Apple has declared war on our humanity

The advert for the new Apple iPad Pro features a hydraulic press crushing all the traditional tools, materials and artefacts of human creativity into a single reflective slither. Released earlier this week, it’s supposed to reflect how the the new model is Apple’s thinnest product ever, but the end result instead appears like a shard of infinitely dense compressed evil, like a fragment of the devil’s looking glass, as was shattered and scattered in Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen. How many of us had that on our iBingo* Card for 2024? (*£2.99 from the App Store, includes in-app purchases.)

The advert has certainly prompted ‘engagement’, if only in the form of the scathing contempt that greeted Apple director Tim Cook’s tweet of it on Tuesday. ‘Your predecessors showed us their dreams; you showed us our nightmares’, mourned one X user, in perhaps the most epigrammatic of hundreds of replies along the same lines. Arguably, the best online response came from a lowly, independent filmmaker who made the advert seem positive and inspiring by putting the crushing process into reverse. He even improved the choice of song to make the iPad Pro feel like a trusty companion and ally, rather than a digital stormtrooper. Apparently, he did it all on iMovie, too.

When I first stumbled on the original ad, I genuinely wondered if it might be satire. Perhaps a teaser of the next series of Black Mirror? It is simply too on the nose. The remorseless descent of a huge steel plate on the much-loved means and ephemera of artistic endeavour is quite literally O’Brien’s boot stamping on a human face in Nineteen Eighty-Four – only now scaled up to an industrial efficiency.

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