Apple's Dystopian iPad Video

When Steve Jobs spoke about the intersection of liberal arts and technology, he did not envision crushing symbols of art and culture.

Apple announced new iPad and iPad Pro products yesterday which are the thinnest devices that the company has ever created. At just over two-tenth of one inch, this is no doubt an impressive feat of engineering. But like many recent product launches, it seems like an incremental release rather than a revolutionary “must-have” upgrade.

I was surprised to see a video posted by Tim Cook on X/Twitter that has to be the most dystopian ad from any company that I have seen in quite some time. The point of the video seems to be that the iPad is … thin … and that it can handle the functions that previously required annoying objects in the physical world like guitars, trumpets, pianos, turntables, and much more. All of these objects are crushed into oblivion and we all know what’s coming: The iPad Pro emerges as an ultra-thin replacement.

The video has to be seen to be understood (click on the image below to view it):

It’s hard to know where to begin... For starters, the video is obviously destructive. It smashes up objects that many people consider beautiful works of art, or things that facilitate art. It implies that objects in our physical world can be entirely replaced by a rectangular electronic object. It is tone deaf in terms of understanding the anxieties many people have when it comes to technology, and it utterly alienates the creatives who have always been one of Apple’s core constituencies.

Steve Jobs famously said that Apple stands at the intersection of technology and liberal arts. Apple is supposed to enhance and improve our lives in the physical realm, not to replace cherished physical objects indiscriminately.

It is one thing to say that the iPhone replaces a dumb phone, a portable music player, and a digital camera in one device. All of the objects that the iPhone replaced were also electronic objects. It is quite another thing to imply that technology can obviate the need for objects like vinyl records, pianos, guitars, metronomes, trumpets, statues, binoculars, squishy toys (?) … and what’s with the splattering cans of paint?

What accounts for the increasing popularity of vinyl in recent years? The technology is clearly “inferior” if all you care about is maximizing the amount of music you can afford to listen to. Yet, there is a niche audience, mostly comprised of creatives, who willingly pay $20-30 for a record when they could get the “same music” on a streaming platform for pennies. Maybe they don’t think it is really the same thing at all.

Apple is a $2.8 trillion dollar company that must sell an enormous number of devices and services to mass markets to justify its market cap in the long run, so perhaps the focus is not on sentimentalists who consider musical instruments and other art to be sacred. It is hazardous to claim to know what a long dead person might think about something happening today, but I feel very confident that Steve Jobs would find this video horrifying. A man who cared deeply about what the inside of a product looks like, who considered himself an artisan as well as a technologist, could not easily stomach such a display of dystopian arrogance.

As Ajit Jain said at the Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting last week, Tim Cook proved that it is possible to take over for a legendary CEO and build upon his business success. There is no doubt that Apple has performed well as a business over the past dozen years, and much of that should be credited to Tim Cook. I am not suggesting that a single video foreshadows an imminent demise of the brand, but there are clearly people within Apple who have lost touch with the ethos that Steve Jobs infused into the business, and that is cause for serious concern.

Readers might think that I am taking the video too seriously or literally and that it is all meant in good fun. But the responses to Tim Cook’s post are overwhelmingly negative which leads me to believe that I am far from alone.

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Disclosure: Indirect ownership of Apple via direct ownership of Berkshire Hathaway.