With its new iPad Pro ad, Apple is offering us the thin end of the wedge | Alex Clark

Maybe it's my age, but the company's brash new vision of digital minimalism looks like a portal to a sad and lonely world

It was my birthday last week, and being these days a quiet rural dweller with a sweet pea obsession rather than the inner-city Dorothy Parker wannabe of yesteryear, I welcomed my appropriately gentle gifts: flowers, plants, an original exhibition catalogue from decades ago, some scent promising to recreate beach walks. I counted among my blessings a recent eye test that showed no further deterioration, an unbroken Duolingo streak (Irish), a roof repair that seems to be holding - what we might call the joy of things not getting worse, small triumphs that often feel disproportionately large and lucky.

On the same day, Apple CEO Tim Cook appeared to suggest that I have little need for all the funny little old-world analogue stuff that I hold dear. In an advertisement for the new iPad Pro - the chief attribute of which, according to same, is that it is extremely thin, indeed the thinnest it has ever been - viewers were treated to a hellish sight: a platform crammed with musical instruments, cameras, games, paints, a record player, an artist's mannikin, all reduced to splinters and dust beneath a giant industrial crusher. Get rid of all that crap, it seemed to say, for here is a gadget that renders the whole lot obsolete.