Apple’s new ad runs into arts storm
NewsThe video promoting the latest iPad shows a crushing machine domolishing a trumpet, a piano, a head of Beethoven, a metronome, among other building blocks of our culture.
Meet the new iPad Pro: the thinnest product we’ve ever created, the most advanced display we’ve ever produced, with the incredible power of the M4 chip. Just imagine all the things it’ll be used to create. pic.twitter.com/6PeGXNoKgG
— Tim Cook (@tim_cook) May 7, 2024
Hugh Grant called it ‘the destruction of the human experience.’
Author Austin Kleon wrote: ‘As a “fuck you” to @tim_cook and that atrocious iPad ad, here’s a picture of my son in front of the old used piano I bought before he was born, so he’d know the joy of growing up in a house with a piece of furniture you could play music on.’
FT columnist Robert Shrimsley added: The most telling things about this ad is that clearly everyone at Apple, including Tim Cook, who saw this. Went “YES, that’s who we are. We crush everything joyful”.
Conservatoire chief Stephen Maddock opined: Sorry @tim_cook but this is a HORRIBLE ad. Just think about all the ways in which your – brilliant – @Apple products have crushed & destroyed creative industries & people’s livelihoods. Is this really a healthy visual metaphor?
Filmmaker Justine Bateman said Apple was ‘crushing the arts’.
My own view? The ad defines the distance between California and the rest of us. California is counter-cultural, eager to recreate the universe, only better. Think John Cage, Francis Ford Coppola, Sergey Brin, Steve Jobs.
The iPad is California writ small. Erasing history comes with the territory.
NL
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Tim Cook just strutted onto the #AppleEvent stage like he’s about to drop the hottest tech album of 2024. pic.twitter.com/6NneG38q53
— Satan (@Scentofawoman10) May 7, 2024
Or maybe Apple is saying that all of these are not destroyed but are compressed into this new device.
You cannot compress any proper acoustic instrument into an electronic device.
I tried that with my mother’s trombone which drove me nuts when visiting her in the institution, but it was the device that crashed, and my mother laughing. For my part, if everything can be put in my cell phone, that would be great, no need to go to concerts, museums, tiring festivals, etc. etc. I have already so much joy by my extensive holiday visits through watching videos, why go through all the hussle?! What people don’t understand is that life is awful and screen life can be controlled.
Sally
Can’t wait for a certain American “composer” to comment about the trombone.
I assume Sally you are being ironic?
She does not know what irony is….. as there are also other things she clearly does not know. But well, you don’t want to fire someone for ignorance if it’s their only job.
If that’s what they are trying to say, they had better go back to school. It communicates something altogether other — hardly surprising from a nerdy “I’m like a rock star” second video.
Don’t worry, iPads are not great at being any of those things.
Apple as a metaphor for the soul-crushing dominance of the algorithms driving our lives is the most honest statement of the year. We are all complicit, at least for the moment.
It makes the company’s “1984” ad that much more ironic, doesn’t it?
Algorithms aren’t crushing our souls, the people who create algorithms, enjoying playing God, are…and you may be complicit, but I’m not!
Just saw a version of this on twitter, with the video is reversed and set to the finale from Britten’s Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra.
It was the most joyous thing to behold. As if art, culture and a ton of instruments were pushing a ceiling higher, rising from the ashes to stand on its on feet as something profoundly proud, determined and optimistic.
For me, this will be the original version.
Please post the link so those of us not on twitter see it, thank you.
Here it is:
https://x.com/jccomposer/status/1788193089376432355?s=46&t=cmeJ04ltFifI0rs_t-fg3A
As bizarre as the ad is, are you seriously using it as an opportunity to take a low swipe at people like John Cage, or Francis Ford Coppola, the man who directed the Godfather Trilogy, Apocalypse Now, Rumble Fish, or The Outsiders? Plus, I doubt Steve Jobs would have sanctioned this ad if he were still alive. Might as well include Arnold Schoenberg in your list as well because he also lived in California and taught John Cage.
One might interpret comments like these as demonstrating the distance between Norman Lebrecht and the rest of us.
But Cage was NOT taught by Schoenberg, who told Cage after a first informative meeting that he better do something else because he did not have any talent for composition.
Francis Ford Coppola has been one of the finest filmmakers of the second half of the 20th century. I don’t see his making truly great films an attempt to change the universe, rather an attempt — successful in my view — to produce first-rate cinematic art.
Classical music is an art form much better at exhaling than inhaling. That’s why it’s shriveling up.
Mr Osborn, can one inhale through a trombone?
Yes, though it can be unpleasant, but not nearly as bad as trying to inhale when La Plus Belle voix is around.
Apple Music Classical is a fantastic product. Currently in hospital, it has been a tremendous benefit.
It truly is. Wish you better.
Thanks for this, Norman, but you swung your tar brush too wide in condemning California in general. The LA Phil alone is the finest symphony orchestra in the entire galaxy and performs in the perfect concert hall. Come out and see for yourself.
Truly vile…
Please have the decency to note that California is an enormous state larger than Germany. The Silicon Valley tech bubble is just a tiny part of that – and quite antithetical to much of the rest of the state, be it the agrarian central valley, the Latino culture of the LA basin, the retirees in Palm Springs, the navy types in San Diego or the Trumpy rednecks in the backwoods of Northern California. Did you know there are more Trump voters in California than in Montana, Idaho, Nevada, Wyoming, Utah combined? Bet you didn’t. And even those are small minority of the tapestry of cultures and experiences that make up California. So please don’t speak of “California” and how and whether or not it is connected to “the rest of us”. You evidently haven’t the faintest idea what that even is.
The problem with things digital is that the spiritual component of making any kind of art is the central fact: human beings have spirit, and machines don’t. And, Steve Jobs would not like anything Tim Cook has done to his creation, because Cook took a great idea and a useful one and turned it into a planned obsolescent-object, requiring users to replace every 2-3 years for over a $1000 dollars; each transformation becoming less like the creative tool it was in Job’s vision and more a tool for making corporate wealth and Tim Cook, in particular one of the richest men in the world.
(I have, in the past, owned 5 Apple computers. But, no longer. The pen and the ink and the paint and the canvas are the best tools for my art.)
Just one more reason, as if anybody on the planet needed one, to stay the hell away from Apple…the biggest cult known to mankind, and one of those least respectful of privacy and the freedom to use a product as one deems most useful to their own situation.
Couldn’t Apple have just crushed Sonny Bono’s voice and let it go at that? It would have immeasurably improved the human experience.
Disclaimer: No musical instruments were harmed in the making of this AI-generated metaphor ad.
No need to drop gratuitously oversimplified stereotypes on California. And what is F.F. Coppola doing among cultural iconoclasts? He embodies the great cinematic tradition rather than dismantling it.