“All I Ever Need Is You”

Apple says its iPad “Crush!” ad “missed the mark.” In reality, it came down right on target.

Welcome to Ever Not Quite—essays about technology and humanism.

I know, I know. I’m a little late to weigh in here, but this post is my contribution to the many reactions and interpretations that have come out in the last week or so of the Apple iPad Pro ad that was released on May 7th. I thought I would take the opportunity to make my own contribution to this genre, now in its twilight, and to connect it to some of the concerns I write about here. While my attention is usually fixed on themes that murmur in the cultural background, I do aspire occasionally to comment on relevant and noteworthy events in something at least approximating real time.

By now, you’ve likely already seen the ad, especially if you’ve spent any time on social media in the last ten days. But if you haven’t, this post will make much more sense if you take the 68 seconds necessary to watch it. The public reaction to the ad has been overwhelmingly negative and, tellingly, Apple has disabled comments on the video. I don’t intend to pile on additional criticism here, but only to offer an interpretation I have arrived at after thinking about the ad’s meaning, the circumstances of its creation, and the response it has provoked. Although I have tried to develop my own argument, my perspective has benefited from others here on Substack who have also written about this topic over the past several days, and I have included links to some of these other posts at the end. 

In my haste to strike while the iron is at least still warm, I haven’t uploaded an audio version just yet, but I plan to do so soon. As always, thank you for reading.

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As if to count in the ensemble, the 1-2-3-4 of the metronome is followed by the rising pitch of a jangly guitar as the record player whirs up to speed. The floodlights roar on, and a stage of sorts is revealed. The voice of Cher is heard, as the drone of the hydraulic press boots up. The performance unfolds as follows: each in its turn, a trumpet, a 1980s-era arcade game, a piano, an acoustic guitar, several cameras, some notebooks, a metronome, a clay bust, and at least seven gallons of paint—among many other objects of an artisanal nature—are all crushed as the plate of an industrial hydraulic press slowly descends upon them to the incongruous accompaniment of a jaunty tune. The visuals evoke the many hydraulic press videos that are native to YouTube, and its sounds are reminiscent of the satisfactions of the ASMR genre. When the product is finally revealed as the press is lifted after its explosive drop, we are informed matter-of-factly that “the most powerful iPad ever is also the thinnest.” As it is held in profile in demonstration of this claim, we hear for a second time—its meaning only now clear—the lyric that concludes the song’s chorus, and which also supplies its title: “All I ever need is you”. The stage has now unveiled its idol. 

Everything about the ad is carefully controlled and slickly produced, but for the fact that its intended purpose of eliciting its audience’s desire has backfired spectacularly, instead becoming a distracting target of widespread condemnation and vitriol. In advertising, as in politics, you aren’t just responsible for what you say; you’re responsible also for what people hear. And what many have heard in all the crunching and squishing is nothing satisfying, but something rather sinister: an insolent disregard, verging on outright disdain, for objects of great affection, sentimentality, and nostalgia on the part of one of the most powerful corporations ever to exist. Apple is known for its commercials, which have long demonstrated a knack for capturing the cultural zeitgeist, with its “1984” ad, which celebrated the freedom of the individual standing up against the conformity imposed by authoritarian oppression, being frequently cited as among advertising’s most memorable. But if Apple’s ethos once promised to liberate human creativity from enforced assimilation, this latest ad was decidedly off-message.

It isn’t difficult to see what Apple was going for here; the intent was to highlight, with just the right amount of irreverence to attract some attention, the formidable combination of the twin imperatives of modern tech design—the maximization of sleekness and power—exhibited by the product. The new iPad, the ad suggests, can take the place of all the objects that have just been crushed—or, more accurately, crushed into—the device. But this doesn’t totally account for all the close-ups of destruction which seem to revel in the gratifying sounds of the crunching of glass camera lenses and the cracking wood of the guitar, or the comically bug-eyed terror of the foam head, caught at the last possible moment by the maw of the giant machine. To many of the ad’s critics, something significant seems to have changed from the forward-looking hope and optimism embodied by many of Apple’s earlier ads to what now feels like actual malice (to borrow a term from the legal world): The press comes down, and the mask comes off.

But contrary to what might seem a novel way for Apple to illustrate its point, the “Crush!” ad is practically a remake, so faithfully does it reproduce a 2008 ad for the LG Renoir KC910 smartphone, which received no such contemporaneous backlash. So, why is it that a nearly identical ad from more than a decade and a half ago was not perceived to epitomize the menace that this one was? For one thing, the public is in a much different mood—much more anxious, and much less optimistic—with respect to technology, and especially so when it comes to its relationship with the arts. However attuned the “Crush!” ad is to the nuances of sound, it revealed a profound tonedeafness on the part of Apple. As Damon Beres and Charlie Warzel, writing for The Atlantic, put it: “good Lord, Apple, read the room.” And they continue: 

This is May 2024: Humanity is in the early stages of a standoff with generative AI, which offers methods through which visual art, writing, music, and computer code can be created by a machine in seconds with the simplest of prompts. [...] Most of us are still in the sizing-up phase for generative AI, staring warily at a technology that’s been hyped as world-changing and job-disrupting (even, some proponents argue, potentially civilization-ending), and been foisted on the public in a very short period of time. It’s a weird, exhausting, exciting, even tense moment. Enter: THE CRUSHER.

As the British filmmaker Asif Kapadia wrote of the ad on X: “It is the most honest metaphor for what tech companies do to the arts, to artists, musicians, creators, writers, filmmakers: squeeze them, use them, not pay well, take everything then say it’s all created by them.” This reaction gives voice to a somewhat abstract line of interpretation: it views the hydraulic press as a metaphor of sorts for the contempt of Apple—and of Big Tech more generally—for artists and their trades, in contrast to its own quasi-providential task of innovating with a bulldozer. And this seems to have been the thrust of a good deal of the pushback Apple has received. 

But the reading that comes most readily to my mind is a bit more literal, narrower, and a little closer, I think, to what the ad actually says and shows: if the intended message was not one of contempt, exactly, it was certainly meant to illustrate the incorporation of the arts into the device being advertised. The ad is thus a fairly literal depiction of the flattened experience of the world that modern screen-based technologies offer their users. Perceiving this, we may feel that we are being pulled by some self-authorizing force into a digital realm where we would rather not have to go. As a result, our relationship with the world becomes progressively flatter and more densely mediated with each new field of experience we give over to a device. And this process requires just what Apple’s ad shows us: the destruction of an expansive, tangible world, and its assimilation into a digital one which we can contact only through a flat, glass screen. After the overwhelmingly negative response, Apple pulled the ad from media circulation last Thursday and its vice president of marketing communications released a statement acknowledging that “[w]e missed the mark with this video, and we’re sorry.” 

As a public relations gesture, yes. But as a not-particularly-metaphorical display of what the iPad does and what Apple aspires for it to be, the ad came down upon the issue with remarkable precision, showing a richly dimensional and sensory world of craft and artistry flattened and outsourced to its product.

Consider what the German sociologist and social theorist Hartmut Rosa observes in his 2016¹ book, Resonance: A Sociology of Our Relationship to the World. Rosa acknowledges that, while the printed page has itself long acted as a “screen” of sorts, suppressing to a minimum the role of the body as the reader engages the written word, its replacement by screens of a digital variety is decisive on account of the seemingly limitless range of activities for which they can be made to substitute. Rosa writes: 

Far more significant, it seems to me, is the fact that in late modernity, the screen has come to replace much more than just the book; it has become the uniform medium of nearly all forms of relating to the world. Ever more activities, and thus ever more relationships, are developed and conducted via the symbol-conveying screens of smartphones, tablets, televisions, and touchscreen computers. We work on screens, we inform and identify ourselves via screens, we play on them, communicate over them, distract and entertain ourselves through them. Screens are even well on their way to becoming the basis of our experience of art.²

To my mind, Apple’s ad captures this transformation rather perfectly. It declares that the action of the hydraulic press, which seems to wield all the force of necessity, is an extension of the ongoing process of digitization: flattening, and ultimately replacing the greatest possible number of modalities through which we make contact with the world. “We can thus say without exaggeration or alarm”, Rosa continues, “that we are well on our way to a society in which the larger part of our various relationships to the world, along with our relation to the world as a whole, is mediated by screens.” Moreover, the ad proposes to accomplish this not only by making the iPad flatter (earlier versions were already flat), but also powerful enough to assume more and more of the business of artistic production. Indeed, as Apple CEO Tim Cook wrote in the tweet that first introduced the ad to the world: “Just imagine all the things it’ll be used to create”. In other words, the experience of using these objects must be deemphasized in order to highlight the iPad’s capacity to maximize artistic output, which now exists, not as a physical artifact, but as intangible, worldless information.

Rosa concludes that this situation has two major consequences: 

First, the screen has become a kind of bottleneck through which our experience and appropriation of the world plays out, leading to a potential uniformity or mono-modularization of our relationship to the world. The world responds to us, and we reach the world, always in the same ways, through the same channel, with the same eye and thumb movements. Second, in spite of all technological innovations, our physical experience of the world is now extremely reduced. The world we interact and communicate with, in which we work and play, does not smell, leaves no taste, has no gravitational effect, and produces no tactile sensations. In fact, engaged with our screens, we are not entirely in the world-space with which we are interacting.³

Of course, the objects that are destroyed as they are being incorporated into the iPad represent the tactile world which can be touched, manipulated, and sensed with our body. The cool dampness of the clay that gives way under the fingers, the action of the piano keyboard, the laborious strumming of the guitar, the rough surface of the notebook paper: all this is treated as though it was only ever accidental—even, perhaps, a hindrance—to human craftsmanship. And the song which Apple chose to play over the ad nicely captures Rosa’s first consequence: the lyric “All I ever need is you” furnishes a melody to the device that has become the single channel through which we reach the world. 

It’s important not to lose sight of the fact that, just as surely as they diminish and shut out a range of sensations and experiences, screens also put us into contact with a great deal that is meaningful; this was the early promise of the internet, and it is also what makes it possible for me to reach any significant readership. But the impoverishment of the full sensory breadth of which we are capable by means of the pervasive adoption of screen-based technologies is undeniable. The considerable public service Apple has provided, however unintentionally, has been to demonstrate before our very eyes just what we stand to lose should we choose to surrender these tactile experiences wholesale, and volunteer to outsource them away from the body and into a non-world of information. The more we begin to regard the body, and the things which the body puts to use in its commerce with the world, as obstacles to be overcome (or radically modified) in order to better accommodate the needs of a digital venue, the clearer it will be that the needs of human beings and of devices have parted company and assumed the role of adversaries. 

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Bonus Post: Apple is Losing Creatives

The Stuff of (a Well-Lived) Life

A Nightmare Dressed Like a Daydream

The Bare Face Of The Machine

"Crush!"

1. The English translation appeared in 2019.

2. Rosa, Resonance: A Sociology of Our Relationship to the World, pg. 91.

3. Ibid.