Apple has updated the videos on social media, including YouTube, for the iPhone 14 and iPhone 14 Plus launch ad. The original ads used a snippet of the song Biggest by Idris Elba, with lyrics repeating the word ‘Biggest’.
However, the way the way the word was said in the song meant some people instead heard an offensive racial slur. It became somewhat of a viral meme almost immediately after the ad came out in September. Two months on, though, Apple has responded by removing the vocals from the ad’s soundtrack entirely.
If you watch the iPhone 14 & iPhone 14 Plus launch ad on YouTube today, you now hear no vocals at all. Instead, just the instrumental backing track is played throughout the duration of the video. This doesn’t really fit the beats of the scenes of the ad anymore, but was obviously done to avoid the unintended confusion of words noticed by many.
Apple still credits the Elba song in the description of the video, but all that can be heard is the backing track.
The original lyrics went something like ‘Biggest, biggest, biggest, biggest, biggest, it’s the biggest bounce of the summer’. This was obviously a reference to the ‘biggest’ launch of a new iPhone yet, with the introduction of the larger screen 6.7-inch iPhone 14 Plus. But without context, the pronounced syllables of ‘biggest’ overlaid with the music meant that people could instead hear the n-word.
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