Apple shouldn’t have apologized for its iPad Pro ‘Crush’ ad

Even the biggest companies have been caught up in social-media backlashes, from Adobe’s “tone-deaf” software smile correction to Google’s “embarrassing and wrong” AI tool. But I didn’t think much of a potential controversy when I watched Apple’s ad for the new iPad Pro at its Let Loose event this week. Boy, was I wrong about that.

The “Crush!” advert tries to get across the perennial Apple concept that the iPad Pro is such a capable and versatile creative tool that you can do almost anything with it. It does this in an amusingly literal way: By showing the physical embodiments of numerous creative activities–musical instruments, books, cameras, art supplies, sculptures, games machines, and characters–being physically crushed down by a hydraulic press until only the iPad is left. (This has the happy side-effect of also referencing the M4 Pro being preposterously flat.) It’s a cute bit of work:

Sadly a number of members of the creative community did not find “Crush!” cute, and are in fact up in arms about it, having as is traditional “taken to Twitter” to vent their feelings. AppleInsider reported on the first wave of complaints, which included claims it is “extremely distasteful” and “lacks any respect for creative equipment and mocks the creators.” One especially delicate viewer described the ad as “heartbreaking, uncomfortable, and egotistic.”

That’s just Twitter, you might protest. (To which I would of course reply, I think you mean X.) But serious people think this too. Mashable reckons the ad “essentially flips AI-weary creatives the bird”–goodness me, the word “essentially” is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that headline–and TechCrunch did an op-ed describing “Crush!” with an apparently straight face as “disgusting.”

“Does your child like music? They don’t need a harp; throw it in the dump. An iPad is good enough,” writes TC’s Devin Coldewey, tangibly growing angrier as he types. “Do they like to paint? Here, Apple Pencil, just as good as pens, watercolors, oils! Books? Don’t make us laugh! Destroy them. Paper is worthless. Use another screen.”

And if those aren’t big enough names, the bad guy from Paddington 2 is all in as well. Beloved actor Hugh Grant called the advert “The destruction of the human experience,” and I know actors are prone to extreme reactions but come on.

It was all enough for Apple to issue a rare apology, succinctly admitting that it had “missed the mark with this video, and we’re sorry.” And as a result, the ad won’t be shown on TV. I understand Apple’s response, but it shouldn’t have come to this.

Take a deep breath

First up, we can be pretty sure that Apple didn’t destroy any priceless Stradivarii for the advert: Apple hasn’t commented on how the ad was made, but it looks a lot like a lot of it was done with CGI, and any bits that aren’t CGI will be cheaply produced props. This isn’t like that time Kurt Russell smashed a 145-year-old acoustic guitar on the set of a movie.

Also, nobody is being mocked, except possibly people who look like that bulging-eye emoji. The ad is very obviously about claiming to empower creative people through technology. It would be insane to mock the product’s intended market. (If Apple did want to mock creatives it would have shown a bearded hipster being squashed in a machine while drinking an expensive coffee and claiming he liked hydraulic presses before they were cool.)

More importantly, the symbolism of the advert is absolutely not that physical objects and analog creative pursuits have no value and should be replaced by an iPad. Apple is telling us the iPad Pro is a versatile and capable digital device that can do lots of things, likely alongside analog creative tools, and also by the way it’s really thin. It isn’t that complicated.

Think about it. Does Apple feel like the sort of bleakly amoral disruptor startup that would happily throw the creative industries into an AI-powered shredder? Or does it feel like a nearly half-century-old corporation run by baby boomers with a thing for beautiful physical objects and an embarrassing obsession with pop groups? Musicians, filmmakers, photographers, designers… Apple loves to hold up the creative professions as its platonic customer and the template for a fulfilling career–and when it portrays those professions, it does so with Apple products integrated with exactly those physical objects that got chucked in the crushing machine.

Look, Apple has plenty of faults, but those faults do not include wanting to mock, destroy, or mechanize the creative professions. It doesn’t want you to throw your harp in the dump. It just wants to sell some iPads.