Apple’s Underdogs ad is funny, but it has a message

There’s no sign of a blue screen of death in the most recent episode of the Apple at Work film series, but that’s not the only transformation buried in the tale.

The Underdogs series has always offered an amusing take on how digital technology is transforming the workplace. Through an Apple lens, the series shows the extent to which the platform enables hybrid workforces on a planet that is becoming increasingly asynchronous when it comes to productivity.

Apple goes APAC

Set in Thailand, the clip depicts the challenges of the modern workplace to explain how the seamless integration of Mac, iPhone, iPad, and Vision Pro can power up business today. Those products let the team source a new packaging factory, implement last-minute design changes, create 3D prototypes, bridge language gaps and more.

So far, it’s marketing — but it’s hard to ignore the extent to which the series, albeit in a light-hearted way, reflects the extent to which the workplace has changed and continues to evolve. 

Things have changed

Take product design. Not so long ago, designing something with a global team required sharing sometimes huge files, which takes time and bandwidth. Today, tools (such as Freeform) exist that enable creatives to collaborate on ideas remotely in real time, using a range of devices such as a Mac or Vision Pro. Product designers also benefit from the ability to create and share digital prototypes, including 3D models that can be explored on Vision Pro.

Beyond the creative departments, billing, invoicing, and credit control have all become tasks you can transact while travelling as long as you have a network connection. You can take and make payments with mobile devices and authorize remote access to any enterprise service using 2FA and/or biometric security. Tasks that once required dozens of devices can now all be transacted on a smartphone, even as integration between different platforms (smartphones, tablets, computers) improves. 

Accelerating change

This is changing the nature of work, and that change is being felt across platforms and operating systems. It makes it possible for knowledge workers of any stripe to focus on the task in front of them while using whatever device makes the most contextual sense for the situation. Ironically, that means the device used is becoming more invisible because the focus is on what needs to be done. Where you are, what device you use, and the time zone you are in mean less than before. 

To a great extent, many of these changes were already emerging in the mid-2000s, but the introduction in 2007 of true mobile computing in the form of the iPhone and the smartphones subsequent to it accelerated the momentum. 

To some extent, this digital transformation reflects some of the concepts Apple co-founder Steve Jobs visualized, a then hard-to-accept future in which people “spend more time with their PCs than with their cars,” he correctly predicted in 1983.

Focus drives the attention economy

The transition from computer to an ecosystem of equally capable devices simply extended that change; and in the new workplace, the tasks we are attempting are, in a sense, no longer defined by the PC.

This is the kind of reality Apple is exploring in its latest work-focused ad — and it’s only a matter of time until the industrial equipment used in manufacturing companies also gains its own Apple logo. The Apple Car-related autonomous vehicle research the company spent billions on will be deployed in some useful manner, eventually. Perhaps it is time manufacturing became another space where AI, autonomy, and Apple’s multitude of digital platforms makes a difference.

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