I would bet a large sum of money that the creatives who created the ad for Apple had no intentions beyond "this ad will be a metaphor for the insane variety of creative endeavors you can use an iPad for!"
Apple isn't tone-deaf. The people mad about this are tone-hallucinating.
I think most people—including the author of TFA—would agree with you that that's the conscious thought going through the creators' minds. The problem with the ad isn't that it was an intentional statement of destruction on the part of Apple, it's that the metaphor is a bit too on the nose.
If they'd had all the stuff disappear into a magician's hat and then pulled out an iPad, or turned the iPad into a bag of holding and placed all those items inside (or pulled them all out!), that would have conveyed the happy side of the metaphor without triggering any antipathy.
The anger (and I'd argue, fear) stems from the fact that the metaphor Apple chose has the iPad replacing every other creative endeavor. There's no ambiguity: every other instrument, tool, and object is totally and finally crushed. That hydraulic press left no survivors besides the iPad.
That's what the video conveys, and that's what is triggering a lot of angst among creative people of many different stripes. It's too close to what we all have feared has been happening, now presented in vivid and visceral detail.
FTFY.
It’s dominating the headlines, despite it being a rather mundane ad.
This is called "gaslighting". It was only a few years ago I learned about the term, but it's very useful.
No, you're not going to gaslight me. This particular ad sets a new standard for tone-deaf.