The ad itself depicted a mechanical crusher destroying artifacts of human creativity. A trumpet, guitar, sculpture, piano, drawing board, paints, a metronome, several analog cameras, a turntable, and hi-fi equipment were among the much-loved items yielding to the machine’s unstoppable force.
Can we just STFU about this mediocre ad already? You’re giving it more airtime and more mental bandwidth. I didn’t think it was worth one day of headlines much less two or three.
I have to read the headline to ignore it. That puts the ad in my brain, which is what the purpose of the ad is. The post itself is doing advertising despite being negative. I don’t want to think about ads. Fuck em.
Ignoring things like this is how we’ve ended up with an entire generation of people who Apple thinks are either too lazy or too stupid to create art or music on their own.
Note that I am not calling anyone lazy or stupid, I’m just stating Apple thinks this is a desirable outcome and is pushing forward with that plan
Assuming you’re being condescending, some people don’t have the physical capability to plan an instrument. That should stop them from having apps to create music just because a small handful of people who dislike Apple are offended by a commercial that was largely computer generated.
Great counter-point. So we are offended by a commercial AND calling for a ban on differently abled people from using music creation apps! How many differently abled people in your life would love a $1000 iPad designed for an able bodied person? Or would they want something designed with them in mind? Speaking of condescending. "Sounds like a you problem. Don’t piss on everyone else’s parade. “I think a lot of people here are confused and angry at clouds” “I’m sorry your music career didn’t pan out after all that work. Not everyone can be a musician.”
If you point is that Apple makes great products that enable users to be creative with few limits, but like every corporation there are things to complain about… then yes, we are on the same page, my dude.
Between working two jobs, never paying off student loans, unobtainable housing, and medical bankruptcy, yeah you’re right. Let’s just get our dopamine fix and be content with our squalor.
So the solution to that is to only make paint-by-numbers music that Apple will allow you to make with their pre approved apps? That sounds like a good way to end up with a lot of mediocre easily digestible music that all sounds the same…
There are plenty of apps that let you do your own thing. Don’t blame the software for musicians being derivative. People have created amazing digital music with significantly less technology. Maybe you just don’t like that people without a formal background (rich people) have the opportunity to make bad (and good) music.
It sounds like your only problem is that you have to use the App Store. So what app was denied by Apple but is available on Android? Yeah, I didn’t think so.
I have been playing guitar for nearly 20 years. My family has never been rich, which meant I got the most affordable guitar available (which cost MUCH less than an iPad even accounting for inflation) when I started.
I knew absolutely nothing about how to play it and taught myself for the first year from stuff I found in magazines. When it became apparent that I wasn’t going to just abandon the thing in the closet my parents agreed to get me lessons for this costly sum of $25 a week.
Since then I have have scrimped and saved to get nicer instruments when I could afford them, and they mean a lot to me so I take care of them and play them often.
When making music becomes reduced to a game from WHICHEVER app store, it loses all meaning because there is zero invested in it. I’m sure there will be a few people who actually manage to make real music this way despite the limitations, but for most people it will just be a toy they lose interest in like Candy Crush or something.
If it were easy to play decent music then everyone in the world would have a top 10 hit
I see the confusion here… You think playing music is something one does to get fame and money. What you’re describing is a content creator, in which case I can see why having an overpriced toy that makes songs for you would be appealing.
For the record I have, in fact, played for a number of audiences and even recorded several albums with various bands that I’ve been in over the years. I’m sure you wouldn’t have heard any of them because they never really made it beyond the local scene. I’m perfectly fine with that though, because I didn’t make them to be famous. I made them because I enjoy the creative process involved in songwriting and performance, because I’m a musician.
Aww good for you, my dude. But it’s pretty mean to say that other people, who have music inside them, should be denied. Not all music made using technology is 100% digital anyway. It’s a studio in your home. It allows people who aren’t able to go into a studio, for whatever reason, to produce near-professional music.
Here’s a thought, if you don’t want to listen to music created using an Apple product, then… don’t.
You are delusional to think even one of the 9 million kids living in poverty in the US would buy a $1000 iPad as a tool to make music. In 5 years that fucking $1000 iPad is only worth cracking open to harvest as e-waste. A kid buying a $50 dollar pawnshop guitar is far more likely to continue to make listenable music than some fucking dipshit buying an iPad. Maybe in 5 years they can sell that guitar for $50 to another kid who will successfully make music. Or maybe they luck out and that guitar is worth $5000. The kid who can afford to buy the $1000 iPad will hopefully use this as a chance to learn about planned obsolesence…
Here’s a thought, maybe an iPad is a wasteful piece of garbage technology. Maybe this isn’t a rant about technology and preventing opportunities, maybe its a rant against shitty technologies that are wasteful.
Does anyone know an even slighty successful musician who uses a 5 year old iPad? Now, are there any slightly successful musicians that we can think of that use a 5 year old (affordable) guitar? Or a 5 year old computer? How about a cheap drum machine or sequencer? How about giving a kid anything but a $1000 iPad (or a 5 year old paperweight)
I think somebody here is mixing up performing music and composing it. Which have almost nothing in common.
I haven’t touched Apple stuff for composition (don’t even know what it is), but I seriously doubt it’s going to take away all the headache of learning music theory.
And when you do know music theory, you can use plenty of things for digital music. It’s just hard.
So right. I saw a DJ playing incredible chiptune off’a two original brick gameboys and two LSDJs and it was absolutely amazing. I wish I had the skill to do that.
I did get shown the ad, I thought “huh, it’s not like Apple to do ragebait marketing”. I thought that was just what that is, and that everyone can see that. The “Newphoria” marketing tagline I think was verging on it as well, but I didn’t see anyone moaning about it online. Much harder to avoid for me because it was on giant billboards and shop signs.
I guess it’s just working as intended if people are recycling it every day into news fodder, not like there’s anything else going on in the world (ongoing genocide? No we have four tweets about Apple’s new ad and boy are these tweets strongly worded!)
Agreed. People like to get upset over nothing. It’s a stupid commercial that landed poorly. Someone in the marketing department has way too much control and probably didn’t do a very good focus group for this.
There are plenty of other things about Apple we could be complaining about.
Save us 5 years. Just put the new ipad into e-waste collection now. Meanwhile, anyone want to use all the real tools designed specifically to make music? Any kid with half a brain will spend their $1000 musicmaking budget on something useful
I actually think that’s perfectly possible because to be a christian you have to already be in denial about a whole boatload of things, so really… what’s one more? And as a bonus “my own people hate me” fits nicely with the whole christian guilt thing.
My coworker is fully bought in to the ecosystem, so I get the full experience every launch day. Listen critically sometime. Turn on your bullshit filter. It’s a fun game.
Apple popularised two things that bug the shit out of me in addition to everything you said. “on iPhone” “on iPad” just sounds utterly wrong. It needs to be “on the iPhone” “on the iPad”. Now everyone is doing it.
The other is " breathlessly we’re excited to announce/we’re excited to share with you/we’re excited!!!big fucking cheesy grin". The whole point of having that whole “excited” or whichever adjective you want at that point of the sentence is to prep you and let you know what you’re supposed to feel. If it’s that good surely you shouldn’t have to tell me what I need to feel.
I got a pixel 8.
I’m really enjoying it.
But the camera doubles the thickness of the phone where it is.
And the case I have for it just gave up, and made the whole phone+case that thickness.
I’d have liked the actual phone to be that big, have a bit more battery - maybe even replaceable battery, a 3.5mm jack at stuff like that.
At some point, things get too thin to hold and use comfortably. I think the Nintendo switch highlights this, whereas the steam deck is much more comfortable to hold.
In 2007 I had a Gateway convertible computer. This thing was like 14 or 15 inches screen size, it had to have weighed 5 pounds with the battery attached, closed and without worrying about the battery’s additional thickness it had to have been an inch and a half thick. The thing is, it worked fine.
The Dell Inspiron that replaced it has one of those soft shell lithium batteries that inevitably bulge and stop the trackpad from clicking, there’s a fan that scrapes its housing because of how tight the clearances have to be…all so the thing can be about a half inch thick? Why?
I just watched it for the first time and… I thought that while the handwringing is excessive, the subtext that all these other emblems of human creativity have to be destroyed to become part of the iPad is unsettling, moreso because the visuals are so decadent in their detail. It makes it feel much more like replacing than supplementing. It’s probably worse that I think it was also unintentional. Big miss for me.
I’ll try to explain this to you - the video shows crushing of plethora of sophisticated, subtle, powerful instruments and then says you can replace them all with Apple’s picture poking thing. The preciousness of that thing is not shown to us. The preciousness of those instruments is implied, because we know what they are.
We literally see the precious being crushed and some shit being offered instead after crushing it. Like “I broke all your toys cause I think this one is better and you are going to like it”.
If you got Apple is “destroying creativity” from that, you A) only saw the clip or B) are searching for problem.
The outcry’s not really Apple, but tech in general. The backlash of crushing the human experience is the transition from valuing true art and creativity, and just lurching toward yet another do-everything screen that doesn’t compliment creativity, but instead displaces it, with the hint of incoming generative AI.
Apple really doesn’t give a fuck about art, creativity, expression, or for that matter quality anymore. They’re good at making a thing that sells, they’re good at marketing it, and they’re good at convincing people of the cost vs worth equation that gives them insane margins over their chic branding. I love the outcry not because of any validity behind the detriment of tablets and smartphones (which is absolutely there) but moreso because it’s entertaining when a company renowned for their advertising prowess fucks up so publicly then backpedals with apologies.
Yeah, I’m no marketing guru, but I feel their actual point would have been better conveyed by a pile of all of the things the iPad replaced slowly gathering dust, spider webs, and eventually archaeologists.
Seriously, everyone is going to forget about this in a week. Regardless of how you feel about Apple, one slightly tonedeaf ad isn’t going to significantly affect their reputation.
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