The 20 best Apple adverts ever made, ranked

The best Apple adverts ever made start and end with a film that showed no product and aired nationally once: 1984, Ridley Scott’s Super Bowl launch for the Macintosh, is number one on this list and has been number one on most others for forty years. Behind it sit Think Different, the 1997 manifesto that won an Emmy before the iMac existed, and Get a Mac, the 66-spot sitcom that Adweek named campaign of the decade. All three came from the same lineage: Chiat/Day, then TBWAChiatDay, then TBWAMedia Arts Lab, the agency built in 2006 to serve one client.

This is Ad Ranking’s list of the twenty Apple commercials worth ranking, from a 1985 failure to a 2024 apology, and it includes both on purpose. The criteria are the ones we apply to any campaign: one idea a stranger could retell, craft that holds on a second viewing, bravery, evidence that it worked, and legs. Year, agency and director have been checked for every entry against trade coverage and award records. Where a director could not be verified, none is named.

20 to 11: Apple commercials ranked, including the two that went wrong

20. Apple: Crush! (2024)

To launch the thinnest iPad Pro on 7 May 2024, Apple’s in-house team filmed a hydraulic press flattening a piano, a trumpet, a record player, cameras, paint tins and an arcade cabinet until only a tablet remained. The craft is immaculate and the reading was catastrophic: Hugh Grant and the filmmaker Justine Bateman led a wave of creative people who saw technology crushing culture, and Apple’s marketing chief Tor Myhren told Ad Age, “We missed the mark with this video, and we’re sorry.” Plans to run it on television were dropped. Crown verdict: it is on this list because it is the most instructive Apple advert of the decade, a perfect demonstration film that forgot to ask how the demonstration would feel.

19. Apple: Lemmings (1985)

The sequel to 1984 was a Super Bowl film for Macintosh Office in which blindfolded executives trudge over a cliff to a dirge of Heigh-Ho, until one lifts his blindfold. Tony Scott directed for Chiat/Day and flew to Sweden for the clouds, John Sculley wanted it pulled, the agency argued that the board had hated 1984 too, and this time the board was right. The copywriter Steve Hayden later admitted, “you can’t make fun of the customers you’re trying to reach”. Crown verdict: the most famous failure in Apple’s advertising, and the reason the brand spent the next decade being nicer to the people it was selling to.

18. Apple: Detectives (2025)

Apple’s last film of 2025, posted on 31 December, sells the iPhone 17 Pro’s 8x optical-quality zoom, a 200mm equivalent that Apple calls its longest telephoto, by having a pair of detectives close a case through a series of increasingly long zooms. It is the Shot on iPhone lineage at its most literal: the feature is the plot. There is no line to remember and no star, and the spot is shorter than a minute and a half. Crown verdict: a well-made demonstration that belongs here as the current state of a decade-old campaign, rather than for anything it adds to it.

17. Apple: Fumble (2021)

A woman on a phone call drops her iPhone 12 in the street and the next thirty seconds are a juggling act down the street, set to Nitin Sawhney’s The Conference, until she catches it and carries on talking. The point is Ceramic Shield, the toughened front glass, and Apple made it without a single spec or a single word of copy until the end card. Released in March 2021, it is the best of a run of Ceramic Shield spots that all made the same joke. Crown verdict: a durability demo disguised as slapstick, and the closest Apple has come to a Buster Keaton routine.

16. Apple: Intention (2013)

The film that opened the WWDC keynote on 10 June 2013 has no product in it, only white words on a black screen and the question of what happens when everyone is busy making everything. It introduced the line “Designed by Apple in California” and the answer, “This is it. This is what matters.” It was made at the moment critics were asking whether Apple had lost its way after Steve Jobs, and it read as a company talking to itself as much as to customers. Crown verdict: a manifesto that borrowed the typography of Think Different and none of its heroes, and a reminder that Apple sells its own seriousness as a product.

15. Apple: Behind the Mac (2018)

Launched on 15 June 2018 with black-and-white portraits of the musician Grimes, the legally blind photographer Bruce Hall and Peter Kariuki, who built a motorbike-taxi safety app in Rwanda, the campaign put the laptop in the corner of the frame and the person in the middle. TBWAMedia Arts Lab has since made local editions in Japan, Korea and Britain, and the campaign took a D&AD Yellow Pencil in 2019. It is the calmest thing Apple does, which is why it has lasted. Crown verdict: the Mac’s answer to Shot on iPhone, a format rather than a film, and one that has never needed a celebrity to work.

14. Apple: Escape from the Office (2022)

The third Underdogs film, released on 10 March 2022, has the team quit their employer, Arca, launch a start-up called BetterBag and build a business on iPhone, iPad, Mac and Apple Business Essentials while their old boss tries to sabotage them. Mark Molloy directed again through Smuggler, and the film runs to short-comedy length rather than advert length. The product placement is relentless and somehow never breaks the story, which is the trick the series has always pulled off. Crown verdict: the best-plotted episode of the series, and proof that a B2B advert can be watched for pleasure.

13. Apple: Bounce (2019)

A commuter puts in AirPods and the pavement starts to give, so he bounces off benches, bins and a bus stop through the city to Tessellated’s I Learnt Some Jazz Today. Oscar Hudson directed through Pulse Films for TBWAMedia Arts Lab, building the streets six feet off the floor of an aircraft hangar in Kyiv so that the bounces could be done in camera over twelve days of shooting. It won a Gold Lion at Cannes in 2021. Crown verdict: a one-line idea, that music changes how the ground feels, made with the kind of physical craft everyone else would have faked.

12. Apple: Data Auction (2022)

A woman called Ellie wanders into a record shop and finds a door marked with her name, behind which an auctioneer is selling her emails, her purchases and her location to a room of eager bidders, until she taps Ask App Not to Track and the room empties. Ivan Zacharias directed through Smuggler for TBWAMedia Arts Lab, three years after his first privacy film for the brand, Private Side. It turned a policy fight with Meta into a costume drama. Crown verdict: the clearest explanation of the data economy anyone has broadcast, made by the one company with a commercial reason to explain it.

11. Apple: R.I.P. Leon (2022)

A man finds a lizard left in his care apparently dead, texts the owners that Leon has gone, and then Leon twitches, so he unsends the message in iOS 16 while the soundtrack mourns. Andreas Nilsson directed through Biscuit Filmworks, with Apple’s in-house team credited at the Emmys, and it won the Cannes Film Grand Prix in 2023. The feature, unsending a text, is about as small as a launch message gets, and the film is enormous. Crown verdict: the funniest Apple advert since Get a Mac, and the only Film Grand Prix ever won by a software update.

10 to 4: the greatest Apple ads, from a hangar to a stadium

10. Apple: The Greatest (2022)

Kim Gehrig’s film through Somesuch shows real disabled people using Apple’s accessibility features to get on with ordinary days, cut to a track built from Muhammad Ali’s “I am the greatest” speeches. It was credited to Apple’s own team and won the 2023 Emmy for Outstanding Commercial against two other Apple nominees. Nobody in it is presented as brave; they are presented as busy. Crown verdict: the best accessibility advert any company has made, because it treats the features as products rather than charity.

9. Apple: Welcome Home (2018)

Spike Jonze’s four-minute film for the HomePod, released on 6 March 2018, has FKA twigs come home from a grey commute, ask Siri to play something she would like, and dance through a flat that stretches, tilts and opens into colour to Anderson .Paak’s ‘Til It’s Over. It was a music video for a speaker, made by the director who defined music videos. The original HomePod was discontinued in 2021; the film is still passed around. Crown verdict: the most beautiful Apple advert of the decade, attached to the product that needed it most and benefited least.

8. Apple: Hello (2007)

The first iPhone commercial aired during the Academy Awards on 25 February 2007 and did not name the product: thirty seconds of film and television characters answering telephones, from Lucille Ball to Audrey Tautou’s “Bonjour”, ending on an iPhone with a call from John Appleseed and the words “Coming in June”. It was cut entirely from existing clips, shot nothing new and made the launch feel like the history of the telephone had been waiting for it. Crown verdict: the most confident product teaser ever broadcast, and a reminder that Apple’s best launches sell the moment rather than the object.

7. Apple: The Underdogs (2019)

Four office colleagues get a brutal deadline to pitch a round pizza box to a terrifying boss called Vivienne, and Mark Molloy’s film through Smuggler for TBWAMedia Arts Lab follows them through the night with every Apple product doing a job in the script rather than in a cutaway. The sequel, The Whole Working-From-Home Thing, arrived in July 2020 at seven minutes, shot under lockdown rules by the cinematographer Greig Fraser, and passed ten million views in two days. Molloy has said the product is treated as a character and never given a gratuitous shot. Crown verdict: the series that made enterprise advertising watchable, and the only Apple work with recurring characters since Get a Mac.

6. Apple: Shot on iPhone (2015)

World Gallery took photographs from 162 iPhone 6 owners and put them on more than 10,000 posters and billboards in 73 cities across 25 countries, with nothing on them but the picture, the photographer’s name and three words. It won the Outdoor Grand Prix at Cannes in 2015, the jury president calling it a game changer, and a decade later the same campaign took the Creative Effectiveness Grand Prix. It has since expanded into films by named directors and the recurring line under every user’s own post. Crown verdict: the best-executed idea in Apple’s history after 1984, because the customers make it and the product is the proof.

5. Apple: iPod Silhouettes (2003)

Black figures dancing against flat colour, white earphone wires drawn like a signature, and a song: TBWAChiatDay’s art director Susan Alinsangan, with James Vincent and Lee Clow, built the look in 2003 and launched the first television spot to the Black Eyed Peas’ Hey Mama. Jet’s Are You Gonna Be My Girl was re-released in Britain after its 2004 spot, and the campaign made Apple the most important music supervisor in advertising. The format ran for the rest of the decade on television, print and the sides of buildings. Crown verdict: the most recognisable visual identity any campaign has had, and the reason white earphones became a status symbol.

4. Apple: Misunderstood (2013)

A sullen teenager spends a family Christmas staring at his iPhone, until he plugs it into the television and it turns out he has been filming everyone all week. Lance Acord directed through Park Pictures for TBWAMedia Arts Lab and it won the 2014 Emmy for Outstanding Commercial against Nike and two Budweiser Super Bowl films. Our full review looks at how it turned the argument against phones into the argument for one. Crown verdict: the best product demonstration on this list, because the product is only visible once you know what it was doing.

The top three best Apple adverts ever made

3. Apple: Get a Mac (2006)

From May 2006 to October 2009, Justin Long’s Mac and John Hodgman’s PC stood on a white background and had a conversation, 66 times on air out of 323 shot, all directed by Phil Morrison of Epoch Films for TBWAMedia Arts Lab. The PC crashes, catches viruses and buries his claims in legal small print; the Mac is nice about it, which was the cruellest choice available. Britain got its own version with David Mitchell and Robert Webb, and Adweek named it the campaign of the decade in 2010. Crown verdict: the longest-running joke in advertising, and it stopped only when the punchline, that PCs were embarrassing, had become the market’s opinion.

2. Apple: Think Different (1997)

With Steve Jobs newly back and no new products to show, TBWAChiatDay’s Rob Siltanen and Ken Segall wrote “Here’s to the crazy ones” over black-and-white footage of Einstein, Dylan, Martin Luther King, Gandhi and Picasso, from an idea by the art director Craig Tanimoto and under Lee Clow. Jennifer Golub directed and Richard Dreyfuss narrated, and it debuted on 28 September 1997 before winning the 1998 Emmy for Outstanding Commercial. Our full review covers how a company nearly out of money bought itself a personality. Crown verdict: the manifesto every brand has tried to write since, and the only one where the company then lived up to it.

1. Apple: 1984 (1984)

Ridley Scott filled a Shepperton soundstage with London skinheads as the grey masses, cast the discus thrower Anya Major because she could actually swing the hammer, and had her shatter Big Brother’s screen during the third quarter of Super Bowl XVIII on 22 January 1984. Chiat/Day’s Steve Hayden wrote it, Brent Thomas art directed and Lee Clow ran the creative, and the Macintosh itself never appears. Apple’s board hated it, the agency could not offload the airtime, and the film ran once nationally and then forever in retrospectives, a story our full review tells in full. Crown verdict: the advert that invented the Super Bowl commercial as an event, and the standard every launch film on this list is still measured against.

Famous Apple ads that missed the cut

The Whole Working-From-Home Thing (2020) is covered inside The Underdogs entry, because the series is one idea. Quiet the Noise (2023, directed by Megaforce for AirPods) and Call Me (2023, Timothée Chalamet, directed by Tom Kuntz) were both Emmy nominees in the year The Greatest won, and lose out here for being very good rather than definitional. The Song (2014) and the stop-motion Fuzzy Feelings (2023) belong to the Christmas conversation rather than this one. Private Side (2019) is the funnier privacy film but Data Auction is the clearer one.

How we ranked these

Every film was scored on the idea, the craft, the bravery of the call, verified evidence of effect and staying power, with idea and legs weighted heaviest. That is why two campaigns that ran for years, Get a Mac and Shot on iPhone, sit above films with bigger single moments, and why a 1984 commercial that aired once outranks everything, because it is still being talked about.

Crush! and Lemmings are ranked as failures rather than excluded as embarrassments, on the grounds that a list of the best Apple adverts should say what the company learned. Directors and agencies are named only where trade coverage or award records confirm them, and the list is reviewed after each autumn iPhone launch.

Frequently asked

What is Apple’s most famous advert?

1984, Ridley Scott’s Super Bowl film for the Macintosh, is the most famous Apple advert and one of the most famous adverts of any kind. Think Different and the Get a Mac campaign are the two usually named after it.

Who makes Apple’s adverts?

TBWAMedia Arts Lab, a Los Angeles agency set up in 2006 to work only for Apple, makes most of them, continuing a relationship that began with Chiat/Day and 1984. Apple’s own marketing team is increasingly credited as the agency, including on The Greatest, R.I.P. Leon and the 2024 Crush! film.

Did the 1984 advert really only air once?

It aired nationally once, during Super Bowl XVIII on 22 January 1984, after a late-night airing on a single Idaho station in December 1983 to qualify for that year’s awards. It has been replayed in news coverage and award shows ever since, which is a different kind of media plan.

Why did Apple apologise for the Crush advert?

The May 2024 iPad Pro film showed musical instruments, books and cameras being flattened in a hydraulic press, and many artists read it as technology destroying creative culture. Apple’s marketing chief Tor Myhren apologised within days and the company dropped plans to run it on television.