Apple floods TikTok with ‘brain rot’ videos
Summary created by Smart Answers AI
In summary:
- Apple launched an unconventional TikTok marketing campaign featuring 12 bizarre “brain rot” videos to promote the new MacBook Neo, including content like FaceTiming limes and blushing Apple logos.
- Macworld reports that this strategy specifically targets Generation Alpha and younger customers in the education market, marking a significant shift from Apple’s traditional marketing approach.
- The campaign focuses on the MacBook Neo’s unique positioning among a younger audience rather than technical specifications, although viewer reactions remain mixed.
Apple has released a slew of TikTok videos following the launch of the MacBook Neo last week, and they’re pretty bizarre. In fact, anyone older than Generation Alpha may find them completely incomprehensible.
Apple has been on TikTok since April 2020, but you wouldn’t know it by looking at the company’s account. He has a policy here and on other social networks of deleting all of his posts from time to time in order to clear the decks for a major launch, and there are currently only 12 videos there, all posted since the middle of last week.
Of the 12 videos, the first three are relatively normal, announcing the launch of the MacBook Neo, showing it unboxed, and summarizing its specs and features. But then things get strange.
The next three videos focus on Citrus, the Neo’s most eye-catching color finish. And the videos celebrate that with what those under 16 would call brain rot memes: “I love limes”; images of bubbles on citrus fruits, accompanied by strange noises; and a lime FaceTiming a lemon.
It’s enough to make a middle-aged journalist feel very confused and very old, and that’s probably the idea. Apple makes it clear that the MacBook Neo is aimed directly at younger customers and the education market in particular. As we’ve written elsewhere, if you question the technical specifications of the device, it’s not for you.
Compared to the citrus videos, the rest seems almost normal. But taken in isolation, they remain objectively strange.
The next three are for the blush pink color option, so we (obviously) get the iconic blushing Apple face logo and cute anime eyes; time-lapse footage of a pink sunrise accompanied by the Apple startup sound; and POV of someone putting on pink blush.
There’s a brief interlude for grainy footage apparently from the launch of the original Macintosh, with a binary caption that translates to the word “mother.” Then, to finish, we turn to the indigo color finish, which means images of dark blue stained hands and dark blue liquid flowing; and someone wearing dark blue jeans and incredibly loud shoes, revealing that they have a MacBook in their back pocket.
Comments on the videos are mixed. I’ve seen several asking if the Apple account was hacked, or even if everything was fine. But that seems like exactly the kind of reaction the company would have wanted. This draws attention on the one hand to the existence of the MacBook Neo, but on the other hand to the difference between the device and its predecessors.
