Apple's 'Crush!' iPad ad destroyed creative tools — and the audience revolted

On 7 May 2024, Apple released 'Crush!' as the launch film for the iPad Pro (M4). Posted to Tim Cook's X account and Apple's YouTube channel, the 68-second ad showed a hydraulic press slowly destroying a piano, guitars, trumpets, paint cans, sculpture tools, books and a vintage arcade machine, compressing them into the new iPad Pro. The message was that all these creative tools now lived in one device.

The backlash was immediate. Musicians, artists and designers — the exact audience Apple was courting — read the ad as a celebration of destroying the things they loved. The visual of a hydraulic press crushing a guitar struck many as the opposite of Apple's usual message of empowering creativity. Within two days the ad had become one of the most criticised product launches in Apple's recent history.

On 9 May, Tor Myhren, Apple's VP of marketing communications, told Ad Age: 'Creativity is in our DNA at Apple. Our goal is to celebrate the ways users express themselves through iPad. We missed the mark with this video, and we're sorry.' Apple pulled the ad from TV. Samsung responded within days with an 'UnCrush' ad for the Galaxy Tab S9, showing a woman playing a damaged guitar from the rubble: 'Creativity cannot be crushed.'