Apple's "Crush!" ad crushed their fandom.

On Tuesday, Apple seemingly made the biggest blunder of its advertising history, (according to a lot of people on social media) in a new iPad commercial. 

iPad is the red-headed stepchild of the Apple family, sitting uncomfortably between the Mac and the iPhone. Years ago, Apple tried out a campaign where it insisted the iPad wasn’t a computer. A few years later, Apple insisted it was a computer. 

If you own an iPad, you aren’t working on it all that much. The flimsy pathetic keyboard which requires you to change your entire way of typing normally is the opposite of Johnny Ive perfection. Unless Johnny Ive thought it was a great idea to give writers carpal tunnel syndrome, it is a poor design.

Apple would be better off just explaining that they “revolutionized” the way we watch YouTube videos or Netflix shows or read while lying in bed or in the bath or sitting on the shitter because that is its real benefit. It’s just a lighter version of a laptop that very few people use for any serious reason except perhaps in drawing class or if you are sales person or insurance agent taking your info in the field. There’s a ceiling for that audience. And that’s actually okay. Not everything needs an over-the-top Apple adjective to describe it.

But let’s explore the angry to the point of exaggerated response to this iPad ad’s premise. Like all things Apple, this is an extravagant big budget production. This is the same brand that spent millions of dollars and hired The Rock just to tout the benefits of Siri, the AI that insists it can't understand me with every other prompt I give it. The ad features tons of things being crushed by a giant compacter until at the end a really thin iPad is revealed. The fact that “thin” is the big feature  is telling. This iteration really isn’t that much different than the previous versions. It’s a lot like choosing to highlight the color which Apple has done for other products when it has run out of big improvements to talk about.

The ad using a compactor as a metaphor and that's where everything goes sideways. Crushing a bunch of analog things designed for creativity (including musical instruments, old school arcade games, books, paint, metronomes, and sculptures) seemed like a great way to showcase all the things contained within this really thin device. But some audience reactions suggest that this metaphor has been misinterpreted. Instead of celebrating portable creativity, we are celebrating the destruction of the tangible because the digital has transcended the physical. The throwback Sonny and Cher soundtrack makes it seem like the height of deliberate irony. 

The audience reaction on social media is as over-the-top as the ad itself. A lot of the vitriol reeks of opportunists taking a flame thrower to an easy target like a school of piranhas feasting on low-hanging fruit.  “How dare they besmirch our beloved analog world,” they shriek on X. “The sheer nerve of Tim Cook’s audacity to dismiss our old way of life is sickening," they write on their laptops. “They're taking everything decent away from us,” they complain. From their iPhones.

If all of the analog things that are being “crushed” in the spot were so important to our daily lives, would we have let them go in the first place? Wouldn't we have resisted becoming enveloped by Apple’s ecosystem?

Take Mp3 players. The new iPad Pro ad is reminiscent of “Say hello to iPod” because it’s more or less the exact same sentiment with a bigger budget and a less cringey dance routine. Steve Jobs introduced iPod as having 1,000 songs in your pocket.” Now 1,000 songs is a drop in the bucket thanks to Apple Music which made vinyl, cassettes and CDs and even iPod obsolete. 

The world jettisoned rotary phones and Blackberrys; eventually giving up talking for texting because of iPhone. A product we buy more or less every two years, or every "generation" as they prefer to call it. Many do this just out of force of habit, when the rotary phones we gave up lasted for actual generations.

Our entire houses are connected. From Hey Alexa to Hey Siri, to connected thermostats,  refrigerators and home speakers. The same ad world that is currently panning iPad’s new ad was celebrating FKA Twigs dancing during the HomePod spot. No one was losing their shit over her lack of an physical record collection. 

Apple TV streams every channel we could want including Netflix which supplanted DVD’s which supplanted VHS. They also have Apple Arcade, another niche product that serious gamers don't endorse. PlayStation and Xbox are still around but with the exception of Barcades, no one's wasting a Saturday afternoon at the mall playing X-Men.

It’s also important to note that Mac got rid of CD-ROMs for their benefit in order to transition its user base to a cloud-based subscription model. Now Apple owns our stuff and rents it out to us. Haven't heard many complaints about that..

And as for art? Who needs physical sculptures? That’s just one Midjourney prompt away. The ad industry is investing heavily into LLMs and encouraging creatives to dig our own graves by teaching it with prompts. Is Apple to blame for that?

The people who are the most upset about technology making our beloved analog versions antiquated were responsible in ushering in this new age to begin with. For years record stores, book stores and arcades closed in large numbers. Not enough people decried it as it happened, at least not loudly enough to stop it. Apple is just trying to do what it always did which is to provide consumers with something they didn’t know they needed and hoping they won’t be able to live without it.

The difference is that since Tim Cook took the helm, Apple seems much more product and sales focused, whereas Steve Jobs seemed to care more about our emotional relationship to the products.

Take the iconic iPod campaign with the silhouettes dancing  against vibrant colors, their white ear buds synonymous with music. It was more a benefit than a feature. If you have lots of music in your pocket you can shake your ass without stopping because you can take your music anywhere.

The new iPad spot isn’t even interested in showing consumers why they should care about the features contained within and it doesn't show consumers in the ad, either. The features are just a conduit to the big reveal: the new iPad is thin, a theme they explored to better effect with its MacBook Air introduction commercial from 13 years ago. 

Apple has not been hiding the fact it wants more of our money. And this is just the latest attempt to get people more excited about iPad. The audience's harsh response seems more performative than anything else. Outrage for cheap engagement. But that's fine, because it's giving Apple earned media. And as always, many in the media are more interested in writing about the response to the ad instead of putting it into context regarding Apple’s very long history of making consistently great advertising. How much of this is manufactured blunder is hard to say but it's rare that there's been so much undeserved hate heaped upon it.

Despite the mini backlash Crush is just a regular Apple ad with familiar tropes. Neither Utopia nor 1984, but more like Purgatory.