Destruction may not be the best way to illustrate creativity. It's the hard lesson Apple learned after significant backlash over its new "Crushed" TV ad promoting the all-new iPad Pro and its revolutionary Tandem OLED screen technology. Now, the company has issued an apology and scrapped plans to run the ad on TV.
In the ad, a wide collection of creative tools, from guitars to cameras, paints, a metronome, sculptures, and even emojis, are violently crushed down in a giant press. When the creative violence is complete, the steel plates pull back to reveal a beautiful iPad Pro 13 in its place.
The idea is that all this creativity can be combined into this one M4-running iPad Pro. But that message is quickly lost as you bear witness to the destruction of precious objects.
Apple played the video for the first time at its "Let Loose" event on May 7. I recall sitting with about 40 people at one of Apple's New York offices and watching uncomfortably as the record player, guitar, TVs, and cameras all cracked, flattened, and sometimes exploded. My rational brain understood the point but my emotional one was disturbed and I barely noticed the iPad Pro at the end of it.
I was not the only one who felt this way and now Apple is responding.
On Thursday, Apple's VP of Marketing Communications Tor Myhren told Ad Age it would not air the ad on TV (it's still at this writing on YouTube), adding, “Creativity is in our DNA at Apple, and it’s incredibly important to us to design products that empower creatives all over the world. Our goal is to always celebrate the myriad of ways users express themselves and bring their ideas to life through iPad. We missed the mark with this video, and we’re sorry.”
The similarities between these two videos – 15 years apart – are stunning. Both of them evoke a similar discomfort. pic.twitter.com/59uGugPxoXMay 9, 2024
Apple doesn't offer a lot of apologies. Steve Jobs famously told iPhone 4 owners who were experiencing connectivity issues that they were "holding it wrong." This, though, is no longer Job's Apple. Apple CEO Tim Cook seems more open to regrets.
It's not the first time, by the way, we've seen this bad idea. As The Verge pointed out in its coverage, 15 years ago LG produced an ad almost identical to Apple's concept: An enclosure full of creative objects (paint and a violin, for instance), and all of it crushed down to one of LG's latest phones. The similarities are stunning.
We can mark this as a rare misstep for the protean tech giant, and it's unlikely to distract from the startling innovation we witnessed on May 7. As my iPad Pro 13-inch hands-on notes: "Apple's iPad Pro experience now feels more premium than ever, with the 2024 model boasting almost shocking thinness, intriguing new power thanks to a new M4 chip, and dual-OLED-panel screen technology that offers stunning image quality, with near plasma-screen-level blacks."
I'm sure that can be depicted in a new ad.
