Do you remember how Apple commercials were great at Christmas? One of my favorites is ‘Misunderstood’, released in 2013.

In this ad, a teenager sits at the family table with his headphones on, thumb busy on his phone, while some members of his family think he would rather be somewhere else. Nobody says it out loud, but we, as spectators, think it too: he is bored of his family, and we begin to think something is wrong with that kid. Only at the end does the ad show what he has been doing all afternoon. His film plays on the television, and the whole family watches their own day, filmed by the boy they (and ‘we’) were judging. He was preparing a gift for all of them, and it lands as an emotional climax.

The machine is in his hand from the first frame to the last, and you never once look at it. That was the promise: technology disappears behind what people do with it.

Since the release of ChatGPT, the commercials have argued about the device instead, even at Apple. It was very common to see Gemini, ChatGPT or other LLMs / agents ad through Google and Samsung latest smartphones commercials. Apple did the same with Siri and AI (you know, that famous ‘Apple Intelligence’…) and some of them are remembered for the wrong reason (the ‘More Personal Siri’ with Bella Ramsey in 2024). In those, the product had become the subject, and the people were only there to say its name out loud.
Same as the unfamous ‘Crush!’ commercial, which was removed a few weeks after by Apple.

Then, on the 12th of November this year, Apple released ‘The Dreamer’.

It is the story of a boy who draws. On paper, in the margins, on walls, on shoes,… on anything, and all the time.
At school he hides a drawing behind a spreadsheet when the teacher walks past; later a classmate knocks over his sculpture, and he goes home and tears the drawings off his bedroom wall. Then come the months of work and the long evenings, and a Christmas gift from his parents: the MacBook Neo, the cheapest Mac in the lineup.
He photographs his old sketches with an iPhone, animates them on the laptop, and his mother watches from the doorway, exactly as she did when he was small.

Nearly four minutes, no dialogue, and I did not see a single AI feature. Also, the Apple devices are shown on screen for thirty seconds at most.¹

For less than four minutes, Apple sells a 699$ computer by showing a kid making something with his own hands, and it is (in my own opinion) the best advertisement the company has produced in years.
The computer does not make (or generate) anything for him, but it is a companion that helps him to fulfill his dreams.

The resemblance to ‘Misunderstood’ is not in the nostalgia, but it is in the shape. Here, a child filmed while the adults assume he is wasting his time, then proved right by what he made.
Apple used to know that this shape works, and nobody in Cupertino needed a voice assistant to make it work.

So yes, I loved ‘The Dreamer’, and I hope the next commercial looks like this one: a machine in somebody’s hands, a person who keeps at it, and nothing in the frame that has to explain itself.