Apple has apologized over an ad for its new IPad Pro showing a piano, guitars, paint cans and other objects being crushed by a hydraulic press after it sparked backlash online.
“Creativity is in our DNA at Apple, and it’s incredibly important to us to design products that empower creatives all over the world,” Tor Myhren, Apple’s VP of marketing communications, told Ad Age.
“Our goal is to always celebrate the myriad of ways users express themselves and bring their ideas to life through iPad,” he continued. “We missed the mark with this video, and we’re sorry.”
The ad, which Apple reportedly no longer plans to run on TV, shows the massive press flattening various objects before lifting to reveal the tech giant’s new tablet.
“Meet the new iPad Pro: the thinnest product we’ve ever created, the most advanced display we’ve ever produced, with the incredible power of the M4 chip,” Apple CEO Tim Cook wrote Tuesday on the social media platform X.
“Just imagine all the things it’ll be used to create,” he added in the post, which featured the video.
The commercial was widely criticized online as tone-deaf, with some comparing its destruction of creative tools to the tech industry’s impact on the creative fields.
“Why did @Apple do an ad that crushes the arts?” actress and filmmaker Justine Bateman wrote on X. “Tech and #AI means to destroy the arts and society in general.”
Actor Hugh Grant also weighed in on the ad in a post on X, saying, “The destruction of the human experience. Courtesy of Silicon Valley.”