Apple doesn’t understand why you use technology

I wonder if Apple CEO Tim Cook was surprised by the visceral revulsion many people felt after seeing Apple’s newest iPad commercial. In it, a multitude of creative tools are destroyed by an industrial press. Watching a piano, which if maintained could last around 50 years, be smashed to advertise a gadget, designed to be obsolete in less than 10 years, is infuriating. The reaction was immediate.

The message many of us received was this: Apple, a trillion-dollar behemoth, will destroy everything that is beautiful and human, everything that is a pleasure to look at and touch, and all that will be left will be a thin slab of glass and metal.

Surprisingly, this intends sell a product. “Buy the thing that is destroying everything you love,” says Apple. This is a big change from the famous “1984” ad where Apple called itself boring conformity. Of course, the new ad is tone-deaf – after all, Apple rose to prominence by aligning itself with creative types. But it also requires an embarrassingly narrow view of technology. Imagine being a hillbilly who believes that the only good technology is new technology.

This view of technology is fundamentally disrespectful. We are surrounded by things that are meant to last. Technology, in a very broader sense, it is innately hopeful. It is a shining golden thread between our past and our future.

Language is the most basic technology, the one that allows us to build everything else. Writing down our thoughts meant we could begin to access lives of experience. Pythagoras’ theorem was so significant when it was first discovered that a cult formed around him; I learned this in sixth grade, because it was fundamental to many things we created later. These foundations – language, mathematics – made possible a chain of events that allowed Apple to exist.

There’s still a place for the technology that Apple crushes in its announcement. The TV screen is larger and more pleasant to use than an iPad if you don’t need to be on the go; That’s why most people still own one. A record player allows for the secondary joy of bartering physical objects and record store get-togethers. Arcade video games exist in places where you gather with other people.

The iPad does not replace these experiences. At best, it complements them. I have never met a professional carpenter who only used a multitool to do his job. But if you’re trying to travel light, that Swiss Army knife is probably better than an entire tool kit.

This ad highlights a specific Silicon Valley attitude: It dismisses the past as out of date, instead of respecting him as intelligent. In a sense, these companies have to: they have products to sell. If Apple built something as durable as a piano, it would sell a lot fewer computers. In fact, the company has a history of undercutting its own products to sell more of them: it deliberately slowed down its older iPhones, for example. It also has a history of making its products difficult to repair and maintain.

In this ad, the technology is disposable. I cringed when that piano was crushed. But apparently no one within the company did so – and many people had to sign this announcement. The emotional valence of crushing is unmistakable; simply reversing the ad, like Reza Sixo Safai did, so all the creative tools coming from the iPad immediately improve it. After all, the iPad can also be a creative tool, and isn’t that what the commercial was trying to suggest?

Apple has a habit of suggesting that its older devices are obsolete, releasing new versions that change their structure and style without changing what they are about. to do in any meaningful way. The point of this ad isn’t about the creative uses of the iPad – it’s that it’s skinny. This is the big selling point: the thinnest ever. Apple was so focused on its new marketing feature that it lost sight of what’s really important: the tools that do the things we love.