Apple did one of its big, fancy press events yesterday, showing off the upcoming iPad Pro, the biggest immediate selling point of which is that it’s very, very thin. In order to convey that thinness, Apple did what any giant tech firm that secretly hates the weak, fleshy meat of the human race might do: Filmed a commercial in which they stuck basically every implement of human creativity to date under a crusher, utterly demolished it, and then displayed the new iPad as a suitable replacement for… all of it.
And, look, the actual message of the ad isn’t all that hard to parse, something along the lines of “Look how we can fit all of human creativity into this tiny, very expensive package!,” etc. But the decision to convey that idea by showing the destruction of so many outlets of expression for the human spirit—presumably because, from a strictly aesthetic perspective, crushing shit in a giant crusher looks cool—is a level of tone-deafness the company hasn’t really exhibited in years. (Really, Apple? Nobody looked at the part where a human-shaped pose doll literally gets its back bent and broken by what you’re doing to it and thought, “Hmm, our message here might be getting a tad ‘This is the hell the robots will make for us in 40 years’?” No one voiced concerns with the close-up of an emoji representing the human face being demolished? You’re the people who made the 1984 ad!)
Anyway (per Deadline), a great many people, some of them famous, have already made fun of the “Crush” ad since it came out yesterday, including filmmaker Rezo Sixo Safai, who did a very clever job of reversing the ad to convey its actual message roughly a thousand times better than what was released. We’ll default to champion-level shit-talker Hugh Grant, though, who summed the whole situation up nicely: