I find it hard to believe that no one on Apple’s marketing team saw this coming. Maybe they were too timid to speak up. Perhaps they were overruled. Maybe they didn’t care.

But surely someone in that Cupertino spaceship in California could comprehend the grim imagery of its new iPad ad – titled simply “Crush!” – in which a giant crushing machine slowly squeezes a pile of beloved creative tools. First, a trumpet, buckling. Then paint splattering everywhere. A bust, squashed. An upright piano, crushed, strings and hammers flying out with a horrific crunch. Camera lenses shattering.

Apple chief executive Tim Cook appears in a pre-recorded video at Apple’s Battersea headquarters in the UK, to introduce the new iPads.Credit: Tim Biggs

The ad’s intended message was to suggest that all these wonderful tools could now be faithfully re-created using one of the new iPads announced on Tuesday. But many saw something different, and backlash is picking up steam.

“Thank you to Apple for providing this excellent visualisation of how AI is made,” I half-joked on Threads. Others had the same thought. “Just a terribly cruel image,” one user wrote in response to chief executive officer Tim Cook’s post of the ad on X. “How........

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