Apple Launches ‘Convince Your Parents to Get You a Mac’ Short Film on YouTube, Then Pulls It a Day Later Without Explanation

Joe Rossignol at MacRumors:

Apple has marked its day-old The Parent Presentation video on YouTube as private, meaning that it is no longer available to watch. Apple has also moved The Parent Presentation to the bottom of its College Students page, effectively burying it. When we reported on the marketing campaign yesterday, the presentation was prominently featured at the top of the page.

It is unclear why Apple is suddenly hiding the ad, or if it will return. Apple did not immediately respond to our request for comment. On social media, some people said that the ad was cringe or gross, so perhaps Apple pulled the video due to overly negative reception. To be clear, this is merely speculation, and there were others who found humor in the video.

The 7.5-minute video, which at the moment is still available to watch from re-uploads on YouTube and X — stars Martin Herlihy from SNL’s “Please Don’t Destroy” triumvirate. I wouldn’t describe it as “cringe”, but I also wouldn’t describe it as “funny”. (If Herlihy wrote this, it would suggest that his cohorts Ben Marshall and John Higgins are the funny ones in the trio.) It’s also not the least bit offensive, so it really is unclear why Apple pulled it. If it’s because it’s not funny, how did it not only get approved and produced, but posted for 24 hours? Is Apple’s new marketing strategy to just publish new ads and then wait to see how the world reacts before deciding if they’re any good or not?

One obvious problem with “The Parent Presentation” video is that the gist is that everyone involved is stupid: high school kids (the ostensible target audience?) are too stupid to know how to ask their parents for a MacBook for college, parents are too stupid to know they should buy their kids a good laptop, and even Herlihy’s lecturer is a doofus who himself doesn’t know how to deliver a presentation. I don’t know how this got past the concept stage.

To top things off, the downloadable slide presentation — which Apple still has available in Keynote, PowerPoint, and Google Slides formats — is entirely typeset in Arial. I would take my son’s MacBook away from him if he came to me with a presentation set in Arial.

★ Sunday, 22 June 2025