Is it true that all press is good press, or is Apple's latest iPad ad — featuring a different kind of press — a poorly-timed mistake that puts Apple in the AI-weary creative business? Can it cost?
Because right now, creators are expressing their displeasure at having their tools gleefully destroyed in a hydraulic press to make way for a shiny new tablet. It could be just the wrong message at the wrong time.
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It's nothing new that some ads are annoying, and we all know that hateful ads aren't necessarily ineffective. When I was 12, there were these burger commercials with people noisily shoving burgers into their gross, close-up mouths and sucking on their fingers like animals. The whole thing made me want to bawl my eyes out. (They actually made a lot of people feel that way, I later learned.) But as my father explained to me at the time, “The thing is, they got your attention.”
I heard the underlying message loud and clear: companies don't have to pretend they respect their customers. They only have to part with their money.
It's entirely possible that Apple will trick users into doing this. Yesterday, my colleague Chris Taylor pointed out that the top-of-the-line new iPad with all the peripherals adds up to a $3,000 package of gadgets, and that — sticker shock or not — it forks over that cool stuff. It's tempting to do. . But he also notes something that's key to his value proposition: The new iPad taps into his personal creative fantasies. “Apple knows our income is always a little more disposable if it can appeal to our wannabe geniuses,” he wrote.
With that in mind, I urge you to watch the “Crush” ad again, and really consider what it's showing you:
All those things — the paint, the piano, the trumpet, the arcade machine, the artist's desk — do you feel any animosity towards it? Do you want to see it destroyed and symbolically transformed into an Apple device? Do you get any satisfaction from seeing record players destroyed, and cameras break, shatter and explode?
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And to change things up a bit, take a look at your nearest Apple device and think about the last time you imagined crushing it. was it yesterday It was maybe five minutes ago. In any case, you probably like it less than your guitar.
Almost 40 years ago, Apple released its most famous ad, “1984,” in which a monochrome society of drones falls under the spell of some kind of computerized dictator. The prisoners of this horrible society are then freed from their monotony by a hammer-throwing savior representing the Macintosh computer, and a glorious, colorful future begins.
Fast-forward 40 years, and Apple is the most valuable company in the world, releasing a commercial in which symbols of creativity, color, joy, human spirit, and playfulness are piled into the center of a gray concrete void. And it was crushed by an industrialist. Machine until they become a small Apple-branded rectangle.
The message is not working well.
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And the timing couldn't be worse. Apple, after all, is pleasing Wall Street by pivoting to AI — even pushing the development of a new AI cloud infrastructure project built from its own proprietary chips. As Apple CEO Tim Cook said on an earnings call last week, Apple “believes[s] in the transformative power and promise of AI, and we believe we have the advantages that will differentiate us in this new era.”
To that end, yesterday's iPad event had more use of the term “AI” than any Apple product presentation in recent memory. AI is being added to Apple's creative tools like Photometer, with its ML Enhance tool, and a new Isolate Subjects option in Final Cut Pro.
No two ways about it: Apple is now an AI company. And with this ad, it seems like Apple is sending that message through the loudspeaker, maybe even louder than it should. It seems that members of the public are slowly coming to terms with this terrifying new reality after watching “Krush.”
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That same year, Apple released its “1984” ad, named after a short movie. Terminator debuted, and the folks at Apple might want to take another look at it — or at least (spoiler alert) its final moments. At its core, Terminator A love story about the essential qualities of humanity overpowering artificial intelligence. Was it the concept of love that James Cameron put into a hydraulic press in the finale? Was it creativity? Happiness? passion No. The film spoke to humanity's identity, because of the cathartic ending Terminator That's the moment an artificially intelligent machine was crushed.
she is Creative destruction is something people will always want to see, and if you're a technology company right now, it's probably a good idea to keep that in mind.