The biggest thing that makes me wonder about this ad is: "why?". It certainly costed more to make than an average ad, regardless if it was CGI or real, it should be obvious to anybody who has ever itneracted with humans why crushing a bunch of instruments and tools they use would be a bad idea, all to get it mention more often thanks to society's backlash? Apple isn't some newcomer who needs all the attention they can get, every man, woman, child, dog and cat who can afford apple products has heard of them and I doubt hearing about the brand new iPad pro a million times more is going to change their decision to buy it or not. Most of their userbase is people up to their eyes in the apple ecosystem, all they have to do is send a push notification about the newest iProduct, initiate the planned obsolescence procedure, and watch the cash pour in, the rest would just need to see an ad about the amazing new health app or whatever with a suttel subtext of "and if you don't buy this you're a poor low-status chump lol". But again, I don't run a trillion+ dollar tech company so what do I know?
This also reminds me of those 4chan pranks where they tell people that the new software update made the iPhone waterproof or they can charge it by putting it in a microwave. This time they wouldn't even have to make fake ads: "look, apple said new iPad can't be crushed, post a tiktok of yourself stomping your iPad nothing can go wrong!" (disclaimer: the previous text in quotes is in quotes for a reason; don't do that to any of your devices. There's no warranty to the extent permitted by law, etc etc).
I'm quite surprised to find this on HN, synthesizers like espeak and eloquence (ibm TTS) have fallen out of favor these days. I'm a blind person who uses espeak on all my devices except my macbook, where unfortunately I can't install the speech synthesizer because it apparently only supports MacOS 13 (installing the library itself works fine though).
Most times I try to use modern "natural-sounding" voices they take a while to initialize, and when you speed them at a certain point the words mix together into meaningless noise, while at the same rate eloquence and espeak would handle just great, well, for me at least.
I was thinking about this a few days back while I was trying out piper-tts [0] how supposedly "more advanced" synthesizers powered by AI use up more ram and cpu and disk space to deliver a voice which doesn't sound much better than something like RH voice and gets things like inflection wrong. And that's the english voice, the voice for my language (serbian) makes espeak sound human and according to piper-tts it's "medium".
Funny story about synthesizers taking a while to initialize, there's a local IT company here that specializes in speech synthesis and their voices take so long to load they had to say "<company> Mary is initializing..." whenever you start your screen reader or such. Was annoying but in a fun way. Their newer Serbian voices also have this "feature" where they try to pronounce some english words it comes upon properly. It also has another "feature" where it tries to pronounce words right that were spelled without accent marks or such, and like with most of these kinds of "features" they combine badly and hilariously. For example if you asked them to pronounce "topic" it would pronounce it as "topich, which was fun while browsing forums or such.
This also reminds me of those 4chan pranks where they tell people that the new software update made the iPhone waterproof or they can charge it by putting it in a microwave. This time they wouldn't even have to make fake ads: "look, apple said new iPad can't be crushed, post a tiktok of yourself stomping your iPad nothing can go wrong!" (disclaimer: the previous text in quotes is in quotes for a reason; don't do that to any of your devices. There's no warranty to the extent permitted by law, etc etc).