24 hours later, Apple thinks different about flattening creativity for iPad ad

Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they are very, very sorry for flattening the whole of human creativity to convince consumers to buy another iPad.

Apple’s latest blunder, a new commercial entitled “Crush,” was supposed to excite people about shelling out another grand for another iPad. However, because consumers spent the last few years being taken for fools by tech companies that can’t seem to make anything anymore, most read this as a pretty clear metaphor for how Apple and its ilk have treated art during this tech bubble. Like Rodney Dangerfield, the arts get no respect. So, in a rarity for the company, Apple has apologized.

“Creativity is in our DNA at Apple, and it’s incredibly important to us to design products that empower creatives all over the world,” said Apple’s VP of Marketing Communications Tor Myhren told AdAge. “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.”

The ad sees a massive hydraulic press slowly crushing instruments of artistic expression, like a trumpet, a record player, a piano, a guitar, paint cans, and more, into a really cool new iPad. Though Apple, as is its wont, hoped to highlight the razor-thin size of their latest tablet, most interpreted it as an insensitive metaphor for how tech giants are attempting to replace creativity with AI junk that doesn’t work. It’s almost as if Apple doesn’t own a Hollywood studio that produces work written by the same WGA writers and starring the same SAG actors who spent last year striking against machine-written gobbledygook and AI-generated Pixar characters with 13 fingers and four rows of teeth. Apple, for its part, also released a pair of $3,500 ski goggles no one wanted this year, so the goodwill that shielded the company from accusations of worker exploitation (here and abroad) and weaponizing tax loopholes is wearing as thin as the all-new iPad.

“Meet the new iPad Pro: the thinnest product we’ve ever created, the most advanced display we’ve ever produced, with the incredible power of the M4 chip,” Apple CEO Tim Cook tweeted yesterday. “Just imagine all the things it’ll be used to create.” Most imagined all the things Apple was destroying. As bestselling author Hari Kunzru put it: “Crushing the symbols of human creativity to produce a homogenized branded slab is pretty much where the tech industry is at in 2024.”

The last time Apple released an apology was in September 2012, when Tim Cook posted a letter on the company’s website expressing regret over the release of Apple Maps. So, if anything, we can rest assured that the backlash to this shortsighted commercial convinced someone to think different.