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I think the big thing here is that if you don't have an attachment to any of the items being crushed you probably don't feel as strongly. If you're a trumpet pl

I think the big thing here is that if you don't have an attachment to any of the items being crushed you probably don't feel as strongly. If you're a trumpet player, seeing a trumpet being crushed is going to be a bit distressing. If you're a photographer, you're putting a monetary value on those lenses being destroyed. If you're into old arcade machines, you're thinking about how many of those cabinets are left in that good of a condition.

verdverm 2y ago
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- deleted 2y ago
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Alupis 2y ago
> If you're a trumpet player, seeing a trumpet being crushed is going to be a bit distressing Really? I play the trumpet and felt nothing watching this ad. My trumpet wasn't being crushed, so who cares? It wasn't a rare Stradivarius, nor even a high-end Schilke or anything... Even if it was - why care? They can make more trumpets after all...
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
Tiktaalik 2y ago
The arcade one particularly distressing given that arcades and their unique arcade hardware are rapidly vanishing across the world without replacement.
- mulmen 2y ago
  Contemporary arcade cabinets featured similar hardware to the original Macs.
  - jowsie 2y ago
    Nearly all modern arcade cabinets just have regular PCs in them.
    - mulmen 2y ago
      Right. That has essentially always been the case.
- Sohcahtoa82 2y ago
  And the arcades that DO exist are often 90% shitty ticket games that cost $1, have about 15 seconds of gameplay, and then maybe after blowing through $50 you'll have enough tickets to buy $2 worth of Tootsie Rolls and maybe a balsa wood glider. If you got really lucky, maybe a plushie. Though there are some "barcades" popping up these days that focus on classic arcade games to appeal to older the older crowd.
  - redwall_hp 2y ago
    I happened across a nice one when I was in Denver, recently. It's called Akihabara. Tons of imported Japanese cabinets (including Taiko no Tatsujin and Typing of the Dead), and a bar with imported beers, sake and house cocktails. I wish I'd had a smartcard for saving progress, but it was only something I found out about during the trip. I'm definitely more into the 90s and early 2000s era of arcade games than 80s stuff (and the seat-friendly JP cabinets are nice) so I enjoyed the opportunity to play games that are hard to find here, and bring back memories of wandering (relatively lackluster) bowling alley arcades with a pocket of quarters.
    - touisteur 2y ago
      Typing of the dead! Ask me how I learned touch typing in anger. Such a beautiful piece of hijacked game. Much, much love to anyone who worked on this gem, or work to preserve it.
    - asix66 2y ago
      If ever out in the Denver area again, check out The 1UP Arcade[0]. They have all manner of games, including '80s cabs. Very fun. [0] https://the1uparcadebar.com/ https://the1uparcadebar.com/
    - Sohcahtoa82 2y ago
      There's a chain of arcades called Round1 that also specializes in Japanese games, mostly music games. They're all over the USA, including Denver.
- rchaud 2y ago
  Why would you need that when for the low price of 25 quarters a month, you could have Apple Arcade(TM)? /s
- bnralt 2y ago
  The console says “Space Imploder,” which isn’t a real arcade console, from what I can tell. There’s more discussion here[1], but it seems likely that a lot of the things weren’t real (or if they were real, they weren’t were junk that was broken beyond repair). This seems to be a major point that’s missing from the discussion. If a lot of this is stuff that was fake or already headed for the dump, it completely undermines the argument that perfectly good equipment was destroyed. [1] https://vi-control.net/community/threads/apple-destroys-vintage-instruments-in-tone-deaf-new-commercial-for-ipad-pro.151774/ https://vi-control.net/community/threads/apple-destroys-vint...
  - groby_b 2y ago
    The point isn't how it was produced, but what the message is. And the message is destruction of creative instruments is good, akshually, because shiny & thin. No amount of "but we only rendered it" is going to fix it. It speaks about values the company holds.
    - codelobe 2y ago
      [x] Strongly Agree. Also, the focus on how these devices are increasingly consumer only instead of me being able to use my device to create Disclaimer: one of my goals is to build apps for my machine on the machine itself. I had this working on the now defunct Firefox phone OS (Its apps were deployed as Zipped HTML/JS and related resources -- I cobbled together a dev environ out of a few browser based tools). TL;DR: I'm a tool-using creator-type species, The modern "CONSUME ONLY" device craze makes my eye twitch; Ads that reinforce destruction of tools make me want to join fight club.
      - smallmancontrov 2y ago
        Art creation is creation. Muic, images, video -- they all benefit from good screens, fast processors, quality stylus integration, first party apps, and full-stack attention to latency. The iPad is about creation, just not your type of creation.
      - doctorwho42 2y ago
- Brian_K_White 2y ago
  Not to mention a bit rich considering their stance on emulators and game stores.
  - immibis 2y ago
    If tech companies didn't have double standards, they'd have none.
  - uwagar 2y ago
    and 32-bit apps that stopped running since catalina.
- firebat45 2y ago
  I understand that there is an entire culture surrounding these machines and that people enjoy collecting and restoring them. Hell, I would even like to build a cabinet myself one day. But there's a reason they are disappearing. They're old and obsolete. While they may have value to a niche group, they are overall viewed as mostly worthless. Secondly, there's a very simple solution to disliking what someone else does with their own property. Purchase it before they do whatever you dislike. Either from them or by beating them to the punch and buying it from the previous owner before they do.
  - bogantech 2y ago
    > They're old and obsolete. While they may have value to a niche group, they are overall viewed as mostly worthless. Old and obsolete doesn't mean worthless, if people are collecting them and spending a lot of money on them then they're not worthless.
    - derefr 2y ago
      Most of the reason that collectors have to spend a lot of money on arcade cabinets, though, is not that they have high market resale value; but rather that the machines they can manage to acquire are usually in terrible condition, requiring large amounts of conservation work to get working and presentable again. And they’re so broken down, because everyone but these few collectors have valued — and continue to value — these machines so little that they’ve allowed them to rot in warehouses for decades. Many arcade cabinets are recovered from e-waste recycling centers, or even landfill. If they truly had market value, then people other than the collectors themselves would be making a business out of finding and restoring these cabinets, in order to sell them to the collectors. But no such business exists — because there just isn’t the demand to sustain it. I’m reminded of a recent YouTube video about MadCatz gaming peripherals. The video’s author had to spend thousands of dollars buying the few remaining controllers on the used market to use as examples. Why so much? Not because of high demand. Because of limited supply — they were so valueless (mainly due to just being awful products even when new) that every owner of one had long thrown in away; no gaming store wanted to buy any used (being seen selling such brands was a mark against the quality of a store!); and even thrift stores had long dumped them for lack of interest. These gamepads and flight-sticks had value to this one guy making this one video — but literally nobody else. A one-time purchase, does not a market-clearing price make. The market is still just as illiquid after such a purchase as before it.
- pc86 2y ago
  Nobody went out and bought a vintage arcade game with "unique arcade hardware." It's almost certainly plywood and an old monitor.
  - Tool_of_Society 2y ago
    People didn't even notice that it was "space imploders" lol. They were too busy being outraged.
- Tool_of_Society 2y ago
  It was a mini arcade box which are sold by a variety of companies with any number of real arcade games using modern hardware in them for under $300. I can't find any existence for the game "Space Imploders" though.
__turbobrew__ 2y ago
I don’t think it is healthy if you are emotionally distressed seeing a trumpet being crushed.
- throwup238 2y ago
  Agreed. I don’t understand the reaction at all. Your favorite trumpet getting crushed in front of you? Yeah sure that might be distressing. But a generic virtual facsimile on a video? That’s silly
  - groggo 2y ago
    Wait are you sure the whole thing was an animation? It's hard to tell but at least some of it looks real... Is that mentioned in the article?
    - labcomputer 2y ago
      I would guess that if it is a real trumpet the props department went down to the local used instrument store and picked up the cheapest Yamaha in the discount bin. But, the way the trumpet crumples doesn't quite look realistic to me.
      - groggo 2y ago
        I know it's actually hard to tell. There's definitely some CGI in there. But a lot of it looks pretty real too. But the issue with it was the destruction of all of the creative tools. So it's in some ways not quite as bad if it's not real.
        quesera 2y ago
        > animation I'm betting mostly CGI actually. Some bits are obviously physically impossible, so definitely CGI. I can be persuaded that some shots are real+CGI, and squished into the larger CGI view. They might have crushed a few "things" to see how they would fail, and then CGI'ed up a final version. The wide shots do not look real. The lighting is not believable. The failure modes of many individual items are not believable. The whole pancaking effect of the big crush is not believable. I understand the discomfort at seeing wanton destruction. It bothers me to see great old houses or cars get wrecked for movies, for example. Nowadays, most of that is fake. And I think almost all of this ad is fake as well.
Hamuko 2y ago
You mean the arcade cabinet that conveniently switches to a GAME OVER screen while it has sparks flying and smoke pouring out of it when it gets hit by the crusher? Somehow I doubt you lost an actual cabinet. I'll be surprised if it's even made out of wood and not polygons.
- supportengineer 2y ago
  Was the entire ad CGI? I cannot tell anymore. I find it unlikely they built a gigantic hydraulic crusher just for the ad.
  - Hamuko 2y ago
    It's possible that some of the close-ups are practical, but the wide shots, such as when the cabinet is being crushed, look fake and plastic as hell. And quite a lot of the destruction is super dramatic, whereas real objects under real hydraulic presses are way less so. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJrE4nxDsSw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJrE4nxDsSw Quite a lot less sparkles, smoke and explosions than the ad.
commakozzi 2y ago
I'm a trumpet player, professionally. I don't give a rats *ss about it. Everyone just wants to get upset about something, is how i see it.
bsder 2y ago
Agreed. Wondering how many of those things were real and got crushed was distressing. The worst part was that you can have a super effective ad simply by reversing the video. Everything now springs out of the iPad and nobody is thinking about whether anything got crushed.
fl0ki 2y ago
So if you own a house or car then it's distressing to see one destroyed in a movie? Both of those cost much more than a trumpet, and for many people are more personal and unique, but somehow most people manage to keep their eyes on the screen.
- koof 2y ago
  Depending on the context, probably? During my suspension of disbelief of the narrative, it might make me say "I don't like this destruction!" and to root for whatever might be mitigating the destruction
  - ToucanLoucan 2y ago
    Honestly, outside the context of a movie or education, I find it pretty off-putting altogether. The videos of brand new cell phones being destroyed, TV's kind of less so but still, cars being crushed or vandalized, etc. If I put my psychoanalysis hat on (always dangerous when your subject is yourself, but anyway) I feel two big things: 1. A part of me just does not like waste. I'm keenly aware of our rampant consumerist culture's slow and continuing march towards collapsing our biosphere, and one of the ways those thoughts manifest themselves is being really upset with people buying products simply to turn right around and destroy them, while barely using them, usually for profit in the attention economy but sometimes seemingly just because they're wealthy and bored. 2. And another part: growing up poor, I'm keenly aware of how valuable things can be for people like me, who didn't grow up with much. Maybe that old computer that works fine that you're going to run tannerite through for a YouTube video means nothing to you, but I vividly recall many points in my life I could've really used it, and I know I'm the absolute opposite of alone in that fact. The "artistic" angle that a lot of the outrage this is drawing didn't really hit me as hard as these things did, but that's just my subjective experience. I respect people who love these beautiful things and don't want to see (probably) completely functional, or even repairable, useful things destroyed so a multi-billion dollar company can sell more products. (And let's be honest, given the nature of video production, the ones we actually saw destroyed were likely a fraction of the ones actually destroyed.) The artistic angle I do understand though is if it's done for something like a movie, it doesn't hit the same for me. When it's done to make other kinds of art, even schlocky hollywood crap art, at least that has... a result, I guess? It's destruction to create something. This was destruction for... another fucking ad. That will be forgotten in probably 2 weeks. Edit: The more I've thought about it, the more gross it feels, and I find myself really sympathizing. Times are pretty tough right now and artists have it rough during good times. How would you feel if you, as a piano player, who hadn't gotten to play in years (or maybe even ever!) on a piano like that, how would you feel seeing Apple buy one that at least looks to be in perfectly good working order, and smash it, in the service of selling you a stupid iPad? I really think this is impossible to comprehend without taking into account that everyone is hurting right now: inflation, Bidenomics, whatever it is you want to call it: people are broke, our expenses are going up, and our salaries remain the same. Yeah, I totally understand why this ad in this cultural moment hit a nerve: a whole ton of people, especially creatives, are struggling right now and here's Apple, buying up a ton of awesome things, and smashing em to bits and being like "here, you don't need a piano, you need an iPad!" Yeah, no shit people are upset.
tkdev2 2y ago
[flagged]
monksy 2y ago
It's not your personal trumpet that is getting smashed.
TheRealNGenius 2y ago
[dead]
caconym_ 2y ago
AFAICT people are not so much upset about objects of value being destroyed as they are about the symbolism of creative tools being crushed flat and turned into an iPad. For artists and similar creatives, it evokes the way AI companies have already stolen their intellectual property, and their promise to make them all but obsolete in the future.
- haswell 2y ago
  For me, it’s a mix of both. I’m a musician and a photographer. I felt a visceral negative reaction because those objects are sitting here in my apartment, and I’ve invested thousands of dollars and thousands of hours into them. I also found the symbolism a bit distressing, because it takes the general worry I’ve felt about AI’s impact on art and music and animates those worries very literally. Most AI/tech proponents are quick to point out that the original forms of expression aren’t going anywhere. But this felt uncomfortably close to “where we’re going, you won’t need these things anymore”. And the thing is, I’m a big fan of the iPad and it’s incredibly useful as a companion to these artistic endeavors. But I’m not a fan of the idea that it supersedes them.
  - dheera 2y ago
    Yeah this 100%. Creatives have strong emotional attachments to their tools, especially musicians (whose tools never become obsolete). Watching a musical instrument get crushed is like watching a pet getting tortured, and it's probably not something non-creatives would understand.
    - CyberDildonics 2y ago
      Did you seriously just compare watching a video of a trumpet getting flattened to watching your own pet getting tortured?
      - dheera 2y ago
        Now you know why it rubs musicians the wrong way
Tool_of_Society 2y ago
"Space Imploder" is not a real arcade game. That looked like one of those cheap mini arcade boxes you can buy brand new from a variety of sources. I see a bunch of cheap knock offs being crushed but I cannot say all of the items were.
- leptons 2y ago
  The entire ad is a symbol for Apple's iPad replacing everything being crushed. It's not "Space Imploder", it's every single arcade game every made. It's a representative for arcade games in general. Nobody should take "Space Imploder" literally. They can't use "Space Invaders" likely because of copyright, but I'm sure that they would have in this ad if they could have just so that someone wouldn't end up missing the point and suggesting "but, Space Imploder doesn't even exist".

verdverm 2y ago

[flagged]

deleted 2y ago
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Alupis 2y ago

> If you're a trumpet player, seeing a trumpet being crushed is going to be a bit distressing Really? I play the trumpet and felt nothing watching this ad. My trumpet wasn't being crushed, so who cares? It wasn't a rare Stradivarius, nor even a high-end Schilke or anything... Even if it was - why care? They can make more trumpets after all...

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

Tiktaalik 2y ago

The arcade one particularly distressing given that arcades and their unique arcade hardware are rapidly vanishing across the world without replacement.

mulmen 2y ago
Contemporary arcade cabinets featured similar hardware to the original Macs.
- jowsie 2y ago
  Nearly all modern arcade cabinets just have regular PCs in them.
  - mulmen 2y ago
    Right. That has essentially always been the case.
Sohcahtoa82 2y ago
And the arcades that DO exist are often 90% shitty ticket games that cost $1, have about 15 seconds of gameplay, and then maybe after blowing through $50 you'll have enough tickets to buy $2 worth of Tootsie Rolls and maybe a balsa wood glider. If you got really lucky, maybe a plushie. Though there are some "barcades" popping up these days that focus on classic arcade games to appeal to older the older crowd.
- redwall_hp 2y ago
  I happened across a nice one when I was in Denver, recently. It's called Akihabara. Tons of imported Japanese cabinets (including Taiko no Tatsujin and Typing of the Dead), and a bar with imported beers, sake and house cocktails. I wish I'd had a smartcard for saving progress, but it was only something I found out about during the trip. I'm definitely more into the 90s and early 2000s era of arcade games than 80s stuff (and the seat-friendly JP cabinets are nice) so I enjoyed the opportunity to play games that are hard to find here, and bring back memories of wandering (relatively lackluster) bowling alley arcades with a pocket of quarters.
  - touisteur 2y ago
    Typing of the dead! Ask me how I learned touch typing in anger. Such a beautiful piece of hijacked game. Much, much love to anyone who worked on this gem, or work to preserve it.
  - asix66 2y ago
    If ever out in the Denver area again, check out The 1UP Arcade[0]. They have all manner of games, including '80s cabs. Very fun. [0] https://the1uparcadebar.com/ https://the1uparcadebar.com/
  - Sohcahtoa82 2y ago
    There's a chain of arcades called Round1 that also specializes in Japanese games, mostly music games. They're all over the USA, including Denver.
rchaud 2y ago
Why would you need that when for the low price of 25 quarters a month, you could have Apple Arcade(TM)? /s
bnralt 2y ago
The console says “Space Imploder,” which isn’t a real arcade console, from what I can tell. There’s more discussion here[1], but it seems likely that a lot of the things weren’t real (or if they were real, they weren’t were junk that was broken beyond repair). This seems to be a major point that’s missing from the discussion. If a lot of this is stuff that was fake or already headed for the dump, it completely undermines the argument that perfectly good equipment was destroyed. [1] https://vi-control.net/community/threads/apple-destroys-vintage-instruments-in-tone-deaf-new-commercial-for-ipad-pro.151774/ https://vi-control.net/community/threads/apple-destroys-vint...
- groby_b 2y ago
  The point isn't how it was produced, but what the message is. And the message is destruction of creative instruments is good, akshually, because shiny & thin. No amount of "but we only rendered it" is going to fix it. It speaks about values the company holds.
  - codelobe 2y ago
    [x] Strongly Agree. Also, the focus on how these devices are increasingly consumer only instead of me being able to use my device to create Disclaimer: one of my goals is to build apps for my machine on the machine itself. I had this working on the now defunct Firefox phone OS (Its apps were deployed as Zipped HTML/JS and related resources -- I cobbled together a dev environ out of a few browser based tools). TL;DR: I'm a tool-using creator-type species, The modern "CONSUME ONLY" device craze makes my eye twitch; Ads that reinforce destruction of tools make me want to join fight club.
    - smallmancontrov 2y ago
      Art creation is creation. Muic, images, video -- they all benefit from good screens, fast processors, quality stylus integration, first party apps, and full-stack attention to latency. The iPad is about creation, just not your type of creation.
    - doctorwho42 2y ago
Brian_K_White 2y ago
Not to mention a bit rich considering their stance on emulators and game stores.
- immibis 2y ago
  If tech companies didn't have double standards, they'd have none.
- uwagar 2y ago
  and 32-bit apps that stopped running since catalina.
firebat45 2y ago
I understand that there is an entire culture surrounding these machines and that people enjoy collecting and restoring them. Hell, I would even like to build a cabinet myself one day. But there's a reason they are disappearing. They're old and obsolete. While they may have value to a niche group, they are overall viewed as mostly worthless. Secondly, there's a very simple solution to disliking what someone else does with their own property. Purchase it before they do whatever you dislike. Either from them or by beating them to the punch and buying it from the previous owner before they do.
- bogantech 2y ago
  > They're old and obsolete. While they may have value to a niche group, they are overall viewed as mostly worthless. Old and obsolete doesn't mean worthless, if people are collecting them and spending a lot of money on them then they're not worthless.
  - derefr 2y ago
    Most of the reason that collectors have to spend a lot of money on arcade cabinets, though, is not that they have high market resale value; but rather that the machines they can manage to acquire are usually in terrible condition, requiring large amounts of conservation work to get working and presentable again. And they’re so broken down, because everyone but these few collectors have valued — and continue to value — these machines so little that they’ve allowed them to rot in warehouses for decades. Many arcade cabinets are recovered from e-waste recycling centers, or even landfill. If they truly had market value, then people other than the collectors themselves would be making a business out of finding and restoring these cabinets, in order to sell them to the collectors. But no such business exists — because there just isn’t the demand to sustain it. I’m reminded of a recent YouTube video about MadCatz gaming peripherals. The video’s author had to spend thousands of dollars buying the few remaining controllers on the used market to use as examples. Why so much? Not because of high demand. Because of limited supply — they were so valueless (mainly due to just being awful products even when new) that every owner of one had long thrown in away; no gaming store wanted to buy any used (being seen selling such brands was a mark against the quality of a store!); and even thrift stores had long dumped them for lack of interest. These gamepads and flight-sticks had value to this one guy making this one video — but literally nobody else. A one-time purchase, does not a market-clearing price make. The market is still just as illiquid after such a purchase as before it.
pc86 2y ago
Nobody went out and bought a vintage arcade game with "unique arcade hardware." It's almost certainly plywood and an old monitor.
- Tool_of_Society 2y ago
  People didn't even notice that it was "space imploders" lol. They were too busy being outraged.
Tool_of_Society 2y ago
It was a mini arcade box which are sold by a variety of companies with any number of real arcade games using modern hardware in them for under $300. I can't find any existence for the game "Space Imploders" though.

__turbobrew__ 2y ago

I don’t think it is healthy if you are emotionally distressed seeing a trumpet being crushed.

throwup238 2y ago
Agreed. I don’t understand the reaction at all. Your favorite trumpet getting crushed in front of you? Yeah sure that might be distressing. But a generic virtual facsimile on a video? That’s silly
- groggo 2y ago
  Wait are you sure the whole thing was an animation? It's hard to tell but at least some of it looks real... Is that mentioned in the article?
  - labcomputer 2y ago
    I would guess that if it is a real trumpet the props department went down to the local used instrument store and picked up the cheapest Yamaha in the discount bin. But, the way the trumpet crumples doesn't quite look realistic to me.
    - groggo 2y ago
      I know it's actually hard to tell. There's definitely some CGI in there. But a lot of it looks pretty real too. But the issue with it was the destruction of all of the creative tools. So it's in some ways not quite as bad if it's not real.
      - quesera 2y ago
        > animation I'm betting mostly CGI actually. Some bits are obviously physically impossible, so definitely CGI. I can be persuaded that some shots are real+CGI, and squished into the larger CGI view. They might have crushed a few "things" to see how they would fail, and then CGI'ed up a final version. The wide shots do not look real. The lighting is not believable. The failure modes of many individual items are not believable. The whole pancaking effect of the big crush is not believable. I understand the discomfort at seeing wanton destruction. It bothers me to see great old houses or cars get wrecked for movies, for example. Nowadays, most of that is fake. And I think almost all of this ad is fake as well.

Hamuko 2y ago

You mean the arcade cabinet that conveniently switches to a GAME OVER screen while it has sparks flying and smoke pouring out of it when it gets hit by the crusher? Somehow I doubt you lost an actual cabinet. I'll be surprised if it's even made out of wood and not polygons.

supportengineer 2y ago
Was the entire ad CGI? I cannot tell anymore. I find it unlikely they built a gigantic hydraulic crusher just for the ad.
- Hamuko 2y ago
  It's possible that some of the close-ups are practical, but the wide shots, such as when the cabinet is being crushed, look fake and plastic as hell. And quite a lot of the destruction is super dramatic, whereas real objects under real hydraulic presses are way less so. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJrE4nxDsSw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJrE4nxDsSw Quite a lot less sparkles, smoke and explosions than the ad.

commakozzi 2y ago

I'm a trumpet player, professionally. I don't give a rats *ss about it. Everyone just wants to get upset about something, is how i see it.

bsder 2y ago

Agreed. Wondering how many of those things were real and got crushed was distressing. The worst part was that you can have a super effective ad simply by reversing the video. Everything now springs out of the iPad and nobody is thinking about whether anything got crushed.

fl0ki 2y ago

So if you own a house or car then it's distressing to see one destroyed in a movie? Both of those cost much more than a trumpet, and for many people are more personal and unique, but somehow most people manage to keep their eyes on the screen.

koof 2y ago
Depending on the context, probably? During my suspension of disbelief of the narrative, it might make me say "I don't like this destruction!" and to root for whatever might be mitigating the destruction
- ToucanLoucan 2y ago
  Honestly, outside the context of a movie or education, I find it pretty off-putting altogether. The videos of brand new cell phones being destroyed, TV's kind of less so but still, cars being crushed or vandalized, etc. If I put my psychoanalysis hat on (always dangerous when your subject is yourself, but anyway) I feel two big things: 1. A part of me just does not like waste. I'm keenly aware of our rampant consumerist culture's slow and continuing march towards collapsing our biosphere, and one of the ways those thoughts manifest themselves is being really upset with people buying products simply to turn right around and destroy them, while barely using them, usually for profit in the attention economy but sometimes seemingly just because they're wealthy and bored. 2. And another part: growing up poor, I'm keenly aware of how valuable things can be for people like me, who didn't grow up with much. Maybe that old computer that works fine that you're going to run tannerite through for a YouTube video means nothing to you, but I vividly recall many points in my life I could've really used it, and I know I'm the absolute opposite of alone in that fact. The "artistic" angle that a lot of the outrage this is drawing didn't really hit me as hard as these things did, but that's just my subjective experience. I respect people who love these beautiful things and don't want to see (probably) completely functional, or even repairable, useful things destroyed so a multi-billion dollar company can sell more products. (And let's be honest, given the nature of video production, the ones we actually saw destroyed were likely a fraction of the ones actually destroyed.) The artistic angle I do understand though is if it's done for something like a movie, it doesn't hit the same for me. When it's done to make other kinds of art, even schlocky hollywood crap art, at least that has... a result, I guess? It's destruction to create something. This was destruction for... another fucking ad. That will be forgotten in probably 2 weeks. Edit: The more I've thought about it, the more gross it feels, and I find myself really sympathizing. Times are pretty tough right now and artists have it rough during good times. How would you feel if you, as a piano player, who hadn't gotten to play in years (or maybe even ever!) on a piano like that, how would you feel seeing Apple buy one that at least looks to be in perfectly good working order, and smash it, in the service of selling you a stupid iPad? I really think this is impossible to comprehend without taking into account that everyone is hurting right now: inflation, Bidenomics, whatever it is you want to call it: people are broke, our expenses are going up, and our salaries remain the same. Yeah, I totally understand why this ad in this cultural moment hit a nerve: a whole ton of people, especially creatives, are struggling right now and here's Apple, buying up a ton of awesome things, and smashing em to bits and being like "here, you don't need a piano, you need an iPad!" Yeah, no shit people are upset.

tkdev2 2y ago

[flagged]

monksy 2y ago

It's not your personal trumpet that is getting smashed.

TheRealNGenius 2y ago

[dead]

caconym_ 2y ago

AFAICT people are not so much upset about objects of value being destroyed as they are about the symbolism of creative tools being crushed flat and turned into an iPad. For artists and similar creatives, it evokes the way AI companies have already stolen their intellectual property, and their promise to make them all but obsolete in the future.

haswell 2y ago
For me, it’s a mix of both. I’m a musician and a photographer. I felt a visceral negative reaction because those objects are sitting here in my apartment, and I’ve invested thousands of dollars and thousands of hours into them. I also found the symbolism a bit distressing, because it takes the general worry I’ve felt about AI’s impact on art and music and animates those worries very literally. Most AI/tech proponents are quick to point out that the original forms of expression aren’t going anywhere. But this felt uncomfortably close to “where we’re going, you won’t need these things anymore”. And the thing is, I’m a big fan of the iPad and it’s incredibly useful as a companion to these artistic endeavors. But I’m not a fan of the idea that it supersedes them.
- dheera 2y ago
  Yeah this 100%. Creatives have strong emotional attachments to their tools, especially musicians (whose tools never become obsolete). Watching a musical instrument get crushed is like watching a pet getting tortured, and it's probably not something non-creatives would understand.
  - CyberDildonics 2y ago
    Did you seriously just compare watching a video of a trumpet getting flattened to watching your own pet getting tortured?
    - dheera 2y ago
      Now you know why it rubs musicians the wrong way

Tool_of_Society 2y ago

"Space Imploder" is not a real arcade game. That looked like one of those cheap mini arcade boxes you can buy brand new from a variety of sources. I see a bunch of cheap knock offs being crushed but I cannot say all of the items were.

leptons 2y ago
The entire ad is a symbol for Apple's iPad replacing everything being crushed. It's not "Space Imploder", it's every single arcade game every made. It's a representative for arcade games in general. Nobody should take "Space Imploder" literally. They can't use "Space Invaders" likely because of copyright, but I'm sure that they would have in this ad if they could have just so that someone wouldn't end up missing the point and suggesting "but, Space Imploder doesn't even exist".