Not because eg one piano got destroyed; surely that happens all the time, even on camera for eg movies and such. But there was something about watching beautiful objects be destroyed, in slow motion, gratuitously, and with an upbeat/sunny tone, that just aesthetically made me squirm in my seat
They predicted/showed us the future that is coming. They said/showed the quiet part loud.
In fact, I think this would have been an excellent art piece if the message was "heartless tech corporations want to destroy the good things in life and replace it with a cold slab of glass".
It's not like Apple has forgotten how to make such ads - the recent one for iPhones with family members asking to not be let go while the owner tries to delete photos represented a familiar experience of people trying to free up storage, and how they wouldn't have to do that if they bought a new iPhone.
On the other hand, this ad just shows stuff being destroyed, just like some of those useless Youtube videos which shows perfectly usable stuff being destroyed under the pretext of "ASMR" or whatnot. Not only is it very difficult to watch as someone who didn't have a lot of money and was taught to make careful use of it from an early age, it just invokes negative vibes, as if possessing a musical instrument is something to be ashamed of.
What bothers me is the arrogance to say that an iPad, a device which will be obsolete in a few short years, can replace all those instruments and tools that last more than a generation.
This is similar to the history channels which use AI colorized historical footage which wildly shifts objects from red to blue in a few frames and have the audacity to claim this is an improvement over the original.
It would still bother a lot of people for other reasons, but it's the wanton destruction that bothers me the most.
Makes me wonder if this is why Apple went out of their way to apologize for the ad. I think if this ad just had non-culturally-specific backlash, they would've simply moved on. But because this impacted a specific market's sensibilities, maybe they felt the need to do a public mea culpa.
They felt that it would be disrespectful to just dump somewhere the main tools of their work, after they had used those every day for decades.
In garden's silent nook, Beneath cherry's tranquil look, Blades retire from the cook.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3846402/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0_tt_8...
https://www.theregister.com/2012/10/12/apple_licenses_swiss_...
In 2009, smartphones were a novelty, and the iPad has not been announced yet. People were wowed by the new capabilities that "multimedia" devices were enabling. They were getting rid of the old, outdated, less capable tools.
Nowadays "multimedia" is taken for granted. OTOH generative AI is turning creative arts into commoditized digital sludge. Apple acts like they own and have the right to control everything that is digital. In this world, the analog instruments are a symbol of the last remnants of true human skill, and the physical world that hasn't been taken over by the big tech yet. And Apple is forcefully and destructively smushing it all into AI-chip-powered you-owe-us-30%-for-existing disneyland distopia.
So the ad was probably punching up in a way back then.
Today there is a real recognition of how pervasive digital devices and AI tech is becoming.
With all the might and influence Apple and tech companies now have - this ad might have evoked a sense of punching down.
Cite?
If not, then I am not sure what you're talking about.
I've known for a while now that I'm more creative with a 2H pencil and a sketchbook than I am on my iPad. I'm more creative noodling around on real strings than in an app. This has made me pause to consider whether I should ever again plug in my currently uncharged iPad.
> This has made me pause to consider whether I should ever again plug in my currently uncharged iPad.
I can't comprehend this. It's not an either or scenario, and I don't believe destruction/replacement was the intended message of the commercial. These things can be (somewhat) emulated with the iPad (are inside it). You can use an iPad for those, while riding on the bus, eating lunch, whatever, or when creativity does strike you. But, I don't think any reasonable person is thinking an iPad is a parity replacement for piano or a physical paint brush, or will use it to replace those. It's a tool, available when someone wants to use it. I have trouble believing this much, and fairly profound, introspection is only happening because of a silly commercial showing things being compressed into an iPad. I think it must be something else/indirect/unrelated, possibly something to do with identity. But, I suppose this is evidence that these emotions are real, which is fascinating to me, seeing the iPad as a small form factor computing device/useful tool.
I'll just say that I have a piano at home that exists, and I can happily use, regardless of the charge state of my iPad. I can go between them, without issues. But, I will say, the objective limitations/irreproducibility of compositions that come with using musical notation is much better handled with sequencers (which can then be used to produce the under-expressed notation).
Japanese users normally aren't exposed to the rest of WWW at all, even on social media, so there's intuition that any notable interactions observed has to do with the four-seasons and egg sandwiches way. But it's also true that there are 0.35x as many of the people here as there are US Americans, or 1.5x more than Germans, which creates a lot of presence in itself, possibly even grossly exaggerated on Twitter due to cultural fit and ongoing collapse of its en-US bubbles. I think this instance is example of the latter being the case mistaken as the former.