Apple floods TikTok with ‘brain rot’ videos

Apple has posted a flurry of TikTok videos following the launch of the MacBook Neo last week, and they’re pretty bizarre. In fact, anyone older than Gen Alpha may find them entirely incomprehensible.

Apple has been on TikTok since April 2020, but you wouldn’t know it to look at the company’s account. It has a policy, here and on other social media networks, of deleting all of its posts from time to time in order to clear the decks for a major launch, and there are currently just 12 videos on there, all posted since the middle of last week.

Of the 12 videos, the first three are relatively normal, announcing the launch of the MacBook Neo, showing it being unboxed, and summarising its specs and features. But then things get strange.

The next three videos focus on citrus, the most eye-catching of the Neo’s color finishes. And the videos celebrate this with what those under the age of 16 would call brain-rot memes: “I love limes;” images of bubbles on citrus fruit, with strange accompanying noises; and a lime FaceTiming a lemon.

It’s enough to make a middle-aged journalist feel very confused and very old, and that’s probably the idea. Apple is making it clear that the MacBook Neo is targeted squarely at young customers and the education market in particular. As we’ve written elsewhere, if you’re questioning the tech specs of the device, it’s not for you.

Compared to the citrus videos, the rest seem almost normal. But in isolation, they’re still objectively odd.

The next three are about the blush pink color option, so we get (obviously) Apple’s iconic face logo blushing and getting cute anime eyes; sped-up footage of a pink sunrise accompanied by the Apple startup sound; and POV of someone putting on pink blusher.

There’s a brief interlude for grainy footage seemingly from the launch of the original Macintosh, with a binary caption that translates into the word “mother.” Then to finish, we turn to the indigo color finish, which means images of hands stained dark blue, and some sloshing dark blue liquid; and someone wearing dark blue jeans and incredibly noisy shoes revealing they have a MacBook in their back pocket.

The comments on the videos are mixed. I saw several asking if Apple’s account had been hacked, or even if everything was okay. But it seems like exactly the sort of reaction the company would have wanted. It’s drawing attention firstly to the MacBook Neo’s existence, but secondly to how different the device is from what’s come before.