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Apple angers with iPad advertising
May 10, 2024, 8:26 a.m
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An advertising clip for the new iPad is intended to demonstrate the strength of the Pro model. Instead of enthusiasm, however, Apple is triggering outrage. Because in the video tools of creativity are crushed. The company appears to be guilty.
Apple has hit a nerve with an advertising clip for its new iPad model – just not in the way the company might have hoped. The video was intended to spectacularly emphasize the diverse capabilities of the more powerful Pro model of the tablet series: musical instruments such as a trumpet and a piano as well as paint pots, cameras, a sculpture and a video game machine are crushed in a gigantic press. Then the press opens again – and there is an iPad inside.
However, many viewers were outraged by the destruction, even if it appeared to be computer-generated. Criticism spread in online networks that the video crushed tools of creativity. Actor Hugh Grant complained on the online platform X about Silicon Valley’s “destruction of the human experience”.
Apple apologized and said it would refrain from broadcasting the commercial on television. It is important for the company to design products for creative people, Apple manager Tor Myhren told the advertising magazine “Ad Age”. “We missed the mark with this video and we are sorry.” CEO Tim Cook published the video on Tuesday to present the new iPad models on X and wrote, among other things: “Imagine all the things it will be used to create.”
The next iPad Pro is the first Apple device with the M4 chip, which is, among other things, more focused on applications with artificial intelligence. The model series also has an OLED screen, and the version with a 13-inch display is the thinnest Apple device to date with a thickness of 5.1 millimeters, as the company emphasized at the presentation on Tuesday. Apple wants to boost its iPad business with new models – and is making the tablet more of a competitor to its own Mac computers.