No such thing as bad press?
Apple’s new Crush! ad for its latest iPad received such a negative reaction that the company issued an apology just 2 days after its release, ditching plans to run it on TV, with Apple’s VP of marketing communications Tor Myhren conceding that the promo had “missed the mark”.
The one-minute video features various instruments of culture and creativity — a guitar, books, turntables, cameras, antiques — being pulverized by an industrial crushing machine, leaving only the new, admittedly very thin, iPad Pro in its wake. Some people wrote long indictments of the ad, outlining why it represented all that was bad about big tech, while others were more economical in their damnation: “Worst. Commercial. Ever.”
Rage bait
The tech giant now has an interesting opportunity to take the old “all publicity is good publicity” maxim out for a test drive. Preliminary Google Trends data suggests this might be the most buzzy bit of promotion that the iPad product line, quarterly sales of which peaked back in 2014, has had in years.
Indeed, it’s hard to imagine a world where Apple’s marketing execs didn’t see some kind of strong reaction to a striking visual of creative objects being destroyed. The fact that they’ve pulled the ad, however, weakens the deliberately provocative argument. It’s also just not very Apple — which has found success with upbeat, uplifting ads in days gone by.
For now, the ad still sits on CEO Tim Cook’s Twitter feed, having racked up nearly 60 million views and thousands of enraged replies.
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Alphabet, Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta plan to spend more than $700 billion on capex this year
Big Tech’s big capital spending continues to surge even higher than the companies had previously expected.
Alphabet raised its 2026 capex outlook to between $180 billion and $190 billion, up from $175 billion to $185 billion. Meta increased its 2026 forecast to $125 billion to $145 billion, up from $115 billion to $135 billion. Microsoft, meanwhile, said it’s planning on spending $190 billion this calendar year, about $55 billion more than the FactSet analyst consensus. Amazon, the lone outlier, didn’t boost its capex forecast, keeping it at a cool $200 billion.
Combined, Alphabet, Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta plan to spend more than $700 billion on capex in 2026, nearly double what they spent last year and $100 billion more than they’d expected just last quarter, as they continue to build out the AI infrastructure to support their AI futures.
Microsoft’s capex outlay this year would be enough to buy every outstanding share of Disney
CFO Amy Hood said on last night’s earnings call that the company will spend $190 billion on capex in 2026.
A tale of two capex increases: Why investors are responding to Google and Meta so differently
Two Big Tech companies posted stellar earnings and upped their capex forecasts. One stock is up, one is down.