Where is the Money?

An Ad and its Detractors

bet a lot of money that the TechCrunch writing and editorial team have had an interesting 72 hours.

After Apple announced its new iPad on Tuesday, the ad that supported it was initially widely slammed for its cruelty to obsolete tools for creativity, including a piano, guitar, and paint. This week's Video of The Week has it if you don't know what I am talking about.

A sizeable crushing machine compresses the items with colossal force, and in the end, an iPad can incorporate the functions of traditional items.

It's not the most amazing ad ever, certainly not as bold as Steve Jobs's 1984 ad, but it's in the same genre. The past must be crushed to release new freedom and creativity for a fraction of the price and, often, the power and flexibility.

Oh, and it's thin, very thin.

I was not offended. Devin at TechCrunch was. He leads this week's essay of the week with his "Apple's 'Crush' ad is disgusting" and does not mince words:

What we all understand, though - because unlike Apple ad executives, we live in the world - is that the things being crushed here represent the material, the tangible, the real. And the real has value. Value that Apple clearly believes it can crush into yet another black mirror.This belief is disgusting to me. And apparently to many others, as well.

He also makes the incorrect point that:

A virtual guitar can't replace a real guitar; that's like thinking a book can replace its author.

It's more like a digital book replacing a paper book than the author being replaced. Oh wait... that has happened.

That said, a virtual guitar can replace a real guitar, and an AI guitar can even replace a virtual guitar - and be better. That is not to say there are no more actual traditional guitars. They will be a choice, not a necessity, especially for people like me who can't play a guitar but will be able to play these.

Devin had his supporters in the comments (go read them).

Handmaid's Tale director Reed Morano told Apple CEO Tim Cook to "read the room" in a post on X.

Matthew Carnal captured my somewhat unkind instinct:

There were a lot more reactions to the Apple ad haters like Matthews.

Of course, many old instrument lovers (the instruments, not their age) hated the Ad. By Thursday, this being the times we live in, Apple apologized for the ad:

Tor Myhren, Apple's vice president of marketing, said the company "missed the mark."

"Creativity is in our DNA at Apple, and it's incredibly important to us to design products that empower creatives all over the world," Myhren told Ad Age. "Our goal is to always celebrate the myriad of ways users express themselves and bring their ideas to life through iPad. We missed the mark with this video, and we're sorry."

Please judge for yourself below, but my 2c is that the ad was a moderately underwhelming attempt to champion innovation. It is certainly not offensive unless you are ultra-sensitive and have feelings for pianos, guitars, and paint. Oh, and hate attempts to recreate them in a more usable form. And Apple really should have taken the high ground here.

I spent some of the week in LA at the CogX Festival and virtually at the Data Driven Summit by @AndreRetterath. The latter focused on what is happening in Venture Capital, as do several of this week's essays. Milken's event was running in LA also. Its attitude to Venture Capital is best summed up here:

"We're all being told in the market that DPI is the new IRR," B Capital's Raj Ganguly said onstage Wednesday. (The acronym sandwich means investment firms have to actually prove that their investments actually generate cash through a metric called distributions to paid-in capital, not just theoretically, through internal rate of return.) "Even the venture panel at Milken is at the end of the day on Wednesday," he joked, meaning that it didn't get top billing at the conference, which had started a couple days earlier.

This does sum up where we are. Hundreds of Billions of dollars are still trapped inside companies funded in 2020-2022, with little prospect of producing returns. The impact is that there is less funding for current startups (see the Carta piece below). And much of what is flowing is flowing to AI and into a very small number of companies (see Tomasz Tungux below).

However, innovation and funding are still possible. This week's Startup of the Week is Wayve, a UK autonomous driving platform that seems to agree with Elon Musk that cameras are sufficient to teach a car to drive. Wayve's ambitions go beyond Cars (also like Musk) but differ in that the product is available to all developers to embed in their products.

"Very soon you'll be able to buy a new car, and it'll have Wayve's AI on it ... Then this goes into enabling all kinds of embodied AI, not just cars, but other forms of robotics. I think the ultimate thing that we want to achieve here is to go way beyond where AI is today with language models and chatbots. But to really enable a future where we can trust intelligent machines that we can delegate tasks to, and of course they can enhance our lives and self-driving will be the first example of that."

Love that attitude.

Essays of the Week