I have to strongly disagree. Pianos, guitars and other instruments have a long and rich history that connects the past to the present. A long arc of human progress and creativity, with some of the most sought after instruments today being rooted in a deep history of human craftsmanship.
Cameras also have a rich history, but don’t belong in the same sentence IMO.
While you can find soulless products to buy, those are only a subset of what’s on offer.
I enjoy using Apple products, and will probably even buy this iPad because I need to upgrade. But it sits in an entirely different category than my cameras and musical instruments.
The entire arch of human history from the first rock picked up our ancestors leads up to the most complex things ever conceived by humans. Requiring a globally distributed intellectual exchange, thousands of years of scientific and technological advancement, commerce, etc.
Focusing on just the physical assembly of complex parts ignores not just where those parts comes from, but also everyone living and dead that contributed to the software which makes it more than odd object. And even that glosses over the continent spanning electrical systems used to power em etc.
A tablet, laptop, etc is the ultimate expression of history warts and all. If they seem soulless it’s because they aren’t just a product of a single culture.
Pianos guitars and violins were crafted by hand! Materials were chosen with care and cultivated over decades with the express purpose of providing a certain character to an instrument! The complexity of a harpsichord or piano was insane in a time before supply chains, and they were designed to last centuries and be passed down between generations! That's just the fancy stuff, stringed instruments can and have been made by anyone, and innovation has come from surprising places! Almost anybody can change the balance, or experiment with covering up holes or adding random metal components to see how it affects the sound. All this effort and knowledge and time goes into something created FOR FUN. You can't eat a piano or use it for any reason other than changing the way people feel, yet music has been around since language was first invented or possibly even earlier.
An iPad is a homogenous blob, it's components broken down and reconstituted at a molecular level, none of it's original character remains. They are the pinnacle of design, but there's not much room for expression left. They last a few years at most before becoming museum pieces or trash. They're impressive in their own right, they showcase human achievement like nothing else. I'd argue they have a less colorful history than music, however.
A homogeneous blob wouldn’t do anything. You’re discounting complexity because it’s not staring you in the face.
> History of consumer electronics goes back maybe a century
Ceramics go back 9,000+ years and people where making glass 4,000 years ago but that history doesn’t count because…
Capacitors, batteries, metals, etc each have their own long history of development without which you didn’t get an iPad.
> The complexity of a harpsichord or piano was insane in a time before supply chains
They don’t use glass, ceramics, etc. It only seems complicated because you have some idea of all the steps involved. Meanwhile you can’t conceive of everything involved in making just the machines required for a single component.
Sorry, my phrasing was poor. As a product line, iPads are homogenous. If we both order one, they will be nearly indistinguishable. Their component materials have been homogenized before manufacturing to remove as much of the character of the original sand or rock as possible.
> Capacitors, batteries, metals, etc each have their own long history of development without which you didn’t get an iPad.
These were not developed with consumer electronics in mind. Electricity itself was only discovered 300 years ago. Electronics absolutely built upon the shoulders of giants, but I don't believe they can claim all human progress as their own. The iPad air doesn't have 5000 years of history because that's when we started refining metals.
> Meanwhile you can’t conceive of everything involved in making just the machines required for a single component.
My work makes optics for the chip industry, so I like to think I have better idea than most, but I haven't been to anywhere like Shenzhen yet, so I may be out of touch...
You also just described musical instruments. The goal is for them to sound identical to similar instruments and a great deal of effort controlling humidity etc falls under that umbrella. People in an Orchestra want specific sounds not just random character from their instruments.
> These were not developed with consumer electronics in mind.
By that token the harpsichord wasn’t invented with the piano in mind. There’s nothing wrong with this view, but it drops the ‘rich history of musical instruments’ to the work of a tiny number of innovators.
> Electricity itself was only discovered 300 years ago
Electricity (static shocks, lightning, some evidence for primitive battery etc) was known about since antiquity though obviously we only recently learned how to exploit it.
> The iPad air doesn't have 5000 years of history because that's when we started refining metals.
The rich history of glassmaking is directly relevant to the iPad and provides some of its most valuable features. If we discount that then the history of musical instruments again becomes one of a tiny number of lone inventors.
Apples to apples comparisons favor electronics here.
Some. My experience has been that the diversity of instruments dwarfs that of electronics, with the possible exception of early Nokia phones. I bet this is largely driven by product lifecycle, as my saxophones are each over 10 years old and have been refurbished more than once. High-end professional instruments are often one-of-a-kind.
> The rich history of glassmaking is directly relevant to the iPad and provides some of its most valuable features.
I agree, but again I think it's a problem of intent. Glassmaking was improved to make decorations, then storage vessels, then optics, then cookware and labware, then electronics. Meanwhile people have been making bone flutes and leather drums for longer than they've been able to write about it.
The intent to create musical instruments is a tiny fraction of the history of woodworking etc. If you’re looking at things that narrowly there’s nothing particularly interesting left about em.
With that mindset a hammer has a much longer and richer history than a Tuba and musical instruments are just a trivial edge case crated as little more than novelty items.
On the other hand if you bring in the skills required to craft precision objects and the culture required to support such endeavors then tablets are clearly more wondrous.
I think we're probably arguing semantics at this point. I totally agree that the amount of raw effort and technological progress that goes into tablet making dwarfs that which goes into an instrument.
no, man. have you never experienced music in a personal way? not a recording, not a concert, but as a living cultural joy shared and created together among strangers and lovers both in the same moment - it's so beautiful, so overwhelming in a way that nothing else is.
and so often it involves a musical instrument, you know.
and it can be a story, a lesson, it is all political. people kill and die for this thing every day, and every day in history.
instruments may be more electronic these days and i enjoy my share of electronic music and computer music. but physical, acoustic instruments will always be the icon.
i think a piano or a guitar has already made more history than remains to be made by anything.
the first cultural memes were songs
An argument against my amateur analysis is of course scale. Pianos were being explored by maybe a million people and only a fraction of that fulltime. Cameras are basically a part of life for a large portion of humanity.
Though the tone of the ad was still... Orwellian: imagine a hydraulic press, stamping on human creativity, forever.
For those who haven't heard this term, it basically refers to the Apple aesthetic: sparse, minimal, utilitarian, and clean.
Flat UIs and Material design (out of Google) are other examples.
This ad is basically a millennial modernist manifesto. Down with complexity. Down with variety. Simple, clean, minimal.
Contrast this with the noisy cyberpunk aesthetic that was pretty common in technology before Apple 2.0 and Jony Ive and can still be found in the gaming PC area, or the 80s-90s skeuomorphic aesthetic that dominated UIs until the later 2000s.
When Millennial modernism came to prominence it was itself a revolt against noise, clashing styles, and overwhelm. I personally liked it for that aspect. But I can definitely see how it can also be soulless. IMHO the worst thing I can say about it is that it seems associated with authoritarianism. Like Brutalist architecture it's kind of an authoritarian aesthetic because it comes about by having a dictator who says 'no' to almost everything and enforces a very rigid auteur approach. Once established it also tends to remain unchanged because there's not much you can do with it. "Theming" possibilities are pretty much restricted to light and dark mode.
I myself have mixed feelings (about millennial modernism not the ad, which is awful). The biggest thing I like about this style is its association with reduced cognitive load. The biggest thing I don't like is the association with authoritarianism.
Edit:
Just realized that the Cybertruck is an ode to millennial modernism, and might just be kind of a shark jumping moment for it. This ad would count as another shark jumping moment. Maybe it's on its way out.
It was repulsive.
The issue for me is not about minimalism, so this reframing is not appropriate in my case.
I do agree that there is more wrong with the advert than this. I was just pointing out something nobody'd brought up.
I may be over sensitive to generational comments as I've been 'feeling my age' for several months. And the comment you posted makes sense to me better now. <3
A budding revolt? Equating an iPad to authoritarianism?
I think I understand and agree with some of your concepts. I see a trend back towards analog things and low tech devices, but that's a pretty simple and understandable trend. I don't think it has anything to do with authoritarianism.
The problem with the Cybertruck isn't its design (although people did mock that, comparing it to vehicles from PS1 era graphics), but that it is a poorly constructed vehicle.
That’s how it feels when inflation made basics jump up 50% and it feels you’re being slowly crushed.
Seeing this is an Ad for one of the world’s richest Companies, the lesson I got is the rich are slowly crushing the median.
Don’t buy their crap.
If they're mad at that, then they'd be mad at themselves for having a zoomorphic stressball and squeezing it themselves --which, who knows, is possible, but unlikely to be the case.
Mother's heartbeat. The woosh of her blood stream.
We get months of this auditory performance.
There is so much that is still only doable at least in part by hand, from making certain musical instruments to things like crochet. There are even more that use machines but are nowhere near as automated as people believe they are (see e.g. practically all tailoring, where even mass produced articles still need a skilled hand to guide the cutting and sewing machines).
But people love the fiction of some sterile production line that spits out all the cheap things they buy, in no small part because acknowledging that even "cheap Chinese shit" is made by the skilled hands of actual human beings would require acknowledging the gross exploitation that enables you to buy their work for absurdly low prices.
Separately, the ad is weird. They’re the first thing I reach for if I want to e.g. play our actual piano. I tune instruments with them, display music with them, record myself, play an accompanying track on them—I compliment instruments with them, I don’t replace them with an iPad or iPhone.
The iPads have had a hard time because, yeah, the OS was/is in its infancy but nobody (except the dgaf-wealthy) buys the $2000+ iPad Pro for "consumption" because they sell a $400 and $700 iPad for that.
The things iPad (Pro) can do are indeed far fewer than an unencumbered (by draconian lockdown, or simple lack of development resources) PC or even Mac laptop. But that's different than "none". The more hardware equipment in my studio I can shovel onto Apple's magic hydraulic obliterator, the better.
(Although it's a lot less than shown in that ad, haha. But I liked the ad, as far as ads go.)
I get it, that's exactly their point. The iPad can do all of those things. But at a time when many creatives feel like AI is going to replace them or make their skills irrelevant, it's pretty tone deaf.
And also, it's far more likely that most of those objects were made by skilled craftsmen, even if they did work at a bigger company.
This is what I realized, too. At first, I thought the outrage was dumb, but I think this is the context I was missing.
And yeah I'm not oblivious. We can replace all the engineers and artists with generated output that satisfies 97% of everyone. It was great while it lasted but like the apple commercial hints at, out with the old ...
I don't personally think that computing is a threat to art, but many people do.
What exactly are you trying to achieve with this sentence?
What man with a soul would destroy a guitar with a crusher for any purpose at all?
That's psychopathically problematic to me.
Or do you carry a bag with a camera, a dumb phone, a notepad w/ pens and markers, books, an mp3 player, a pedometer, a measuring tape, ...
No one's forcing you to buy the former, so, why don't you do the latter?
There are genuine uses for this technology, but symbolically showing that pianos, violins, paints, etc are out of date by crushing them, replacing them with an iPad removes any of the "humanity" from it.
If I swipe a violin string on an iPad, it's going to sound the exact same no matter what. But if I play a real violin I have control over the vibrato (I guess, I'm not a violinist), I can start a note slowly and then quickly cut it off for effect, or slowly fade out a note by relieving pressure on the strings. The real thing allows for artists to put their heart and their soul into the music. An iPad can only immitate the note in it's most pristine, mathematic, sterile form.
I never wrote anything remotely similar to that in my comment. I'm talking about the convenience of carrying a single thing vs. many of them.
>removes any of the "humanity" from it
No, the iPad didn't remove the humanity from those activities, you did, right now. Let me tell you something, there's some really good pieces of art out there, music, short films, photography, etc... that were created using a modern digital device like the iPad. Does that make those less human? Less artistically valuable? Absolutely not!
On your other point: Correct, there is INCREDIBLE art out there that is only possible thanks to technology. EDM music, 3D animation, the hyperpop genre (RIP Sophie), etc. The insinuation of the ad, however, is that those "old" ways to create art are no longer needed, the iPad does it all!!
Give two jazz artists the same music sheet and an iPad and tell them to recreate it and they'll both make music that sounds the exact same, because the iPad doesn't allow them to insert those little things like I mentioned in my previous comment.
Give those same two jazz artists the same music sheet but give them a full orchestra and they'll both be unique.
This doesn't make digital art less artistically valuable. I'm saying that technologies such as the iPad, which inherently remove the ability for human uniqueness to be included, insinuating that physical methods of artistic expression are outdated is both demeaning to artists, and frankly a dangerous method of thinking when it comes to art.
The walled garden of Apple is famous.
Painters cannot paint a room with buckets of paint in an iPad.
Children cannot play with a squeeze ball on an iPad.
The ad failed, overstating the iPad functionality, while they destroyed precious tangible items.
That sounds like an extremely dubious claim.
By the same logic, two pro gamers playing the same video game should always achieve the exact same score, two authors typing a novel in the same computer should end up with the same story etc., yet that’s clearly not true.
Both of those comparisons you've made have the human element included in them. The gamers don't follow the exact same path in a speedrun. The authors don't have the exact same instructions on what book to write.
If a musician plucks the iPad violin strings to make an A note, it will sound the same across all iPads, across all artists, every time without fail. But if that same musician plucks an A note on a violin, it will sound different every time, across different musicians, different violins, different pressures, different techniques, etc.
Ask a music lover which they'd prefer. An orchestra consisting of pre-recorded music from 80 iPads played over loudspeakers or a live symphony orchestra?
Will it really, though? Touchscreens are pretty high resolution these days in both time and space.
I think this is ultimately a quantitative (and a huge one, at that, don't get me wrong) difference in the ergonomics of input methods, rather than a qualitative difference in "humanness".
Again, don't get me wrong, I am not arguing here that an iPad will produce "better" musical outcomes than an "analog violin", but I'd like to challenge the idea that the analog or digital (or maybe mass-produced vs. artisanally crafted) nature of an inanimate object is what makes or breaks the "human element" of a work of art.
Humans add the human element, by using their tools creatively.
From knowing and being close with a lot of artists, the main complaint I hear about this ad is that it comes across as a destruction of the analog form to "make way" for the digital. Both of them can exist as they cater to different forms of artistic expression. This doesn't inherently make one better than the other. It comes across as a very bad take to artists that digital art is better than analog art, and analog art is on it's way to being destroyed.
I get it that this may just all be artists and myself reading too much into this. But that's art! We read into things waaayyyy too much sometimes.
As I see it, all of these great analog (and digital, there's a Space Invaders arcade cabinet!) tools are getting physically squished into the iPad.
That's coincidentally how I think about my smartphone already: It's not necessarily better than most of my other devices (digital and analog) it's replaced, but it's all of them at once, and that is quite the achievement.
That doesn't mean that the squishing didn't cause an unfortunate loss in expressiveness or ergonomics in many cases, but at least in photography, there's the old saying that the best camera is the one you always have with you.
I am actually making an argument for that. Why did smartphones caught up? Because they're everything in a single thing. Apple wants the iPad to be the same in its respective market segment.*
The thing is, people are starting to do that more and more. Even John Gruber, iPhone enthusiast extraordinaire, has started carrying a real camera around again. Fujifilm hasn't been able to keep their smaller mirrorless cameras in stock for the last four years. Notebooks and pens are back for a lot of people. Even wristwatches are undergoing an enormous renaissance in popularity.
The cultural zeitgeist is shifting. Whether it's a reaction to a sense that software is eating the world, or a reaction to the ubiquitization of AI generica, or a quest for authenticity, I'm not sure. But this ad is badly out of step with that cultural trend, and the dystopian lighting, framing, and the popping eyes on the stress ball certainly don't help either.
I have the impression that the opposite is happening.
Also while not analog, iPods modded to be a bit more modern (replacing their mechanical HDs with higher capacity flash and adding haptics and Bluetooth among other things) have also been popular lately.
Offline music is definitely seeing a resurgence.
I carry those other things because I value photography and the phone can’t replace the tactile experience of writing on paper or turning the pages of a book.
I own an aging iPad and will probably buy this new one, but strongly disliked the ad because it seems to be signaling that those things I value are being replaced by the iPad. In a sense, they said the quiet part out loud.
I actually liked the ad, and I like the underlying message of the iPad being a simile for all those things. Consider a situation where you have a limited budget, let's say you're a teen and you only get one birthday present. Me personally, I'd get an iPad or a similar device, as that's the single thing that will maximize my fun, out of all other options.
(emphasis on thing, please don't come back at me with the "I'd rather have friends" strawman, you can have friends and an iPad)
I get that people want the powerful shiny thing. I do too, I work in tech. I think it's done something dangerous to my brain though...
As someone proficient with both guitar and digital music production, I find that I make better music with physical instruments. I spend most of my time making digital music watching YouTube videos about production tricks... I'm sure some people have more willpower than I who can focus their energy productively, but I don't think that's most people's natural state.
I guess what I'm saying is that in retrospect, if I could give a guitar or an iPad to my 12 year old self, I'd choose the guitar again, no contest.
I agree with everything you say except for this part: not having an emotional reaction to the destruction of objects doesn't imply you don't have a soul (whatever that means to you). Not everybody had the opportunity in life to learn to play an instrument or make art, and I can see how for people like this a music instrument is not more sentimental than, say, a hammer.
Maybe you should feel good about feeling bad after watching that ad: it means you had the chance to experience the beauty of creating art.
source: 2023 10k
But sure, I can see why people don't like it.
these hydraulic press videos are popular because they crush things. they don't create artful unions, they pulverize.
One aspect could bae related the affordability of things. Imagine that beautiful grand piano - how many would have dreamt of owning one in their homes but can’t. Because:
a) they are expensive
b) need a lot of space (so you need to have a big home to begin with)
Seeing a lot of new things being destroyed, along with the stress all emoji’s eyes popping out, was a bit much.
Hollywood does destroy all sorts of things but that's not their sales pitch to you. It happens in the background. Also it isn't replacing those soulful cars with a new car -- it's using them for a shot.
But when a company uses this in an ad, THEY are the ones that come off as nihilists, and not in a good way.
If they wanted to express that the ipad CONTAINED all of those older things within it, they could have created this as something like Dr Strange would have done. Like make those items fly into a portal shaped like a giant ipad, and then shrink the ipad with all those items still inside.
Or at the very least, they could have presented the items to be destroyed like they were worn out and broken (and no longer in use), and then presented their destruction as giving them new life through recycling as an Ipad.
This ad will definitely pop into my head the next time I consider buying an Apple device, and not in a good way.
If you can't see the difference here I think this says more about you being able to put together reasonable comparables for arguments then anything else.
For example using "Australian girl on Instagram that crushes things and dances to their shape" as a comparable is so completely different as to be irrelevant except that there is similarity in something being crushed. It's like comparing a military jet and a mosquito because they can both fly.
To your question - they literally used crush and destroy as their message.
Unforced error on Apples part plain and simple.
This ad destroys a lot of things people are really really fond about: musical instruments, painting supplies, photography equipment, and record player. And then says that all of those things will be replaced by this "gadget" that won't have the years of life of the piano, guitar, camera, record player, etc.
So it destroys things people care about AND tells you the things you care about don't matter anymore.
Is there also outcry when a Musician destroys a guitar on-stage?
My feeling at the ad wasn't particularly emotional, more curiosity at how much of it was real and how much wasnt. Speakers and art supplies aren't particularly expensive, and the Arcade machine wasn't recognizeably a machine worth keeping. There are plenty of used up pianos out there. The emoji was kinda funny...I don't know what that says about me.
I think the difference is that people are very removed from what waste actually is, and when they see what it actually happens all day every day to all those items, shock. We all generate this every day. In the big picture, someone’s old trumpet in an attic is going to end up in a landfill once they move/die/need space. Once it got produced, its final form is landfill.
Even if I don’t believe in the product, and I don’t think of the company very fondly, I lean towards considering the ad anti waste. “You no longer need to buy and store and move and hoard all these things, you only need an iPad”. It’s not saying “go crush all this items to buy an iPad”, it’s saying “don’t generate all this other waste, you can do it all here”
Volume wise at least, there is more waste in the “loved” items, and no one is recycling emoji squishy balls.
But stating that all those beautiful things "deserve" to be replaced by a thin silicon 3k USD machine by literally destroying them in an industrial crusher?
That's different.
The same Apple destroyed the Big Brother some decades ago in a commercial. The sense of irony!
(Also, a car is a car. The world doesn't share Americans' obsession and weird relationships with cars. A photographer's camera, a musician's guitar are more important.)
The world doesn’t share your own obsession and weird relationships with a camera and a guitar.
What do you create with a car? Amazing driving patterns?
I'm not at all surprised people don't feel emotions around it.
The moment a piano starts selling tablature in the TabStore™, I'm sure that people won't mind to see a piano being crushed in a hydraulic press.
I get through regular life okay, but this a $1T company with hundreds of billions in cash, profit driven, using child labor in China indirectly, and engaging in walled-garden policies makes it worse.
They make all these gadgets that replaces incomes from many manufactures and puts it on a single hand. That's bad enough.
Now, they destroy all these beautiful things- a piano, a guitar, a camera, and a lot of valuable things to make a point that this single silicon-made, soulless corporate company-produced, cheap exploited labor induced thing is going to replace them. Those things of aesthetics and soul are destroyed to give rise to this thing.
That hits hard for me. Seriously. I thought that I was being a real snowflake when this ad made me uncomfortable, but was glad to see this backlash in large numbers. Maybe people still have souls.
You can give a thousand lessons in "nature of real circumstances and geopolitics", and this ad with all its backstory will still be wrong to me.