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Comment by cultofmetatron | Hacker News Reader

I really don't see how this is distopian. they are basicly jsut saying that all of these creative tools can be crushed down into an ipad. that the ipad does everything all that stuff did. I can't the only one who feels like this is an amazing achievment.

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They have a million ways of conveying the message of "compress", yet they delibrately choose the most violent and destructive one. Think of cinematic or cartoon-ish effects like turning the objects into colorful fluid on compress and magically forge an ipad.

Instead of this they choose to show every detail of instruments being painfully crushed and destroyed.

It's dystopian because they're crushing these items, and not only crushing them, but doing it slowly in a way that seems to take pleasure in the destruction. Because they've unintentionally created a visual metaphor for the relentless commoditization, dehumanization and destruction of culture and art by capitalism, tech and AI, and the crass arrogance displayed by the tech community towards creatives.

If you can't interpret any meaning in the ad beyond Apple's sales pitch, fair enough, but there are other ways to interpret visual language besides the literal.

And... it's not that amazing an achievement. An Apple tablet that runs Adobe software? Big deal. Even the "thinness" that's supposed to be the focus of the message isn't that impressive. No one really cares that Apple shaved a millimeter off the cross-section, it just a vanity spec that makes the damn thing more fragile.

"Hey look at all of these things you like! These are great, right? Now watch us destroy them, watch them get crushed into smithereens before your very eyes. Forget about all of that busted up crap that you used to like, buy our new slab instead!"

I get that this was the original idea.

But besides the question whether that is actually true (it is not, the ipad certainly can't do everything as good) the issue people seem take with this that its not just compressed or put into it but literally destroyed and crushed.

Yeah, definitely first world problems but I can relate to that.

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