By Elizabeth Lopatto , a reporter who writes about tech, money, and human behavior. She joined The Verge in 2014 as science editor. Previously, she

Apple doesn’t understand why you use technology

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2024-05-09 20:30:05

By Elizabeth Lopatto , a reporter who writes about tech, money, and human behavior. She joined The Verge in 2014 as science editor. Previously, she was a reporter at Bloomberg.

I wonder if Apple CEO Tim Cook was surprised by the visceral revulsion many people felt after viewing the newest commercial for Apple’s iPad. In it, a plethora of creative tools are flattened by an industrial press. Watching a piano, which if maintained can last for something like 50 years, squished to advertise a gadget, designed to be obsolete in less than 10, is infuriating. The backlash was immediate.

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

Astoundingly, this is meant to sell a product. “Buy the thing that’s destroying everything you love,” says Apple. This is quite a change from the famous “1984” ad, where Apple styled itself as smashing boring conformity. Sure, the new ad is tone-deaf — after all, Apple rose to prominence by aligning itself with creative types. But it also takes an embarrassingly narrow view of technology. Imagine being such a rube that you believe that the only good technology is new technology.