You don't think creatives aren't going to get upset watching all the tools they've been using for all their lives and have a love and appreciation for, tools humanity has been using for quite some time to produce beautiful works of art and have a beautiful aesthetic of their own, being destroyed by an industrial press to only be replaced by a mass-produced iPad isn't a form of higher meaning? If so, then don't go into advertising! They're literally depicted the crushing of the human spirit, to be replaced by a machine. That's the higher meaning here.
Yeah, I "get it" - when the mess was over, I understood the message they intended to convey, but boy did Apple screw the pooch on this one!
Like I said, don't go into advertising. The most problematic aspect of this for Apple is it shows they don't understand those who heretofore were considered a core part of their user base. This is a blunder of epic proportions.
Fair enough, marketing is not my strong suit, especially to creatives. Perhaps I'm biased because I go out of my way to spend as little energy as I can on an ad when one comes up.
Really? Would you put this blunder on par with Meta’s quixotic quest into the Metaverse? Or Boeing’s ditching of its engineering culture? Or “New Coke”?
Or would you say it was an ad that a very small subset of the population was able to take out some of its woke-rage at for a news cycle and then move on?
Literally trashing the things loved by your core market that was key to getting you where you are today isn't a smart move. No matter how you try to spin it otherwise.
Is it at stupid as Elon Musk mocking those comprising Tesla's core market? Probably not. Elon Musk continues on acting like a jerk to the people comprising Tesla's core market whereas Tim Cook issued an apology for Apple's blunder.
My interpretation of the ad is limited to "this tablet does a lot in a small form factor". I really don't see a higher meaning here.