completely different if it was a cartoon instead of real life commercial.
Yeah there's no problem with the general concept of the ad, and a cartoonish squish solves that. But they wanted dramatic images of destruction because it looks cool or whatever, without thinking that it's really odd and dissonant to feature a bunch of creative tools being destroyed in an ad which is ostensibly meant to celebrate and encourage creativity.
It's pretty obvious the items in the advertisement are being destroyed. The message is that they were compacted into an ipad, but if like the vast majority of the population you don't think an ipad is a replacement for those items, they were destroyed and replaced with something worse.
The ad does seem very tone deaf. It looks like they were going for “thinness” with the hydraulic press, but the ad instead evokes “destruction.” Apple’s brand has never tried to be about destruction, particularly the destruction of creative things, so it feels like a pretty big mistake.
The ad is kind of pretty and gently amusing. In the grand scheme of "offensive adverts" this doesn't wiggle the needle. I'm suspecting this is more likely a thinly veiled hype from Apple, or just a result of Apple being polarizing.
Apple works very hard to cultivate an image of "our users are hip, cool, creative, and free." Apple also specifically avoids controversy often going out of their way to take non-positions, so to speak. At that level, no advertiser should take the maintenance of that image lightly for what would be a cheap bump in the discussion trends.
That'd be my guess, at least. I imagine we'll know if we see the ad pulled (if it hasn't been already).
What they should / could have done: Through the Looking Glass:
Start with an extreme close-up on the implements of human creativity. Pan across the paints, the instruments, canvas, start to zoom out... You keep zooming out until your viewpoint moves away back out through the surface of the screen. The screen tilts away from the viewer until it shows the iPad edge on.
Hmmm... Matrix references aside, that might be creepier. Captivity instead of creativity compressed.
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[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 45.7 ms ] threadEdit: I bet the reaction to this would have been completely different if it was a cartoon instead of real life commercial.
Replacement/alternative. This is just whining around the meme of smashing stuff in a press.
Outrage is lame.
That'd be my guess, at least. I imagine we'll know if we see the ad pulled (if it hasn't been already).
I would have gone with a synthesis approach. Say teleporting the items and "quantumly mixing" them into the new ipad.
Start with an extreme close-up on the implements of human creativity. Pan across the paints, the instruments, canvas, start to zoom out... You keep zooming out until your viewpoint moves away back out through the surface of the screen. The screen tilts away from the viewer until it shows the iPad edge on.
Hmmm... Matrix references aside, that might be creepier. Captivity instead of creativity compressed.