Crushed
What’s it look like when a company just runs out of good will?
I am, of course, talking about that ad Apple made and then apologized for where the hydraulic press smashes things down and reveals—the new iPad!
The Crush ad feels like a kind of inflection point. Because a few years ago, this would have gone over fine. Maybe a few grumps would have grouched about it, but you can imagine most people would have taken it in good humor, there would have been a lot of tweets on the theme of “look, what they meant was…”
Ahhh, that’s not how this one went? It’s easy to understand why some folks felt so angry; my initial response was more along the lines of “yeaaah, read the room.”
As more than one person pointed out, Apple’s far from the first company to use this metaphor to talk about a new smaller product; Nintendo back in the 90s, Nokia in ’08. And, look, first of all, “Nokia did it” isn’t the quality of defense you think it is, and second, I don’t know guys, maybe some stuff has happened over the last fifteen years to change the relationship artists have with big tech companies?
Apple has built up a lot of good will over the last couple of decades, mostly by making nice stuff that worked for regular people, without being obviously an ad or a scam, some kind of corporate nightmare, or a set of unserious tinkertoys that still doesn’t play sound right.
They’ve been withdrawing from that account quite a lot the last decade: weird changes, the entire app store “situation”, the focus on subscriptions and “services”. Squandering 20 years of built-up good will on “not fixing the keyboards.” And you couple that with the state of the whole tech industry: everyone knows Google doesn’t work as well as it used to, email is all spam, you can’t answer the phone anymore because a robot is going to try and rip you off, how many scam text messages thye get, Amazon is full of bootleg junk, etsy isn’t hand-made anymore, social media is all bots and fascists, most things that made tech fun or exciting a decade or more ago has rotted out. And then, as every other tech company falls over themselves to gut the entirety of the arts and humanities to feed them into their Plagiarism Machines so techbros don’t have to pay artists, Apple—the “intersection of technology and liberal arts”—goes and does this? Et tu?
I picture last week as the moment Apple looked down and realized, Wile E Coyote style, they they were standing out in mid-air having walked off the edge of their accumulated good will.
On the one hand, no, that’s not what they meant, it was misinterpreted. But on the other hand—yes, maybe it really was what they meant, the people making just hadn’t realized the degree to which they were saying the quiet part out loud.
Because a company smashing beautiful tools that have worked for decades to reveal a device that’ll stop being eligible for software updates in a few years is the perfect metaphor for the current moment.