‘A dystopian nightmare’: why do people hate Apple’s new iPad ad so much?

Unless you’re an overstimulated toddler or a grandma who wants nothing more from life than to ‘do her puzzles’ with a nice cup of tea, you might not have been keeping up with the latest developments in Apple’s line of iPad products. Understandable. Here’s a quick refresher: the latest range includes a new generation of the iPad Pro, the thinnest device the company has ever made, although it apparently packs in more power than previous generations due to its new “M4” chip and various other hardware components you probably don’t care about.

To illustrate the unprecedented narrowness of the device – which some have dubbed the “Ozempic iPad” – Apple shared a one-minute advert this week (May 7). In the video, a huge hydraulic press descends on a vast collection of creative equipment. First, a trumpet crumples under its mighty force, then paint cans are pressed under its weight, spurting their contents toward the camera, followed by a full piano, which breaks to reveal its complex inner workings before succumbing to its inevitable, flattened fate.

It’s nothing new for a billionaire tech corporation to get all excited over condensing the many-faceted wonders of human experience into a sleek slab of silicon, glass, and aluminium, of course. See: Mark Zuckerberg’s attempts to replace holidays with the aesthetic equivalent of a Wii loading screen, or the compression of IRL artworks into NFTs (remember those?), or the algorithms that aim to quantify human taste and only succeed in making everything mid. The Apple ad does feel like uniquely poor timing, however.

For the last year or so, talented people across every creative field – artists, musicians, photographers, writers, and more – have been locked in a mortal battle with big tech. There’s been lots of lawsuits, at least. Needless to say, sympathies between the two industries aren’t at an all-time high right now, and in this context the iPad Pro ad does feel a bit like an attack, making a mockery out of the losers in the culture war, whose works are being ripped-off by the millions with little consolation in sight. “You play the guitar? That’s cute. Our new tech crushes the guitar. And cameras. And books. And… emoji-shaped stress balls. All for $1,299.” 

Admittedly, Apple isn’t even a player in generative AI, the tech that everyone’s so angry about, but Cook says it’s going to be as early as this year, and its M4 chip is marketed as “outrageously powerful” for these kinds of tasks. So maybe we can see the iPad ad as a warning, an illustration of the futility of resisting the onslaught of Apple tech – that we may as well just resign ourselves to an artless existence, where music is pure MIDI and paintings are flat pixels on a webpage.

On the other hand, of course, there’s a counter-backlash. For all the comments condemning Apple’s vision of the artistic apocalypse, there are Apple fanboys telling critics to cool it. “It’s not that deep,” they say: Apple is just using a popular trend as a metaphor for all the stuff it can pack inside a 5.1-millimetre-thick tablet. And to be fair, this is quite impressive. Just remember: it’s all fun and games until grandma becomes a cutting-edge content creator, while you’re left behind practising scales on your stupid guitar.