How Apple's latest ad tapped into our collective anxieties around art — for the worse

The tech giant Apple is no stranger to starting a conversation with their advertisements. But with their latest spot, an iPad commercial titled "Crush!," some are saying they've pushed things too far.

For this week's wrap panel, host Elamin Abdelmahmoud talks to pop culture experts Leila Latif, Vikram Murthi, and Paul Myers about why some viewers are so angry over Apple's latest iPad ad.

We've included some highlights below, edited for length and clarity. For the full discussion, listen and follow the Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud podcast, on your favourite podcast player.

Elamin: A new Apple ad that just came out shows the range of human creativity — it shows toys, instruments, books, sculptures and just beautiful things all kind of being crushed by a hydraulic press. And then when the press lifts up, all that stuff has been replaced by this new iPad Pro. The internet is not into this.

A lot of people think that the ad is celebrating technology taking over all of these traditional, hands-on, tactile ways of creating art. We saw celebrities like Hugh Grant have piled on. Apple has apologized for this ad, which is not a thing that I personally saw coming. Vikram, what do you make of the ad or all the backlash that is created?

Vikram: I don't like the ad especially, but I don't think it's any worse than a lot of the other kinds of tech ads that I've seen. There's a Google Pixel ad where a guy is jumping and he edits reality to make it seem like he's jumping higher. I found that kind of depiction of photo manipulation as a way of editing reality for your own benefit to be as gross as what this Apple ad sort of implies.

I do think the generous read of it is very much that they're taking all of human creativity and putting it in this one thing for everyone to access. I can see that perspective of it, but I think it's as gross and as hacky and weird as any tech ad — especially the invocation of Sonny and Cher, which sort of gives it a happy-go-lucky feeling. But I think people claiming that this is some sort of new level of egregiousness, I don't know if I necessarily agree with that. I think it's about the same level of egregiousness as all of these kinds of ads.

Elamin: Paul, I think Vikram just called me dramatic. I had a strong reaction to this ad, which is that I had a sort of immediate, "God, I think I hate this," but I'm not really sure if I've explored it further than that. Where do you land on this ad?

Paul: There's two things that came to mind immediately: that Tim Cook is not Steve Jobs — for whatever that means — and that the famous 1984 ad threw a hammer at a screen to vanquish Big Brother. There's an entirely different energy at work there.

I think the big deal here is they could have depicted squeezing those things into their little thin iPad in a way that didn't destroy those things. They could have made some other science fiction-looking thing that made all the great art in the world at your fingertips, which is what they're trying to say. The joke-y music gave it a sense that this was a fun thing to do, which given the delicate nature of art versus AI and all those things … my first feeling was you could have not smashed them; you could have merged them. The smashing and the light music about it triggers an alarmist feeling in me.

Vikram: I agree with that.

Elamin: I should note that the hydraulic press thing is also a TikTok trend, where people watch a hydraulic press just crush various objects down. They are actually very satisfying videos, and I think Apple might be trying to be in conversation with that trend. Leila, is this a case of the internet looking for something to get angry about? Or is there, as Paul just said, an alarm bell going off?

Leila: No, I think there's a legitimate alarm bell going off. I think the people on the internet who are reacting strongly towards this are those — and I count myself amongst this number — the terminally online, who have a sneaking suspicion that we might be creating the apocalypse somehow. And this is sort of fortifying the thing that will come to eventually destroy all culture and human life.

This just felt like Skynet was sending us a message of like, "We are coming for you." In advertising, you think of the number of people that had to approve this before it went out, it's truly astonishing. Maybe that's a good argument for the machine to take over, because clearly people aren't doing it well.

You can listen to the full discussion from today's show on CBC Listen or on our podcast, Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud, available wherever you get your podcasts.

Panel produced by Stuart Berman.