Broadcast: 24 September 2012
Program: Bones
Channel: FOX
Conglomerate: News Corporation
Advertiser: Apple
Owned By: Apple
Pitch: Take awesome photos of super cute children with your iPhone.
As the days long lines for new Apple products have become so routine as to be widely parodied, Apple decided to get in on the act by actively trolling their most fervent customers with this new ad for a panoramic photo mode. We open with a cute kid in a costume against Apple’s patented all white “wait, am I dead?” backdrop:
Daddy, all I see is empty! Help! Daaaaddddyyyyyyy!
Ignoring his child’s frantic pleas for help, the friendly dad voiced narrator takes a picture, before dropping more terrified kids into this spotless netherworld:
Say cheese and I’ll bring back the floor.
With all these children now safely encased in the iPhantom Zone, the disembodied hand takes a panoramic shot of the kids merely by moving the phone across each of them:
Don’t worry, I’m sure they all made the leap home eventually.
Apple’s nihilistic set design aside, the whole idea here is that you can take an awesome panoramic picture without doing any photoshop or the like, just point and click. That’s a nice enough feature, but what makes this whole thing a clever act of trolling comes, as it so often does, in the fine print. Just after flashing a giant “iPhone 5” logo, there’s a tiny piece of faint gray on white text:
In case you can’t read that, it says “Also works on 4S”. In other words, they’re saying, “Remember that cool feature we showed you? You probably already have it, but we know you’re going to buy the new one anyway, fanboi scum.”
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