Aside from the destruction of low-tech artistic tools triggering non-tech people aspect, tonally the ad was also overly edgy, which is off-brand for Apple. As noted elsewhere, it felt like a video game commercial from the '90s: gratuitous in its attention-seeking.
Re: the Pokémon commercial, I feel like the Apple commercial put way more focus into the actual destruction of the instruments… Like, a lot of its runtime was spent on actually showing each thing getting destroyed individually, so it has a completely different energy compared to the silly Pokémon one
It’s like if the Pokémon one showed each Pokémon getting crushed with splattering and gore…
Yeah there was revelling in the visual and nuance of their destruction. Could have done the whole thing CG where the objects squished together satisfyingly like they were made of clay rather than cracking and shattering. Honestly was easier/cheaper to do also.
Yeah, I think if they did than then it would have actually been a good ad. But focusing on the destruction/actually having destruction at all took away from the point that "it's compressing all these things into one" and made it interpretable as "we're destroying all these things, cause iPad can do it all"
1984 was edgy for its time. I think the difficulty is that the iPad is no longer an edgy product. The least edgy thing you could be these days is an iPad owner, and this ad wasn't the one to change that.
1984 [1] was edgy precisely because it worked as a criticism of society and culture, and then showed a way to 'break free' of mindless dystopia. This [2] ad is pretty much the exact and literal opposite. It essentially takes a sampling of the great things that culture and society has produced, destroys them, and then shows the Product, while literally singing "All I Ever Need Is You." Here [3] a guy basically reversed the ad, with the iPad being crushed, and then slowly lifting it up to have all the great stuff in society come out of it. And suddenly it's actually quite uplifting and positive!
Today's "1984" ad would have to include someone throwing a sledgehammer through an iMac, and similarly destroying an iPhone. It wouldn't be an advertisement for any corporation though, because a truly game-changing act today would be to opt out of the extractive and coercive cycle of modern proprietary technology.
Rebellion can't be bought, but in the 1980's I think it was still an open question whether computers would ever be something that non-nerds wanted. In hindsight, it seems inevitable that general purpose, user friendly computers would crush everything, but was that really a given? Isn't there a possible world where IBM and/or Xerox do own everything and never make it past huge, expensive systems that were only made for specialists?
For everyone here that loved our C64 or DOS PC, how many of our peers actively rejected early computers because they weren't fun to use?
Besides which it seems to me that Apple has never really been against having a single giant corporation controlling everything you can see, do and say, they were just against that corporation not being Apple.
What about rebelling against the cultural elements of rebelling? Much of the image of rebellion has been a futile cycle of (ironically) trying the same thing repeatedly and failing to make any changes. Not falling into the bullshit of old bearded white men who never had to work for a living, were total economic illiterates even if they called themselves economists, and have been dead-for centuries.
"1984" was edgy in a cool way, but that's not the type of edginess I'm evoking. Most '90s video game commercials that were edgy did so in a puerile, juvenile way as befitting the target audience. And not just video game ads, there was definitely a big "xtreme" trend as well.
The Apple ad taps into that xtreme vibe by embracing destructive energy to depict a physical contrast. Which is visually attention-grabbing, but it puts the focus on the act of destruction, and reduction, and people who like the destroyed objects feel miffed.
"1984" I'd say was edgy in a rebellious way as you point out, which I'd argue gives it more substance. The sledgehammer hitting the screen isn't even the focus, it's the climax to a sequence that carries more of a meaningful message than "wow look how much functionality we fit into this thin shell."
> "1984" I'd say was edgy in a rebellious way as you point out, which I'd argue gives it more substance. The sledgehammer hitting the screen isn't even the focus, it's the climax to a sequence that carries more of a meaningful message than "wow look how much functionality we fit into this thin shell."
Well, it just wasn't focusing on empty slowmo destruction of a big screen. It had an emotional message behind it. A bit like original Star Wars vs Rebel Moon.
For low-tech I meant analog as opposed to digital. And I meant nothing pejorative in non-tech; these days, there's fewer and fewer positive connotations in being techie.
we're on a technical forum, but "low tech" isn't inherently inferior. All the MIDI's in the world can't truly replace a good ol' acoustic sound. That's why we still have Orchaestras.
The other half, sure. To think that all tech people are welcoming the current portrayal of AI/LLM's/Generative Art is simply tone deaf. Some of the most cynical detractors are in fact highly technical people.
On the contrary, I wish this was dismissive. It's about time that the Overton window gets shifted about the overly nostalgic articles that get praised by "the right people", which means we need to "read the room" and share the same opinions.
It is an absolutely good thing that an inexpensive device is replacing an expensive one, and that impoverished children will be able to create music with an inexpensive iPad and will not be forced to learn obsolete methods to "finger" an instrument.
How to even start here..
Calling the ipad inexpensive will make people in most of the world to laugh at you (even the discounted stock of ipad 9th is unapproachable for many).
While a guitar at a local store (just looked it up) costs under 80 EUR, needs no apps, no power, no subscriptions, has no EOL, doesn't have a battery that will go bad.
Yes you need time to learn, but you do not necessarily need to invest more money with an analog instrument.
I’ve never seen a guitar under about $300US new that was actually playable without some serious attention from a guitar shop, and on the lower end they’ll probably just tell you there’s not much they can do to make it better. They may need frets filed down to remove rough edges, neck adjustments, to simply have the tuners replaced because they’re so poorly-made they basically don’t work, et c.
Guitars that cheap are similar to crappy small-key $40-80 electronic keyboards that can only sound like three notes at a time and sound terrible doing it—they’re so bad that they will tend to frustrate and turn off even a beginner.
I bought my German made mandolin that's like 100 years old for less than 10% of an ipad, and it'll never be obsolete, that's the whole point...
It'll always be up to date, I'll always find the parts to fix it, and even if one-day it somehow gets damaged beyond repair I can recycle it in my fireplace in about 30 seconds
I feel like people making your point don't see the fundamental difference between a functional tool like a hammer and an artistic tool like a musical instrument, and it's kind of scary tbh.
> I can recycle it in my fireplace in about 30 seconds
not disagreeing w/ anything else (beside responding to a sarcastic comment, usually 'caring for the children' [esp. out of place] is a decent giveaway + repeating 'inexpensive'); however burning stuff is not recycling. If anything it releases all the carbon (CO2 + CO) in the atmosphere, compositing in the ground is a tad better option, but the lacquer might prevent that part... for a while.
>Not more than burning my regular fire wood, and infinitely better than fossil fuel
Not recycling still, recycling would be making something out of it, e.g. a plate, a toy, whatever.
Another option is making fiberboard alike material out of it from sawdust.
Dunno about termites, it'd depend where you live, but then again, I am not sure how that came into the discussion. Anyway compost is used in gardening, so it's a form of recycling.
> It is an absolutely good thing that an inexpensive device is replacing an expensive one.
Professional musician (pianist) here. It’s an outlandish take on solving affordability by destroying acoustic instruments and replacing them with iPads. Let’s see someone play the Prokofiev Toccata in real time using Garageband, no MIDI files allowed.
Aside from whether the iPad is inexpensive or not, it just doesn't replace an actual piano or trumpet.
If your use case is really covered by the iPad, you could also make do with a refurbished corporate DELL costing half the price or 3 years ago's Surface Pro, same way the track makers were doing 2 decades ago.
So no, Apple's marketing would sure want us to think so, but impoverished children are probably not saved by 2024's thinner iPad in any significant way.
I can just visualize the post iPad high school jazz band -- twenty kids sitting in chairs with their tablets, rhythmically tapping virtual buttons on their touchscreen. One stands for her solo, tapping her screen at a different cadence. Oh, she's playing trumpet? I thought she was a saxophonist!
What artistry! What musicianship! Thank God for Apple and the new iPad!
There's a lot to break down here, but I'll take the less obvious angle. If you're calling the shiny new iPad an "accessible, inexpensive device for the impoverished", Apple's multi-billion dollar, decades long marketing has clearly failed you.
Yeah, how dare people have emotional connections with musical instruments! The great (and very inexpensive) iPad will finally allow humans to become equals and set poor people free. Nostalgia is exactly what's wrong with this world.
Yes, this is very over the top, but the iPad is neither inexpensive (compared to your $50 garage sale guitar and synthie) nor is it sufficient to make music.
People enjoy music from instruments not only because someone was able to compose a song on it, but because the instrument carries emotion, there is sweat and pain in learning it, people become masters of their instruments and have actual connections to them. The iPad is a powerful device for making music, sure. But it's not exactly the device I would choose to allow impoverished children to create music. And I, personally, enjoy music more when I know it's actual people playing instruments rather than just a producer mixing some stuff and only recording the singing. Calling playing an instrument obsolete and "fingering" is insulting.
I get your sentiment, but I feel like your view on iPads and there being no musicianship to it is just wrong. The instruments in garage band have velocity sensitivity and can be played expressively by tapping the screen just as you can tap the keys on a piano or hit the marimba with some mallets.
In fact on some of the synthesizers you gain an additional mode of expressiveness because you can adjust your input as you're playing notes, similar to MPE synthesizers like the Osmose.
An iPad is more than sufficient for making music.
I say this as someone that really enjoys playing my instruments (mostly guitars) and wouldn't trade the experience for an iPad ever.
I mean that's just a nonsense statement. You can say "make music (that I don't like)" but you 100% cannot say that an iPad is insufficient to make music when thousands of people do that every day and tens of thousands of people enjoy their output.
Between the fact that you think that entry-level instruments cost more than iPads, that somehow "fingering" an instrument is a bad or obsolete thing, and that you think iPads are affordable to the impoverished, I'm really not sure where to begin correcting you.
Just... yikes. I hate to be flippant, but you're so out of touch that my only thought is to tell you to touch grass.
Yeah, why learn to play an instrument with your caveman hands when you can rent an iPad and make something that sounds the same with the AI in Garageband!
I'm not so optimistic these days. Poe's Law has long since died. Even if this was misunderstood sarcasm, you can probably find this opinion around the net (mayeb even further down the post).
> Aside from the destruction of low-tech artistic tools triggering non-tech people aspect...
604 comments on this HN post (at the time of writing this), the bulk of which appear to be opposed to this video, and you're trying to tell me that tech folk aren't, to use your word, "triggered"? C'mon now.
Yikes, that was really offbrand for Nintendo also, but it fits within their 90s "Play It Loud" marketing strategy wherein they tried to compete with ow-the-edge Sega and later Sony.
https://twitter.com/cuniiform/status/1788013085392859171
And it's actually already been done before, by Nintendo:
https://twitter.com/rsnous/status/1788047377556791321
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzAo9HzOgtQ