I found it super ironic how they blathered on about all of the recycling going on in their products, then blatently show all those items being destroyed when they could clearly be recycled.
I do think that the 'rendered' idea was the best - almost thinking differently, or something...:S
It's an animation of items being destroyed. It's very fake and Apple used an exaggerated cartoon style animation so it couldn't get mistaken for reality.
It's like getting mad at road runner for dropping a piano on Wile E Coyote.
It's not about the actual instruments that probably weren't actually destroyed to make the ad. No one is mad about that. The visual of instruments being pointlessly destroyed can be viscerally upsetting. Just because you have no emotional attachment to such objects doesn't mean other people do not.
I wouldn't think most (if any of it) was real. At the most I'd expect they were destructive props in the same way the table with the legs sawn to break in the just the right way for a movie stunt is a "real" table, but not a "real table".
As the other comment says, the cans would never crush flat before the piano starts to deform at all. Then when the front of the piano comes open, a pile of all the dampers just falls out, despite that area not being touched yet. It's all done to look exciting but not realistic.
Yes. Why in the world would a director use practical effects for something like this?
The CG isn't even that good. It looks like something out of DALL-E.
It calls to mind yet another way in which the ad could have been crafted to communicate without controversy or offense -- the instruments could have been more obviously cartoons.
I do think that the 'rendered' idea was the best - almost thinking differently, or something...:S