I think the big thing here is that if you don't have an attachment to any of the items being crushed you probably don't feel as strongly. If you're a trumpet player, seeing a trumpet being crushed is going to be a bit distressing. If you're a photographer, you're putting a monetary value on those lenses being destroyed. If you're into old arcade machines, you're thinking about how many of those cabinets are left in that good of a condition.
AFAICT people are not so much upset about objects of value being destroyed as they are about the symbolism of creative tools being crushed flat and turned into an iPad. For artists and similar creatives, it evokes the way AI companies have already stolen their intellectual property, and their promise to make them all but obsolete in the future.
For me, it’s a mix of both. I’m a musician and a photographer. I felt a visceral negative reaction because those objects are sitting here in my apartment, and I’ve invested thousands of dollars and thousands of hours into them.
I also found the symbolism a bit distressing, because it takes the general worry I’ve felt about AI’s impact on art and music and animates those worries very literally.
Most AI/tech proponents are quick to point out that the original forms of expression aren’t going anywhere. But this felt uncomfortably close to “where we’re going, you won’t need these things anymore”.
And the thing is, I’m a big fan of the iPad and it’s incredibly useful as a companion to these artistic endeavors. But I’m not a fan of the idea that it supersedes them.
I'm a former professional musician. Not being able to tell the difference between your own pet being tortured and an object on tv being destroyed in a commercial would be a severe mental disorder.
People have anthropomorphised and attached sentimental value to musical instruments and other artistic instruments since the beginning of civilization. Just because someone writes an academic paper claiming it's a disorder doesn't mean we should care what they have to say.
There's a big difference between "I give my guitar a name" and "Seeing a commercial where a trumpet gets squished is the same as my own pet being tortured".
Let's not pretend you didn't say "Watching a musical instrument get crushed is like watching a pet getting tortured".
A metaphor would be "the boy was a cat as he tip toed quietly through the house".
You're thinking about what reasonable people would say and mean, but these people actually want to say that seeing a trumpet getting flattened in a commercial is the same as watching your own pet be tortured. Why that is, is anyone's guess. Maybe to seem sensitive and deep.
Remember when I predicted that you would attack me and attack 'how I asked' for evidence instead of actually explaining how watching a commercial of a trumpet being mushed is the same as watching your own pet being tortured?
Even then it's about things that someone actually owns and not something from a TV commercial.
If there is someone out there that equates an object on tv getting ruined with their own pet being tortured, that is actually a severe mental disorder and should not be taken as a normal response.
That would be a person unable to function on a day to day basis.
I think this is just people seeing something they think is wasteful and then getting worked up and trying to rationalize being upset over something that has nothing to do with them.
This response is basically just you saying "nu uh, you're wrong" again. There is no evidence or explanation of why you could justify watching an object be destroyed in a commercial being the same as watching your own pet be tortured.
Find me any example of people thinking this is normal. How would someone go to the movies or throw anything away? It's complete nonsense.
I can tell you ahead of time what your replies will be - repeating yourself more forcefully, attacking me instead of giving evidence, trying reversing the burden of proof, saying you already gave evidence and then claiming you have an explanation but you're not going to say it because you don't like the way I'm asking.
For me I can't see the symbolism part, but I have serious concerns about destroying that many things and making such a big mess just for one ad. That's just me though.
The arcade one particularly distressing given that arcades and their unique arcade hardware are rapidly vanishing across the world without replacement.
And the arcades that DO exist are often 90% shitty ticket games that cost $1, have about 15 seconds of gameplay, and then maybe after blowing through $50 you'll have enough tickets to buy $2 worth of Tootsie Rolls and maybe a balsa wood glider. If you got really lucky, maybe a plushie.
Though there are some "barcades" popping up these days that focus on classic arcade games to appeal to older the older crowd.
I happened across a nice one when I was in Denver, recently. It's called Akihabara. Tons of imported Japanese cabinets (including Taiko no Tatsujin and Typing of the Dead), and a bar with imported beers, sake and house cocktails. I wish I'd had a smartcard for saving progress, but it was only something I found out about during the trip.
I'm definitely more into the 90s and early 2000s era of arcade games than 80s stuff (and the seat-friendly JP cabinets are nice) so I enjoyed the opportunity to play games that are hard to find here, and bring back memories of wandering (relatively lackluster) bowling alley arcades with a pocket of quarters.
I understand that there is an entire culture surrounding these machines and that people enjoy collecting and restoring them. Hell, I would even like to build a cabinet myself one day.
But there's a reason they are disappearing. They're old and obsolete. While they may have value to a niche group, they are overall viewed as mostly worthless.
Secondly, there's a very simple solution to disliking what someone else does with their own property. Purchase it before they do whatever you dislike. Either from them or by beating them to the punch and buying it from the previous owner before they do.
> Secondly, there's a very simple solution to disliking what someone else does with their own property. Purchase it before they do whatever you dislike. Either from them or by beating them to the punch and buying it from the previous owner before they do
I think this kind of sums up why it was a bad ad.
"Don't be mad, you could have just outbid me" isn't a great thing to have to be saying at the same time you're asking the same person to get hyped about a new product.
The Gutenberg bible is also old and obsolete. The pyramids at Giza are old and obsolete. Stonehenge is old and obsolete. Ancient cave paintings are old and obsolete. The Wright brothers' flyer is old and obsolete.
Most of the reason that collectors have to spend a lot of money on arcade cabinets, though, is not that they have high market resale value; but rather that the machines they can manage to acquire are usually in terrible condition, requiring large amounts of conservation work to get working and presentable again. And they’re so broken down, because everyone but these few collectors have valued — and continue to value — these machines so little that they’ve allowed them to rot in warehouses for decades. Many arcade cabinets are recovered from e-waste recycling centers, or even landfill.
If they truly had market value, then people other than the collectors themselves would be making a business out of finding and restoring these cabinets, in order to sell them to the collectors. But no such business exists — because there just isn’t the demand to sustain it.
I’m reminded of a recent YouTube video about MadCatz gaming peripherals. The video’s author had to spend thousands of dollars buying the few remaining controllers on the used market to use as examples. Why so much? Not because of high demand. Because of limited supply — they were so valueless (mainly due to just being awful products even when new) that every owner of one had long thrown in away; no gaming store wanted to buy any used (being seen selling such brands was a mark against the quality of a store!); and even thrift stores had long dumped them for lack of interest. These gamepads and flight-sticks had value to this one guy making this one video — but literally nobody else.
A one-time purchase, does not a market-clearing price make. The market is still just as illiquid after such a purchase as before it.
> Why so much? Not because of high demand. Because of limited supply
Eh, "high demand" is meaningless on its own in this case. There's high demand relative to the supply.
And not everyone recognizes value in an old cabinet and throw theirs out (further reducing supply), but that just means the market isn't efficient, but that's true of the market for most things.
Your "solution" is so unrealistic for all but the very wealthiest people that it's on the verge of seeming disingenuous. My bank account would have to be quite a few orders of magnitude larger for me to be able to purchase even a fraction of all the things in the world I would like to preserve.
I was so angered by your opinion on relics being worthless that I checked your comments and you seem alright in other respects. I do like HN for this reason. So yeah I disagree with you this time but I’m not going to be rude
The console says “Space Imploder,” which isn’t a real arcade console, from what I can tell. There’s more discussion here[1], but it seems likely that a lot of the things weren’t real (or if they were real, they weren’t were junk that was broken beyond repair).
This seems to be a major point that’s missing from the discussion. If a lot of this is stuff that was fake or already headed for the dump, it completely undermines the argument that perfectly good equipment was destroyed.
The point isn't how it was produced, but what the message is. And the message is destruction of creative instruments is good, akshually, because shiny & thin.
No amount of "but we only rendered it" is going to fix it. It speaks about values the company holds.
Also, the focus on how these devices are increasingly consumer only instead of me being able to use my device to create
Disclaimer: one of my goals is to build apps for my machine on the machine itself. I had this working on the now defunct Firefox phone OS (Its apps were deployed as Zipped HTML/JS and related resources -- I cobbled together a dev environ out of a few browser based tools).
TL;DR: I'm a tool-using creator-type species, The modern "CONSUME ONLY" device craze makes my eye twitch; Ads that reinforce destruction of tools make me want to join fight club.
Man, you touched on something that has been a sore point for me my entire smart phone owning part of my life. The inability to make a simple program without huge hurdles, just for my phone and no one else.
Having a locked down tool that is so dumbed down is annoying. For example, I'd love to make a custom unit converter so that I can quickly and unobtrusively convert between metric and imperial without being online/etc. that also displays the answer with closest drill size
This reminds me of an article from Maddox in 2007 about how the Nokia E70 is better than the iPhone because he can use the terminal on it. [0] Time may have proven him right.
Art creation is creation. Muic, images, video -- they all benefit from good screens, fast processors, quality stylus integration, first party apps, and full-stack attention to latency. The iPad is about creation, just not your type of creation.
So if you own a house or car then it's distressing to see one destroyed in a movie? Both of those cost much more than a trumpet, and for many people are more personal and unique, but somehow most people manage to keep their eyes on the screen.
Depending on the context, probably? During my suspension of disbelief of the narrative, it might make me say "I don't like this destruction!" and to root for whatever might be mitigating the destruction
Honestly, outside the context of a movie or education, I find it pretty off-putting altogether. The videos of brand new cell phones being destroyed, TV's kind of less so but still, cars being crushed or vandalized, etc. If I put my psychoanalysis hat on (always dangerous when your subject is yourself, but anyway) I feel two big things:
1. A part of me just does not like waste. I'm keenly aware of our rampant consumerist culture's slow and continuing march towards collapsing our biosphere, and one of the ways those thoughts manifest themselves is being really upset with people buying products simply to turn right around and destroy them, while barely using them, usually for profit in the attention economy but sometimes seemingly just because they're wealthy and bored.
2. And another part: growing up poor, I'm keenly aware of how valuable things can be for people like me, who didn't grow up with much. Maybe that old computer that works fine that you're going to run tannerite through for a YouTube video means nothing to you, but I vividly recall many points in my life I could've really used it, and I know I'm the absolute opposite of alone in that fact.
The "artistic" angle that a lot of the outrage this is drawing didn't really hit me as hard as these things did, but that's just my subjective experience. I respect people who love these beautiful things and don't want to see (probably) completely functional, or even repairable, useful things destroyed so a multi-billion dollar company can sell more products. (And let's be honest, given the nature of video production, the ones we actually saw destroyed were likely a fraction of the ones actually destroyed.)
The artistic angle I do understand though is if it's done for something like a movie, it doesn't hit the same for me. When it's done to make other kinds of art, even schlocky hollywood crap art, at least that has... a result, I guess? It's destruction to create something. This was destruction for... another fucking ad. That will be forgotten in probably 2 weeks.
Edit: The more I've thought about it, the more gross it feels, and I find myself really sympathizing. Times are pretty tough right now and artists have it rough during good times. How would you feel if you, as a piano player, who hadn't gotten to play in years (or maybe even ever!) on a piano like that, how would you feel seeing Apple buy one that at least looks to be in perfectly good working order, and smash it, in the service of selling you a stupid iPad? I really think this is impossible to comprehend without taking into account that everyone is hurting right now: inflation, Bidenomics, whatever it is you want to call it: people are broke, our expenses are going up, and our salaries remain the same. Yeah, I totally understand why this ad in this cultural moment hit a nerve: a whole ton of people, especially creatives, are struggling right now and here's Apple, buying up a ton of awesome things, and smashing em to bits and being like "here, you don't need a piano, you need an iPad!" Yeah, no shit people are upset.
I remember Obama's "Cash for Clunkers" program where people were paid to pour sand in engines and run them to destruction.
This was all supposedly in the service of replacing them with more fuel efficient cars. The trouble was the numbers weren't run. To equal the emissions from manufacturing a car, a car would have to be driven 20,000 miles. One can easily see that the increase in fuel economy didn't add up.
Then there was the "create new jobs" fallacious reasoning, akin to the broken window fallacy.
I remember once watching some heist movie while recovering from a motorcycle crash, and the sight of all the faceless mooks crashing their bikes during its car chase scene was so viscerally uncomfortable that it took all the fun out of the spectacle. This had never been a problem before.
> So if you own a house or car then it's distressing to see one destroyed in a movie?
I think there's a difference between showing items getting damaged as a depiction of some sort of chaos or violence versus lauding it as being obsoleted by technical progress.
That's because the blown up car is not advertising anything.
Instead, imagine an ad extolling the virtues of public transport by blowing up cars in a parking lot. It sends the complete opposite message than what was probably intended.
Yeah, I do a lot of live recording from my piano to Mac and I was thinking the same thing.
But maybe the ad is saying - you're no longer programming a MIDI track, the AI piano player in Garage Band or whatever is just going to be indistinguishable from a real piano.
I wasn't initially bothered by it, but I think the people who are have a fair point especially about the generative AI implications of replacing real creative tools.
Yeah I don't care how good the AI is, it's not the same as the experience of playing a real instrument. It's taking away someone's creative experience and replacing it with a synthetic version. Even if the result is higher quality artistic output it eliminates the process of producing it which should not be discounted.
If I saw a house, that looked like the one where I grew up, being cheerfully destroyed to build a Walmart parking lot, yes I might get a little distressed. It would certainly not improve my opinion of Walmart.
if a car is like a tool that you tolerate in order to get to work, then no, you might even enjoy the recording of the enactment of a revenge fantasy you can't afford
if you spend your weekends polishing your car, buying aftermarket addons for it, modifying it, and/or considering which car to save up for next, then yeah, it's gonna fucking hurt if you watch a movie and see them blow up a car like the one you long for, especially if you think they did it for real instead of using cgi. and that's true whether that car is a lamborghini countach or a low rider
This comparison falls wildly short and completely misses OP's point.
Many people own cars, but only a small number of people are deeply into cars, and for one of those people I can definitely see a vintage car getting destroyed on screen causing a negative emotional reaction.
Many people own homes, but it's their own home that they get really attached to, not the abstract concept of a home.
My wife is a lifelong, fervent string musician and I have been with her in a film where she shouted out in pain when a string instrument was brutally destroyed. OP is talking about having that kind of attachment to an artform, not about causal ownership of objects.
It depends on the context. On an entertainment yt channel, one single real trumpet, so what. But the context apple produced is the implication that the very concept of a trumpet is being destroyed and replaced with a thin, temporary simulacrum.
The difference is subtle. In the first case, a single real trumpet. Only worth a few hundred bucks. In the advertisement, the crushed trumpet is a symbol representing everything around trumpets: lessons, spit valves, centuries/milennia of history, inherited instruments, afternoons afterschool marching around on a football field with childhood friends.
> I don’t think it is healthy if you are emotionally distressed seeing a trumpet being crushed.
My first thought was the exact opposite: watching the specific ad without being distressed, shows an emotionally damaged human being. Especially the last part where the toy gets crashed screaming is really messed up.
I would guess that if it is a real trumpet the props department went down to the local used instrument store and picked up the cheapest Yamaha in the discount bin. But, the way the trumpet crumples doesn't quite look realistic to me.
I know it's actually hard to tell. There's definitely some CGI in there. But a lot of it looks pretty real too. But the issue with it was the destruction of all of the creative tools. So it's in some ways not quite as bad if it's not real.
Some bits are obviously physically impossible, so definitely CGI.
I can be persuaded that some shots are real+CGI, and squished into the larger CGI view. They might have crushed a few "things" to see how they would fail, and then CGI'ed up a final version.
The wide shots do not look real. The lighting is not believable. The failure modes of many individual items are not believable. The whole pancaking effect of the big crush is not believable.
I understand the discomfort at seeing wanton destruction. It bothers me to see great old houses or cars get wrecked for movies, for example.
Nowadays, most of that is fake.
And I think almost all of this ad is fake as well.
Even if it is a cheap one, it's still wrong. I have the same visceral gut reaction to seeing a musical instrument get destroyed as I do to seeing a book burnt. I own a lot of very expensive, very nice instruments. However, some of my favourite music I have created has been on dirt cheap charity shop instruments.
It's just the shear waste of it all that strikes me. Like so many of those things cost so much money to the people that could use or want them. So many high-paid tech workers are already out-of-touch with what most people consider affordable that I'm not surprised their marketing team thought this was ok.
But most artists are starving, and we live in a world where waste like this isn't really morally acceptable.
It's like a dog whistle. People who care about this are not unhealthy, they are having a visceral reaction to something that you don't understand the significance of. Try curiosity instead of dismissiveness.
You’ve probably never invested hundreds or thousands of hours in a hobby, art form, craft or skill. If you had, you would find the ad at least mildly disconcerting.
If you don’t see how, maybe it’s time to get off the screen? Stop consuming and try creating for a bit?
I don't think it's healthy to have so little perception or understanding and think think everything is that simple.
No one is traumatized. It's just unappealing and tone-deaf that's all. Showing a harmless little toy head and face getting squished and then popped, and presenting that as cool and fun and good, just makes you wonder about the person who produced that imagery and thought it could possibly have those associations, that's all.
Showing a bunch of mixed colors of paint oozing down the side of something is not "emotionally distressing", it's just unappealing, especially to Apple product customers, who buy Apple products precicely because they are sleek and minimalist and clean. Steve's & Ive's entire universe was clean & sterile.
It's remarkable because Apple are supposed to be the KINGS of exactly those sorts of intangible things like impression & subconscious reaction, where things like a 0.1mm or 0.1degree difference in a shape actually matters.
> Showing a bunch of mixed colors of paint oozing down the side of something is not "emotionally distressing", it's just unappealing, especially to Apple product customers, who buy Apple products precicely because they are sleek and minimalist and clean. Steve's & Ive's entire universe was clean & sterile.
For me it was a different reaction: They literally replaced a bunch of colors with grayness. In a gray factory. Under a gray slab.
This is very different from what Apple used to mean and advertise.
"We squeezed all this functionality into this one device"? That doesn't sound that hard to understand.
No wonder everyone on this site complains about loneliness and therapy and this and that. Most humans aren't 'distressed' by this stuff. I always did wonder about the oddly neurotic opinions expressed here. Now it makes sense: people have little to no emotional resilience here. Everything is the end of the world.
I'd say that's a first world thing for the generation that grew up on SSRIs and the pathologization and medical treatment of every negative emotion from grief to mild discomfort. Not specifically a HN problem.
But they didn't actually squeeze all that functionality into a cold piece of glass, plastic, and silicon. They're only suggesting that you see it that way and to give them your money instead of buying and learning to play an instrument.
I mean, I guess just having an iPad can get you laid somehow these days in the very stupid world we live in, but the guys in the band with actual musical skills are probably getting way more action.
I guess you don't understand advertising. Emotional response is a common theme. Consider Honda's continuous "Dream" series of ads. If you think everyone is a snowflake you aren't enlightened, you're just very bad at sales.
The entire ad is a symbol for Apple's iPad replacing everything being crushed. It's not "Space Imploder", it's every single arcade game every made. It's a representative for arcade games in general. Nobody should take "Space Imploder" literally. They can't use "Space Invaders" likely because of copyright, but I'm sure that they would have in this ad if they could have just so that someone wouldn't end up missing the point and suggesting "but, Space Imploder doesn't even exist".
You mean the arcade cabinet that conveniently switches to a GAME OVER screen while it has sparks flying and smoke pouring out of it when it gets hit by the crusher? Somehow I doubt you lost an actual cabinet. I'll be surprised if it's even made out of wood and not polygons.
It's possible that some of the close-ups are practical, but the wide shots, such as when the cabinet is being crushed, look fake and plastic as hell. And quite a lot of the destruction is super dramatic, whereas real objects under real hydraulic presses are way less so.
> If you're a trumpet player, seeing a trumpet being crushed is going to be a bit distressing
Really? I play the trumpet and felt nothing watching this ad. My trumpet wasn't being crushed, so who cares? It wasn't a rare Stradivarius, nor even a high-end Schilke or anything... Even if it was - why care? They can make more trumpets after all...
