That Much-Despised Apple Ad Could Be More Disturbing Than It Looks

Just as transfixing is the real-world back story it implies. Picture it: A team of experienced, well-paid professionals spent months refining a strategy. Ideas were pitched, culled, refined, mocked up. Eventually, after countless steps, a winner emerged, and somehow it was this. They could have depicted all that gear being cheerfully shrunken and squeezed into one iPad, awaiting creative fun. Instead, they went with just demolishing it all. Did no one point out that people are increasingly wary of tech companies’ impact on the creative professions? That people have soured on Silicon Valley’s apparent desire to monetize human creativity in as many ways as possible, from extractive streaming arrangements to harvesting human-made art as A.I.-training material? Did no one sense how bad this would look? It’s not just that the ad is a car crash — it’s that the people who poured so much work and money into something so off-putting appear to have thought they were orchestrating a parade.