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Except what are pianos, guitars, cameras etc.? Also products made by companies that are equally "soulless" (they make these things to make money just like Apple

Except what are pianos, guitars, cameras etc.? Also products made by companies that are equally "soulless" (they make these things to make money just like Apple). And in terms of aesthetics you can think technological products are just as beautiful as those other products. I personally get angry when I see things like classic Macintoshes turned into fish aquariums and the like, as I see it as beautiful technology destroyed, but even so not that angry.

yterdy 2y ago
It's a bit of a stretch to call musical instruments - which are often handcrafted and not manufactured because an object that produces a particular sound requires tolerance that shift with the source material and that are difficult to generalize to a machine process - "soulless". On top of that handcrafting, they're objects made specifically to tap into one of the deepest parts of the human psyche (again, by hand, ephemerally). It's hard to think of something less soulless.
- ThrowawayTestr 2y ago
  Do you think hand crafted instruments were used for the ad or cheap Chinese shit?
  - yterdy 2y ago
    https://youtu.be/XL7Wxqr2ZRk https://youtu.be/XL7Wxqr2ZRk https://youtu.be/0SvfNhMlnBE https://youtu.be/0SvfNhMlnBE Even "cheap Chinese shit" is made by hand.
    - filleduchaos 2y ago
      I'm not sure how to articulate it but there's a deep irony in how people are scoffing at the emotional reaction to this ad, when the sentiment in it - that all things can be done/subsumed by Computers™ - has infiltrated the public consciousness as deeply as it has. There is so much that is still only doable at least in part by hand, from making certain musical instruments to things like crochet. There are even more that use machines but are nowhere near as automated as people believe they are (see e.g. practically all tailoring, where even mass produced articles still need a skilled hand to guide the cutting and sewing machines). But people love the fiction of some sterile production line that spits out all the cheap things they buy, in no small part because acknowledging that even "cheap Chinese shit" is made by the skilled hands of actual human beings would require acknowledging the gross exploitation that enables you to buy their work for absurdly low prices.
- ncr100 2y ago
  Seriously, true. Mother's heartbeat. The woosh of her blood stream. We get months of this auditory performance.
digitalsushi 2y ago
The pianos, guitars, cameras were at one point the labors of love from fellow engineers, and then adopted as the extended arms, fingers, eyes of the the artists those engineers trusted their labors with. And yeah I'm not oblivious. We can replace all the engineers and artists with generated output that satisfies 97% of everyone. It was great while it lasted but like the apple commercial hints at, out with the old ...
haswell 2y ago
> …Also products made by companies that are equally "soulless" (they make these things to make money just like Apple) I have to strongly disagree. Pianos, guitars and other instruments have a long and rich history that connects the past to the present. A long arc of human progress and creativity, with some of the most sought after instruments today being rooted in a deep history of human craftsmanship. Cameras also have a rich history, but don’t belong in the same sentence IMO. While you can find soulless products to buy, those are only a subset of what’s on offer. I enjoy using Apple products, and will probably even buy this iPad because I need to upgrade. But it sits in an entirely different category than my cameras and musical instruments.
- nojvek 2y ago
  The stress ball emoji getting destroyed with its eyes popping up. That was real depressing. That’s how it feels when inflation made basics jump up 50% and it feels you’re being slowly crushed. Seeing this is an Ad for one of the world’s richest Companies, the lesson I got is the rich are slowly crushing the median. Don’t buy their crap.
  - nojvek 2y ago
    He! Thanks for downvote. Someone really loves Apple.
    - mc32 2y ago
      Nah, they're probably mad at the economic, interpreted as political, message more than anything. If they're mad at that, then they'd be mad at themselves for having a zoomorphic stressball and squeezing it themselves --which, who knows, is possible, but unlikely to be the case.
- newswasboring 2y ago
  Bit of a side note, I was trying to understand why the history of craftsmanship feels different for cameras compared to say pianos. One variable here is definitely the fact that I work in lithography and cameras are a sister industry. Familiarity diminishes the mystique of something. But I think it's a bit more about time. Each advance in piano technology had it's "moment" so to speak. New refinement in pianos were slower to develop due to many reasons, but the prestige of pianos remains the same. But unlike cameras each generation of pianos got an entire human lifetime to be explored, sometimes even multiple lifetimes. It's cultural impact got time to be normalized and then commented upon. None of that has happened for cameras. Things changed so fast we didn't even get a chance to explore all of the options. An argument against my amateur analysis is of course scale. Pianos were being explored by maybe a million people and only a fraction of that fulltime. Cameras are basically a part of life for a large portion of humanity.
jrwoodruff 2y ago
For me, it was more about the humanity represented by the objects than what company they came from. All of those objects are far more human-centered than the iPad. All of those objects were crafted and perfected over centuries - guitar forms, paint formulas, camera technology, etc. In a way it's representative of the much of human culture, and this add kinda says, yea, screw all that old crappy stuff. Look at our neat piece of glass that replaces all that humanity. I get it, that's exactly their point. The iPad can do all of those things. But at a time when many creatives feel like AI is going to replace them or make their skills irrelevant, it's pretty tone deaf. And also, it's far more likely that most of those objects were made by skilled craftsmen, even if they did work at a bigger company.
- veidr 2y ago
  > But at a time when many creatives feel like AI is going to replace them or make their skills irrelevant, it's pretty tone deaf. This is what I realized, too. At first, I thought the outrage was dumb, but I think this is the context I was missing.
silver_silver 2y ago
It's the product which they're describing as soulless. Apple likes to sell the idea of creativity but the device's purpose is ultimately consumption.
- vundercind 2y ago
  This remains one of the most alien takes around, to me. I-devices are the most useful computers I have, by a county mile, when I want to do something creative or constructive in the real world (not write software, say). Their greatest strength is that they’re computers that bridge real-life and computing like a “real” computer does not. Separately, the ad is weird. They’re the first thing I reach for if I want to e.g. play our actual piano. I tune instruments with them, display music with them, record myself, play an accompanying track on them—I compliment instruments with them, I don’t replace them with an iPad or iPhone.
- veidr 2y ago
  I get why this take is so common, but it's just wrong. Not that most use of iPad isn't consumption, but that this is different. PCs, too. MacBook Whatevers, too. TVs, too (obviously). The iPads have had a hard time because, yeah, the OS was/is in its infancy but nobody (except the dgaf-wealthy) buys the $2000+ iPad Pro for "consumption" because they sell a $400 and $700 iPad for that. The things iPad (Pro) can do are indeed far fewer than an unencumbered (by draconian lockdown, or simple lack of development resources) PC or even Mac laptop. But that's different than "none". The more hardware equipment in my studio I can shovel onto Apple's magic hydraulic obliterator, the better. (Although it's a lot less than shown in that ad, haha. But I liked the ad, as far as ads go.)
__MatrixMan__ 2y ago
Ok, but nobody thinks that fish aquariums are a threat to computing. I don't personally think that computing is a threat to art, but many people do.

yterdy 2y ago

It's a bit of a stretch to call musical instruments - which are often handcrafted and not manufactured because an object that produces a particular sound requires tolerance that shift with the source material and that are difficult to generalize to a machine process - "soulless". On top of that handcrafting, they're objects made specifically to tap into one of the deepest parts of the human psyche (again, by hand, ephemerally). It's hard to think of something less soulless.

ThrowawayTestr 2y ago
Do you think hand crafted instruments were used for the ad or cheap Chinese shit?
- yterdy 2y ago
  https://youtu.be/XL7Wxqr2ZRk https://youtu.be/XL7Wxqr2ZRk https://youtu.be/0SvfNhMlnBE https://youtu.be/0SvfNhMlnBE Even "cheap Chinese shit" is made by hand.
  - filleduchaos 2y ago
    I'm not sure how to articulate it but there's a deep irony in how people are scoffing at the emotional reaction to this ad, when the sentiment in it - that all things can be done/subsumed by Computers™ - has infiltrated the public consciousness as deeply as it has. There is so much that is still only doable at least in part by hand, from making certain musical instruments to things like crochet. There are even more that use machines but are nowhere near as automated as people believe they are (see e.g. practically all tailoring, where even mass produced articles still need a skilled hand to guide the cutting and sewing machines). But people love the fiction of some sterile production line that spits out all the cheap things they buy, in no small part because acknowledging that even "cheap Chinese shit" is made by the skilled hands of actual human beings would require acknowledging the gross exploitation that enables you to buy their work for absurdly low prices.
ncr100 2y ago
Seriously, true. Mother's heartbeat. The woosh of her blood stream. We get months of this auditory performance.

digitalsushi 2y ago

The pianos, guitars, cameras were at one point the labors of love from fellow engineers, and then adopted as the extended arms, fingers, eyes of the the artists those engineers trusted their labors with. And yeah I'm not oblivious. We can replace all the engineers and artists with generated output that satisfies 97% of everyone. It was great while it lasted but like the apple commercial hints at, out with the old ...

haswell 2y ago

> …Also products made by companies that are equally "soulless" (they make these things to make money just like Apple) I have to strongly disagree. Pianos, guitars and other instruments have a long and rich history that connects the past to the present. A long arc of human progress and creativity, with some of the most sought after instruments today being rooted in a deep history of human craftsmanship. Cameras also have a rich history, but don’t belong in the same sentence IMO. While you can find soulless products to buy, those are only a subset of what’s on offer. I enjoy using Apple products, and will probably even buy this iPad because I need to upgrade. But it sits in an entirely different category than my cameras and musical instruments.

nojvek 2y ago
The stress ball emoji getting destroyed with its eyes popping up. That was real depressing. That’s how it feels when inflation made basics jump up 50% and it feels you’re being slowly crushed. Seeing this is an Ad for one of the world’s richest Companies, the lesson I got is the rich are slowly crushing the median. Don’t buy their crap.
- nojvek 2y ago
  He! Thanks for downvote. Someone really loves Apple.
  - mc32 2y ago
    Nah, they're probably mad at the economic, interpreted as political, message more than anything. If they're mad at that, then they'd be mad at themselves for having a zoomorphic stressball and squeezing it themselves --which, who knows, is possible, but unlikely to be the case.
newswasboring 2y ago
Bit of a side note, I was trying to understand why the history of craftsmanship feels different for cameras compared to say pianos. One variable here is definitely the fact that I work in lithography and cameras are a sister industry. Familiarity diminishes the mystique of something. But I think it's a bit more about time. Each advance in piano technology had it's "moment" so to speak. New refinement in pianos were slower to develop due to many reasons, but the prestige of pianos remains the same. But unlike cameras each generation of pianos got an entire human lifetime to be explored, sometimes even multiple lifetimes. It's cultural impact got time to be normalized and then commented upon. None of that has happened for cameras. Things changed so fast we didn't even get a chance to explore all of the options. An argument against my amateur analysis is of course scale. Pianos were being explored by maybe a million people and only a fraction of that fulltime. Cameras are basically a part of life for a large portion of humanity.

jrwoodruff 2y ago

For me, it was more about the humanity represented by the objects than what company they came from. All of those objects are far more human-centered than the iPad. All of those objects were crafted and perfected over centuries - guitar forms, paint formulas, camera technology, etc. In a way it's representative of the much of human culture, and this add kinda says, yea, screw all that old crappy stuff. Look at our neat piece of glass that replaces all that humanity. I get it, that's exactly their point. The iPad can do all of those things. But at a time when many creatives feel like AI is going to replace them or make their skills irrelevant, it's pretty tone deaf. And also, it's far more likely that most of those objects were made by skilled craftsmen, even if they did work at a bigger company.

veidr 2y ago
> But at a time when many creatives feel like AI is going to replace them or make their skills irrelevant, it's pretty tone deaf. This is what I realized, too. At first, I thought the outrage was dumb, but I think this is the context I was missing.

silver_silver 2y ago

It's the product which they're describing as soulless. Apple likes to sell the idea of creativity but the device's purpose is ultimately consumption.

vundercind 2y ago
This remains one of the most alien takes around, to me. I-devices are the most useful computers I have, by a county mile, when I want to do something creative or constructive in the real world (not write software, say). Their greatest strength is that they’re computers that bridge real-life and computing like a “real” computer does not. Separately, the ad is weird. They’re the first thing I reach for if I want to e.g. play our actual piano. I tune instruments with them, display music with them, record myself, play an accompanying track on them—I compliment instruments with them, I don’t replace them with an iPad or iPhone.
veidr 2y ago
I get why this take is so common, but it's just wrong. Not that most use of iPad isn't consumption, but that this is different. PCs, too. MacBook Whatevers, too. TVs, too (obviously). The iPads have had a hard time because, yeah, the OS was/is in its infancy but nobody (except the dgaf-wealthy) buys the $2000+ iPad Pro for "consumption" because they sell a $400 and $700 iPad for that. The things iPad (Pro) can do are indeed far fewer than an unencumbered (by draconian lockdown, or simple lack of development resources) PC or even Mac laptop. But that's different than "none". The more hardware equipment in my studio I can shovel onto Apple's magic hydraulic obliterator, the better. (Although it's a lot less than shown in that ad, haha. But I liked the ad, as far as ads go.)

__MatrixMan__ 2y ago

Ok, but nobody thinks that fish aquariums are a threat to computing. I don't personally think that computing is a threat to art, but many people do.