You know there are reproductions of those arcade cabinets right? And used instruments cost hundreds, not thousands. A guitar with a broken neck or stripped screws could be propped up long enough for a scene such as this and be useless to actually play. And busted pianos are easy enough to find.

THESE are the sort of comments I come to HN for, and I am just drinking it up.

Technology is going to keep marching forward as it always has. Most of the gadgets being destroyed in the ad are fairly recent innovations. And they had already done their fair share of disruption too. Speakers made live music less necessary, cameras made portrait painting less popular, and typewriters started the slow death of handwriting.

Should we mourn their technological predecessors or recognize we live in an ever-changing world we've only seen a small snapshot of?

And so ad where a guitar and some camera lenses are destroyed isn't "soul-crushing". Saying that is being overly dramatic.

I’ve never seen a guitar under about $300US new that was actually playable without some serious attention from a guitar shop, and on the lower end they’ll probably just tell you there’s not much they can do to make it better. They may need frets filed down to remove rough edges, neck adjustments, to simply have the tuners replaced because they’re so poorly-made they basically don’t work, et c.

Guitars that cheap are similar to crappy small-key $40-80 electronic keyboards that can only sound like three notes at a time and sound terrible doing it—they’re so bad that they will tend to frustrate and turn off even a beginner.

I am quite confident that a skilled musician with an iPad (or, even more obviously, an electric keyboard with a MIDI cable to the iPad) can create music that is indistinguishable from a human playing a piano. The synthesizer will be able to replicate the sound of the best concert grand in the best auditorium, direct to your studio headphones.

I'm also quite sure even unskilled musicians will prefer the feel of practicing and playing on a slightly out-of-tune old upright to a cheap electric synth-action keyboard or (ugh) a glass touchscreen.

It's just a tool.

If you think of yourself as skeptical, agnostic, materialist. I don’t understand how you can be upset about cheap in-animate objects get destroyed for an entertaining video.