Apple

It boils down to this: the ad was a visually detailed and drawn out destruction of things some people like and are not easily replaced. These are physical objects that people genuinely have emotional attachments to. So it's musicians and photographers who probably had the strongest visceral response: the type of people who kept obsolete devices past their obsolescence because that was the physical artifact of the thing they learned their craft on.

I know software developers who would've had the same visceral reaction to a Commodore 64 or Apple II or NES being slowly destroyed. Or even other gadgets that people loved, from a Walkman to an iPod to a Tamagotchi to original iPhone.

It's not like the scene from Office Space where there's visceral disgust for the thing being destroyed, but precisely the opposite emotions involved.

It was so so long and drawn out. All that you said and the length of it was painful.

What’s a word for something beyond soft?

You have basically described how everyone who has seen the ad cannot understand the concepts of nuance or metaphor, for these are not what they criticize.

Don’t get me wrong: I don’t like the ad, either, mostly just because I don’t like ads in general. I just find this one pretentious redirect once again, and I’m bored. It tries to cram a tired message into an overwrought concept so they can avoid saying the same thing for the 20th time: it’s a bit faster and does bit more than the previous model.

But just because the ad is dumb and boring and overwrought doesn’t mean that some of these rather absurd criticisms are valid, either. Hugh Grant criticized it as a ‘destruction of the human experience’.

Really

sigh

Edit: I want to explain this further—

The ad tried to employ the visual metaphor of “constructive destruction” in that they were distilling that closet/room full of creative hardware into the iPad— but so much focus was on the destruction of it all and so little on the results of that “distillation” that the ad just comes of communicating that the new iPads are fucking dreamkillers. Hard sell! Or that all of your hard work or that all of the “real tools” that creatives break their backs with are meaningless nothings to Apple… lots of bad symbolism there.

Apple (or their ad agency) was likely going for the fruit > blender > delicious smoothie visual metaphor and missed by a lightyear. My brothers and sisters in the Flying Spaghetti Monster, people are getting fired over this. Wow.