adobe photoshop ipad pro presentation smile

Adobe’s Clueless iPad Pro Demo: “Let’s Just Give Her a Little Bit More of a Smile”

Using tech to manipulate women more to your liking? Ew.

Jessica Lachenal

Published: Sep 10, 2015 11:16 am

This article is over 9 years old and may contain outdated information

Dude on stage at the #AppleEvent literally using #iPadPro to make a woman smile. No women on stage yet. …

— The Mary Sue Live (@TheMarySueLive) September 9, 2015

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Yesterday, Apple had a major unveiling event in which they revealed a brand new iPad, called the iPad Pro. To demonstrate its processing power, they had a representative from Adobe use Photoshop on the iPad Pro to digitally touch up some photos of a woman for a magazine spread. That touching up involved manipulating the photo to “just give her a little bit more of a smile.”

Yeah. You read that right. Someone essentially thought a woman should smile more, so they decided to digitally manipulate a photo to do it. And they did so to thunderous applause.

Adobe’s VP of Products and Community, Scott Belsky, replied on Twitter to some people tweeting about the presentation.

@drew i know team never meant for photoshop demo to be offensive. #1 use of retouch apps is for selfies, intention was to show off the tech — Scott Belsky (@scottbelsky) September 9, 2015

@drew watching live, got excited seeing ppl like feature and retweeted. but I agree, don’t like the “make someone smile” context. At all. — Scott Belsky (@scottbelsky) September 9, 2015

Many of the women that are on stage are only there as demonstration tools on the products’ screens. This presentation was no different. In fact, up to this point, there were no women at all on stage to present. To their credit, though, they had a female doctor on stage directly after that demo to explain the medical uses of such a powerful tool.

There we go. pic.twitter.com/RflxCIBcPX — The Mary Sue Live (@TheMarySueLive) September 9, 2015

To be honest, what they did was tone deaf. Apple’s long been criticized for constantly having only men on stage during their presentations, so to have a demo like this just kind of shows how they really don’t get it. I guess the tl;dr here is:

Thanks, Broad City.

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Author

Jessica Lachenal

Jessica Lachenal is a writer who doesn’t talk about herself a lot, so she isn’t quite sure how biographical info panels should work. But here we go anyway. She's the Weekend Editor for The Mary Sue, a Contributing Writer for The Bold Italic (thebolditalic.com), and a Staff Writer for Spinning Platters (spinningplatters.com). She's also been featured in Model View Culture and Frontiers LA magazine, and on Autostraddle. She hopes this has been as awkward for you as it has been for her.