Apple destroys musical instruments and cameras in controversial iPad M4 ad | Hacker News Reader

Apple destroys musical instruments and cameras in controversial iPad M4 ad

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8 pointsed_mercer10 comments

How is that presentation "controversial?"

For all I know that was AI generated, with no actual musical instruments or cameras harmed. I saw a piano at the landfill once, I wonder if whomever dumped it got canceled.

The whole time I was watching it I was trying to figure out if it was CGI or if they actually found a giant hydraulic press, stacked everything up, and hoped it would all perfectly crush in a visually pleasing way. And then also do small sections to get those perfect close ups.

The intro video sequence for the 7 May iPad Pro 2024 release presentation.

I found it disturbing.

I get it: this huge collection of fun objects is smooshed together to obtain a smooshed (very thin) iPad Pro.

But the imagery associates destruction of creative tools with iPad.

And what's with the graphic slaying of emoji creatures? Little kids would freak out.

Ugh.

Come on, disturbing? Toy Story has more cartoon violence and my young kids laughed all the way through it. Kids know the difference between a cartoon and real life. Adults likewise should distinguish between actual violence and destruction and an ad that looks like CGI.

Have you ever wanted to smash apart a trumpet? If so, why? Because you were feeling creative? Did you get sent to the principle afterwards?

It's eerie, since Apple's entire shtick is that third party is unneeded, it's cheap. Third party here being conveyed as "paint" and "pianos", etc. Objects which have benefited humanity more than the frickin' iPad.

No, because I didn't take the video literally, or try to find some way to feel offended or upset by it. I saw it as a cartoonish metaphor, compressing a lot of creative tools into a single device. I didn't see it as representing destruction of humanity, and I seriously doubt Apple intended that interpretation.

Remember the 1984 ad for the Macintosh, where a woman threw a sledgehammer through a big screen, destroying it, and exposing the audience of slave-like people to potentially dangerous bits of glass from the explosion? Do you suppose a lot of people felt outraged by that, unable to comprehend the metaphor and references to the novel 1984? If Apple released that ad today they would probably face snowflake backlash and fake outrage.

Some may call the latest ad tone-deaf or missing the mark. But the outrage over Apple's video is just another tiresome example of fake outrage, narcissists centering themselves and playing the victim. Whether people actually can't understand metaphors or irony, or just pretend they can't so they can play at suffering harm, I don't know, but either way that behavior presents more of a threat to society than Apple's advertising.

This ad is not controversial by any measure. Engagement farming much?

It's got 15,000 quote tweets and 4,000 responses and skimming over it, they seem overwhelmingly negative about the imagery being used.

https://twitter.com/tim_cook/status/1787864325258162239/quot...

I don't get the issue here. It's an ad.

You could try skimming over those negative responses to see what they're getting at.

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