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Comment by __turbobrew__ | Hacker News Reader

I don’t think it is healthy if you are emotionally distressed seeing a trumpet being crushed.

It depends on the context. On an entertainment yt channel, one single real trumpet, so what. But the context apple produced is the implication that the very concept of a trumpet is being destroyed and replaced with a thin, temporary simulacrum.

The difference is subtle. In the first case, a single real trumpet. Only worth a few hundred bucks. In the advertisement, the crushed trumpet is a symbol representing everything around trumpets: lessons, spit valves, centuries/milennia of history, inherited instruments, afternoons afterschool marching around on a football field with childhood friends.

Ce n'est pas une pipe.

> I don’t think it is healthy if you are emotionally distressed seeing a trumpet being crushed.

My first thought was the exact opposite: watching the specific ad without being distressed, shows an emotionally damaged human being. Especially the last part where the toy gets crashed screaming is really messed up.

Agreed. I don’t understand the reaction at all. Your favorite trumpet getting crushed in front of you? Yeah sure that might be distressing.

But a generic virtual facsimile on a video? That’s silly

Wait are you sure the whole thing was an animation? It's hard to tell but at least some of it looks real... Is that mentioned in the article?

I would guess that if it is a real trumpet the props department went down to the local used instrument store and picked up the cheapest Yamaha in the discount bin. But, the way the trumpet crumples doesn't quite look realistic to me.

I know it's actually hard to tell. There's definitely some CGI in there. But a lot of it looks pretty real too. But the issue with it was the destruction of all of the creative tools. So it's in some ways not quite as bad if it's not real.

> animation

I'm betting mostly CGI actually.

Some bits are obviously physically impossible, so definitely CGI.

I can be persuaded that some shots are real+CGI, and squished into the larger CGI view. They might have crushed a few "things" to see how they would fail, and then CGI'ed up a final version.

The wide shots do not look real. The lighting is not believable. The failure modes of many individual items are not believable. The whole pancaking effect of the big crush is not believable.

I understand the discomfort at seeing wanton destruction. It bothers me to see great old houses or cars get wrecked for movies, for example.

Nowadays, most of that is fake.

And I think almost all of this ad is fake as well.

Even if it is a cheap one, it's still wrong. I have the same visceral gut reaction to seeing a musical instrument get destroyed as I do to seeing a book burnt. I own a lot of very expensive, very nice instruments. However, some of my favourite music I have created has been on dirt cheap charity shop instruments.

It's just the shear waste of it all that strikes me. Like so many of those things cost so much money to the people that could use or want them. So many high-paid tech workers are already out-of-touch with what most people consider affordable that I'm not surprised their marketing team thought this was ok.

But most artists are starving, and we live in a world where waste like this isn't really morally acceptable.

It's like a dog whistle. People who care about this are not unhealthy, they are having a visceral reaction to something that you don't understand the significance of. Try curiosity instead of dismissiveness.

A virtual facsimile of destruction can still elicit an emotional response. Ever heard of "Happy Tree Friends"?

You’ve probably never invested hundreds or thousands of hours in a hobby, art form, craft or skill. If you had, you would find the ad at least mildly disconcerting.

If you don’t see how, maybe it’s time to get off the screen? Stop consuming and try creating for a bit?

I don't think it's healthy to have so little perception or understanding and think think everything is that simple.

No one is traumatized. It's just unappealing and tone-deaf that's all. Showing a harmless little toy head and face getting squished and then popped, and presenting that as cool and fun and good, just makes you wonder about the person who produced that imagery and thought it could possibly have those associations, that's all.

Showing a bunch of mixed colors of paint oozing down the side of something is not "emotionally distressing", it's just unappealing, especially to Apple product customers, who buy Apple products precicely because they are sleek and minimalist and clean. Steve's & Ive's entire universe was clean & sterile.

It's remarkable because Apple are supposed to be the KINGS of exactly those sorts of intangible things like impression & subconscious reaction, where things like a 0.1mm or 0.1degree difference in a shape actually matters.

> Showing a bunch of mixed colors of paint oozing down the side of something is not "emotionally distressing", it's just unappealing, especially to Apple product customers, who buy Apple products precicely because they are sleek and minimalist and clean. Steve's & Ive's entire universe was clean & sterile.

For me it was a different reaction: They literally replaced a bunch of colors with grayness. In a gray factory. Under a gray slab.

This is very different from what Apple used to mean and advertise.

Apple has become the bad guys in the 1984 ad that they railed against back then. It's really a 180 degree difference.

In stead of "think different", this ad seems to suggest "think the same - get rid of your individuality and skills and just get an iPad instead".

If not to invoke an emotional response what was the point of the ad?

"We squeezed all this functionality into this one device"? That doesn't sound that hard to understand.

No wonder everyone on this site complains about loneliness and therapy and this and that. Most humans aren't 'distressed' by this stuff. I always did wonder about the oddly neurotic opinions expressed here. Now it makes sense: people have little to no emotional resilience here. Everything is the end of the world.

I'd say that's a first world thing for the generation that grew up on SSRIs and the pathologization and medical treatment of every negative emotion from grief to mild discomfort. Not specifically a HN problem.

But they didn't actually squeeze all that functionality into a cold piece of glass, plastic, and silicon. They're only suggesting that you see it that way and to give them your money instead of buying and learning to play an instrument.

I mean, I guess just having an iPad can get you laid somehow these days in the very stupid world we live in, but the guys in the band with actual musical skills are probably getting way more action.

I guess you don't understand advertising. Emotional response is a common theme. Consider Honda's continuous "Dream" series of ads. If you think everyone is a snowflake you aren't enlightened, you're just very bad at sales.

Then hopefully you won't feel emotionally distressed when queer automated communism comes and crushes capitalism, uwu

Hopefully you'll help!

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