For a company that prides itself on decades of advertising prowess, 2024 has been a bumpy year for the tech giant Apple. In May, the company was forced to apologise over an iPad ad that featured a slew of creative tools including musical instruments, cameras, and books being crushed by a hydraulic press, with the suggestion that all these items could be replaced by the new iPad Pro. Then, in July, Apple released a longform advertisement set in Thailand which showcased the benefits of using its products for remote work. The ad was pulled due to its “outdated and stereotyped” portrayal of Thailand.
Media commentary on these two incidents has largely treated the controversies as parts of a whole, crafting a narrative of a company that has missed the mark with its advertising message recently. Even just the surface-level overview of the ads provided above, however, shows that there were two quite distinct issues at play. While the iPad ad struck a nerve among creative professionals who feel that technology, including artificial intelligence, is increasingly threatening their livelihoods and dehumanising creative pursuits, the Thailand ad was the target of backlash from within Thailand among onlookers who felt that the ad presented a negative image of the country. This begs the question – what can an Asian Studies lens reveal about the latter incident and how Asia is represented and imagined in the context of Western technology brands more broadly?
Lost in the Translation App
The ad itself is the latest instalment of Apple’s ongoing advertisement-turned-miniseries ‘The Underdogs’ which feature an unlikely band of four office workers who overcome various work hurdles with the help of Apple products and features. It follows the group as they head to Thailand on a penny-pinching business trip in search of a product manufacturer. Titled ‘Out of Office’, the 10-minute feature makes light of the various struggles involved with business travel including lost baggage, jet lag, and language barriers. These struggles take on an additional layer of meaning in the Thai context, however, given longstanding stereotypes of Thailand as a naturally beautiful yet ultimately unglamorous holiday destination. The characters eat tarantulas, precariously travel cross-country in a tuk tuk, and express disdain when their hotel, called the Sunrise Paradise Resort, looks nothing like the photos. In addition to this, segments of the ad are shot behind a sepia filter; a look which has become a trope used predominantly by Western filmmakers to portray a sense of difference when shooting in less-developed countries.
Combined, these stereotypes meant that reactions to the ad within Thailand were largely critical. The spokesperson of a Thai House committee on tourism stated that “ the government has a policy to promote soft power, but the advertisement severely affects Thailand’s image”, and one Thai lawmaker argued “Thai people are deeply unhappy with the advertisement. I encourage Thai people to stop using Apple products and change to other brands”.
Put simply, it was the orientalism imbued within the ad that sparked a backlash among Thai audiences. As Edward Said argues in his foundational 1979 work, orientalism encourages “positional superiority”, wherein the West is “placed in a whole series of relationships with the Orient without ever losing the relative upper hand”. In presenting Thailand as a somewhat backwards, impenetrable land of cultural difference, the ad, as Apple themselves stated in their apology, “failed to present the Thai way of life in a complete and appropriate manner”.
Designed by Us, Made by Them
In particular, the ad displays a type of orientalism known as ‘techno-orientalism’, a sub-field that emerged in the 1990s in the context of Asia’s rapid industrial and technological rise in the postwar era. As David S Roh et al argue in their 2015 book, a techno-orientalist lens suggests that even when Asian countries and people adopt advanced technology, the way in which they engage with this technology is ‘Asianised’, and distinctly different to the way that Western culture creates and manages technological development.
Techno-orientalist depictions of Asia often present Asian countries as ‘factories’ of the West; monolithic machines that turn Western ideas into reality, or as contradictory spaces where modern technology clashes with traditional cultural stereotypes – what Roh et al call the “premodern-hypermodern dynamic”. This logic has proved extremely pervasive. Recent examples of cultural products that reflect these themes include the 2021 and 2024 Dune films, the 2023 sci-fi film The Creator, and recent videogames Stray and Cyberpunk 2077. For its part, the Apple ad plays into these tropes by depicting Thailand first and foremost as an outsourcing destination for an American manufacturing company. A chaotic pastiche of Thai culture is positioned alongside efficient manufacturing companies that fulfill the increasingly outlandish requests of the main characters with a smile.
More broadly Apple themselves have long reflected techno-orientalist tropes, albeit subtly, in the way that they package and brand their products. Anyone opening an Apple packaging box will have most likely been greeted by the words: “Designed by Apple in California” followed below by: “Assembled in China”. The “Designed by Apple in California” tagline has become so central to Apple’s brand identity that it was the name given to the company’s first in-house product design book. In the context of the packaging, however, a clear divide is created between design, which takes place in California, and assembly, which (mostly) takes place in China. The creative elements of the technological process occur firmly in the West, whilst the labour-intensive, knowledge-light process of assembly is outsourced to factory Asia.
Out of Office, or Out of Time?
Recently, however, Western technology companies, including Apple, have been forced to confront the factory Asia model largely due to the American-led push to shift critical supply chains away from China for security reasons. Trade tensions between the West and China have raised the threat of sanctions, prompting companies to diversify their supply chains and spread their risk across multiple production locations, in what is becoming known as a ‘China-plus-one’ strategy. These changing tides were a significant factor in Apple CEO Tim Cook’s high-profile visit to India in May of 2024, where he opened the company’s first two retail stores in the country. The release of the iPhone 16 series in September 2024 brings India’s share of Apple’s global production to 14%, up from 7% in 2023, and Apple plans to increase this to 25% by 2025. Furthermore, the iPhone 16 series marks the first time that iPhones made in India will ship globally from release in tandem with their Chinese counterparts.
Alongside India and Vietnam, Thailand has become a destination that is viewed favourably by technology companies looking to diversify their supply chains, increasing the stakes as Apple’s reputation in the country takes a hit over the ad. The misstep is yet to impact the company’s blossoming relationship with the Thai government, however, with the country’s then-Prime Minister, Srettha Thavisin, remained balanced in his comments and urging citizens to “look at the positive side. Apple has shown a real intention to do business in Thailand”. These comments are in line with the former Prime Minister’s efforts to forge a personal relationship with Apple, which opened its first retail store in the country in 2018. In a 2023 tweet, he referenced a letter that he received from Cook directly, stating that “[Cook] said Thailand has the potential and preparedness, coupled with government support in related areas, such as education, industry, and labour. This brings me confidence that cooperation with Apple will come true”. Apple’s diversification efforts synergise nicely with the Thai government’s broader push to court businesses relocating their supply chains away from China and towards ‘friendlier’ countries as part of the government’s strategy to make the country a logistics hub.
Far From the Tree
Economic and geopolitical posturing between the US and China takes place in a world that is increasingly connected by intricate supply chains, the shape of which Apple in many ways pioneered when it first began manufacturing overseas at a time when the overriding international economic trend was one of globalisation. The advertisement itself is therefore somewhat of a microcosm for Apple and other companies’ struggles to diversify away from China in the context of hawkish predictions of a looming ‘new Cold War’ and rising protectionism globally. As the band of office workers head off to Thailand in search of a new manufacturing destination, they unwittingly mirror the efforts of Apple and others who rely heavily on China and other Asian countries for their manufacturing needs, yet continue to lean on oversimplified vignettes of how these Asian countries actually operate in shaping their views of the region.
The backlash to Apple’s ad provides insight into the struggles that Western technology firms face in diversifying away from China; a task that has become all the more pressing in the context of deteriorating US-China ties and rising economic nationalism. Countries throughout Asia, and particularly in Southeast Asia, are keen to court the manufacturing business of Western companies, and America’s government is eager to encourage these links in pursuit of its own ‘derisking’ goals. Yet the two camps risk talking past each other if companies and governments fail to deconstruct the monolithic techno-orientalist imaginary that is ‘factory Asia’. Countries such as India and Thailand are much more complex than simply being ‘not China’, and forging deeper links between Western companies and their counterparts throughout Asia will take time. As Apple’s Thailand stumble may have highlighted, this task requires deep knowledge and experience of the region, not just sojourners on a stint ‘out of office’.
Image: Photo by Bach Nguyen on Unsplash
