They're clearly meant to be humorous, and everyone gets that. However they are truly terrible ads. They paint Apple's features with a negative tone and are the sort of lazy, low-effort entrant that you expect from gambling or crypto sites. Just garbage ads.
I know nothing about the ad business, but I feel like Apple must have engaged with an irregular agency for this. They're so out of character for the company.
It's selling something that costs close to $1000 US. Humorous is fine, but couching the entire thing as a joke makes one wonder what is substantively different about it than last year's model.
Everyone understands they trying really hard to be humorous. You're doing a classic "you must not get it" bit when people find an attempt at humour stupid if not distasteful. Yes, we all get it, yet they're still stupid and the sort of ad I expect from Microsoft back in the Windows Phone days.
As another comment mentioned, they're tone deaf if not dystopian: If this is the best image Apple could contrive for their AI features....Jesus Christ.
As to the perpetually lazy bit, the ads are literally predicated on making a "humorous" situation around a thoughtless self-involved sociopath and the office clown. Supremely out of character for Apple, and they gave their agency too much rope.
> You're doing a classic "you must not get it" bit when people find an attempt at humour stupid if not distasteful
I’m not, the couple links I’ve seen here, including this one, have been written as if the ads aren’t intended to be funny, and judge (and describe) them as if the ads are trying to straightforwardly communicate something, rather than being a particular common sort of humorous ad—and, perhaps, failing at what they’re trying to say and communicating the wrong thing, or being bad for other reasons, but that’s not how this piece comes across.
I’m not wondering if everyone who doesn’t like them didn’t understand them, but whether the ones bothering to blog about it are misreading the ads? Has it just been the links I’ve happened to have followed on the topic here?
I think of AI as being roughly the same moral caliber as cigarettes. Apple has never had to make a cigarette ad before, so it doesn't surprise me that they're not good at it. It's hard to come out right and say, "We've bet billions of dollars that we can convince you not to think for yourself anymore."
The product is asking your to give up your creativity, your will for self improvement, your potential to excel. Once you externalize these parts of your brain to someone else who you have to pay to think for you, after a long enough time you will have nothing at all to offer society yourself.
I know nothing about the ad business, but I feel like Apple must have engaged with an irregular agency for this. They're so out of character for the company.