Big Tech Broke Its Promise
Surprise outrage over Monday's new Apple ad marks a shift in public perception.
[PRELIMINARY NOTE TO PEOPLE UNDER 25: This piece deals heavily with the era in which people would get really hyped up about commercials. It was a dark and difficult time in our nation’s history. Before you judge too harshly, just know that things were pretty slow before social media and we would sometime go whole weeks without some sort of horrible world-altering tragedy happening.]
For anyone who came of age in the 90s and 2000s, there was a point at which Apple releasing an ad felt like a big deal. From the “Mac vs. PC” ads to the “Dancing Silhouette” iPod ads, everything the company did seemed to garner attention and praise. Part of this was due to the fact that they were leading the charge on the post-Internet wave of tech worship, guy who looked like a cult leader included. The things Apple made promised to bring us all closer together and simplify our lives. The fact that they came paired with trendy ad spots only sweetened the deal. But those days are long gone. These days, Apple’s biggest flourish is making a device smaller, slightly more powerful, and (most importantly) one thousand dollars.
So an iPad commercial dropping in 2024 should have drawn little response from anyone who wasn’t a tech journalist or Apple fanboy. But as it turns out, the company still has a few new tricks up its sleeve. Namely, making everyone very mad.
Enter: Crush! An ad released this past Monday for Apple’s new iPad Pro.
The commercial depicted an industrial press crushing numerous tools of creative expression (A piano, camera lenses, paint cans, etc) into pulp. Once these objects were crushed, the press lifted to reveal the new, thinner, iPad. Within two days of its release, it had provoked such a vitriolic response from the internet that the company actually went so far as to apologize and pull the ad from its planned television spots. And so, the last few days have been spent trying to piece together what exactly it is about the ad that makes it so universally reviled. Sure, it’s not great! But as far as “things to apologize for” go, it feels pretty out of left field.
The popular theory seems to point to the current state of creative professions. Whether you work in game design, entertainment, or journalism, there’s a very good chance you’re either out of a job or holding onto one you don’t particularly like out of fear. Companies are rolling the dice and laying off entire departments in hopes that AI will cut their creative overhead to zero (a bet that is increasingly and hilariously seeming like a huge whiff). And so, seeing an ad which brazenly destroys the tools of many skill-based creative professions to create another thousand-dollar rectangle is not eliciting the light chuckle that Apple seemed to be hoping for.
And this theory has legs! There are dozens of viral posts from creative professionals who are disgusted by the ad, particularly from people in Japan (a sizable market for any tech company). But, while Twitter would make you think otherwise, creative professionals only comprise a small subset of the population. And frankly, we complain a lot. I can’t really imagine that the level of outrage we saw was solely coming from artists who are feeling the squeeze during tough economic times.
While accusations have been made that the ad is a brazen statement of intent from the tech industry, I have my doubts there as well. I’ve worked a lot of marketing gigs over the years. I’ve written some commercials (though nothing with this budget) and I’ve worked with a lot of Marketing Guys. It’s an industry with lots of limited imaginations and people wearing the biggest wire-frame glasses you’ve ever seen. If I had to bet on how the concept for the ad came about, I’d say that someone who everyone likes but who is not very good at their job said, “What if we took all the big stuff this little iPad does and made it….little……” and everyone in the room shadowboxed for twenty minutes. The phrase “big things come in small packages” was probably written on a white board briefly before being crossed out.
Plus, this is Apple we’re talking about, a company that had a hot streak so hot that they’ve been able to coast off its good will for over a decade, garnering at least tepid hype for even its laziest gadgets. So why is it that suddenly people have rolled up the red carpet? Why has this ad provoked such a strong reaction across the board (Even as it was revealed that LG ran an ad with the exact same concept back in 2008.)?
My theory is a simple one: Everybody knows they’re full of shit.
Let’s jump back in time to 2008.
Welcome back to a magical time in which every single sector is imploding except one. Every day is the tech industry’s birthday. Every song’s a symphony, every meal’s a feast. The economy is floundering but all anyone wants is to buy smartphones. This era was just the beginning of the tech golden age.
Anyone who lived through this time likely remembers this, but it bears repeating for those who didn’t: everyone loved tech companies in the 2000s and early 2010s. We loved what they made, and we believed them when they promised things. And it’s not just because we were easy marks! Sure, in some ways we were. For a while there all Apple had to do was slap some brushed metal on the back of a thing and we’d all line up to buy it, but it was because they’d made things we’d never seen before.
For all the ire they’ve rightfully drawn in the decades that followed, I’ll still never forget the time in high school that I drove from the suburbs of Chicago into the city with a friend who’d just gotten an iPhone. We’d taken a wrong turn somewhere and had no idea how to get back to the highway we needed to get home. As we all panicked looking at street names, my friend realized that his new phone had maps in it. The idea of that was insane to us, but sure enough we were back on the highway in no time. The sudden realization that the ritual of printing out directions to specific places was a thing of the past washed over all of us at once. The world was smaller now. It was easier.
We’d never possessed a single object that could solve so many problems. Now that we did, a world that felt very big suddenly began to feel very small. At the time, it was joyous. And so, when a company like Apple or LG or Google told us that they could do something, we believed them. Every map in the world now sat in my friend’s pocket. Who’s to say the next thing they made couldn’t replace camera lenses or microphones?
Tech companies exploded in value and market share all based on the singular promise that they would make life simpler, easier, and better. For too long, we thought they believed in what they were doing.
Now let’s jump back to 2024, where your phone is built to die, you get twelve emails a day from no one and logging into any service requires three different back-and-forth trips between your email inbox and your text inbox. Your data is regularly sold off to the highest bidder and it leaks so frequently you need to use a service to monitor the dark web for your phone number. Giant predictive text models eat up the sum total of human knowledge and spit it out in the shape of incorrect listicles. The phones get smaller every year until occasionally, in a brilliant artistic flourish, they decide to make them kind of big again. Thus restarts the shrinking process. Every new idea is a Platform That Has Everything or a Digital Coin or an Electric Car That Kills You.
The companies that promised to bring us together online have been accidentally radicalizing our uncles. Platforms ate all the websites and the jobs they supported. Our phones have done the same 3-5 things since 2012. Risk is a dirty word in an industry that once lived and died by it. Now that the returns are reliable and smart products are a compulsory part of everyday life, these companies see no need to innovate on a product that must be replaced every 3-5 years.
To put it simply: shit sucks!
There’s no one company who can shoulder all the blame, but Apple was once the gold standard of what everyone loved about tech. The 1984 ad that launched the multi-decade love affair with Apple’s advertising was a rallying cry against a homogenous industry without imagination. That Apple is now being shamed for facilitating that very homogeny is not a coincidence. There’s an underlying message to the anger and it’s we can’t believe we trusted you.
Of course, the line always goes up. Apple and companies like it continue to post massive profits, but this shift in consumer mood is indicative of a much larger change in how people feel about tech and its place in their life. Smart phones and laptops are now mandatory purchases in an internet-focused society. They serve as expensive barriers to entry for everyday life that do little to make it any better.
So, when I see a hydraulic press crush a camera lens, I wince because I know that the iPad won’t replace my camera lenses, only imitate them. When I see it make a book burst, I think about how reading on a tablet never feels quite the same. When I see an old piano imploding in on itself, I think about my great grandfather’s piano, and how it was the pride of our living room. And then I think about how we couldn’t give the thing away because no one has space for those anymore.
The ad isn’t the calculated manifesto of a company taking a kill shot at creative fields. It’s a symptom of an industry revealing itself not just as visionless, but as never having had a vision to begin with. An industry that is overconfident and drunk with power to the point that it no longer needs to think about the desires of the people who buy its products. It no longer even needs to think about what it might desire for itself.
The ad, like so many things, is just a thing to be mad at. It’s an outlet for the angst of living in a corporate landscape that seems to value creativity and integrity less with each new product release. It’s a way to forget that we gleefully let our world be made smaller and have only just recently realized all that that entailed.
Thanks for reading Brain Worms. As always, this newsletter is free and will remain so. If you like what you see, feel free to pick up a paid subscription to support my work. It’s rough out there for writers, so your money will be put to good and immediate use. If you missed my coverage of the UCLA Student Encampment for Palestine, I highly recommend checking it out. The second part of the story will be releasing early next week.
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