Apple Apologizes for Anti-Art Ad

By: Nick Gambino

After major public backlash against their controversial ad for the new iPad Pro, Apple is now apologizing.

“Creativity is in our DNA at Apple, and it’s incredibly important to us to design products that empower creatives all over the world,” The VP of Marketing at Apple, Tor Myhren, told Ad Age. “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.”

Earlier this week, Apple released a video which shows a huge compactor crushing all manner of art, musical instruments and other works and tools born of human artisans. After it’s done obliterating centuries of human creativity, it releases its hydraulic pressure to reveal the new iPad Pro.

The fact that this commercial passed all manner of quality control checkpoints and made it to release is baffling. In a year riddled with skirmishes between human artists and the impending doom that is AI, it’s wild to think that nobody at Apple stopped to say, “This might not be a good time to show the destruction of art for the sake of technology.”

Now of course, this video was simply meant to illustrate that all of this art could be accessed and fit into the little tablet, but it was a bad choice to show everything being destroyed beyond recognition in the process. In other words, it’s an optics issue but is also indicative of Silicon Valley’s indifference toward human creation.

Surprisingly, very little needs to be done to fix this video. The solution is actually quite simple as an X user demonstrated. He simply took the Crush video and put the whole thing in reverse. All of a sudden, it looks like creation, not destruction.

The original video is still up on YouTube and Tim Cook’s X page. However, due to the intense backlash, Apple doesn’t plan on airing the commercial on TV.