• by Barbara Lippert , Columnist, May 9, 2024

Hey, Apple, I’ll tell you what’s crushing!

The tsunami of social media backlash to “Crush!,” your new, dehumanizing iPad Pro commercial!

Speaking of execution, it’s not just a metaphor. Amazingly, through this commercial, the world’s number 2 tech colossus reveals its own cluelessness by showing the art of human civilization destroyed for the purpose of promoting a thinner iPad.

As one X user, speaking for many, put it: “Forty years ago, Apple released the 1984 commercial as a bold statement against a dystopian future. Now you are that dystopian future. Congratulations.” 

Still, the slo-mo slaughter of 500 years of the arts and humanity is as cleverly rendered as you might expect of any Apple ad.

The 70-second commercial opens on a dark set featuring a giant, industrial-sized hydraulic press, a sort of sleek, modernized answer to 19^th century steam punk machinery. The power of this monster machine forms the basis of this grand industrial opera of a spot, set to the music of Sonny & Cher’s “All I Ever Need is You,” their hit song from 1972.

It’s heartbreaking enough to see these beautiful objects we’ve enjoyed for centuries -- a gleaming trumpet, an innocent piano, paintings, books, a plaster bust -- chosen to go to their deaths, crushed in the jaws of the press. On top of that, the creators chose to make the extermination action even more heartless (sociopathic?) by anthropomorphizing the objects they crush.

Even the guitar shows a compelling human face. By the end, some yellow balls with cartoonish googly eyes have been squashed so completely that we watch their eyeballs pop out.

What were they thinking?  Maybe the creative team was riffing on the popularity of TikTok videos that show popular items getting pulverized.

Or that this was a simple-enough concept through which to entertain the Apple worshippers who can’t wait to get their hands on this Ozempic version of the iPad Pro.

In his video release, CEO Cook talked about the power of the custom M4 processor, which he called an “outrageously powerful chip for AI.”

But only its thinness is featured in this spot.

Rather, with its unexpectedly art-and-soul-crushing message (the tag line is “All of human creation compressed into one impossibly sleek tablet”), the commercial has inadvertently underlined that the threat for musicians, writers, and visual artists, some of whom happily use Apple products, whose livelihoods are already suffering, will only get worse. The writing on the wall: They will be crushed.

Worse, this iteration of the iPad Pro arrives at a time of slumping tablet sales for Apple.

And Apple’s image as one of the less malevolent, human-facing tech giants has been losing its burnish. The days of being a scrappy underdog are long gone; now it’s one of the richest, most powerful companies on the planet.

Last month, a Department of Justice lawsuit accused the company of monopolistic practices. The future doesn’t look so magical.

“Just imagine all the things it will be used to create,” Tim Cook wrote while releasing the iPad Pro spot on X.

For now, it’s been genius at alienating some of its most faithful folk.

With major moguls expressing worry for humans over letting the AI genie out of the bottle, another X user expressed an increasingly common feeling: “This ad has convinced me that I need less technology in my life.”

Postscript: Apple rarely apologizes, but it did last night. It also announced it was pulling "Crush!" off the air. I salute the company for the decision and for the alacrity with which it was made.

In a statement, Tor Myhren, the company’s vice president of marketing communications, said, “Our goal is to always celebrate the myriad of ways users express themselves and bring their ideas to life through iPad. We missed the mark with this video, and we’re sorry.”