Commercials are clever things: tiny movies designed to provoke a reaction in a matter of seconds. Done badly, and they are crass or annoying. But done well, they offer something profound and meaningful.
The new Apple holiday ad is out. And it’s a winner. Sometimes the Apple holiday ad is abstract, sometimes it’s an animation (like the brilliant one with the Billie Eilish song), or a flight-of-fancy metaphor with stunning dancers seeming to take flight.
It’s always unpredictable. This year’s is called Heartstrings and it touches on a profound subject, hearing loss, and Apple’s remarkable response to it. This response is the recently introduced Hearing Test for Apple AirPods Pro 2—one earbud is the only visible product placement in the ad—and the fact that those headphones are now established as a clinical-grade hearing aid in some countries.
I’ve tried the Hearing Test feature and it’s a simple, effective five-minute test which helps assess how your hearing’s doing. If you have AirPods Pro 2, you should do it. It’s already available in many countries and comes to the U.
K., for instance, with iOS 18.2 in December.
And the ad touches on something important: we know that AirPods Pro 2 offer great listening capabilities for music, we know they have spatial audio, that when you take one out of your ear, the music pauses and that the active noise cancellation is spectacular. But in the commercial we see a father with hearing loss unable to properly hear the joy.
