Why Apple's new iPad ad is change you can't believe in

Technically Incorrect offers a slightly twisted take on the tech that's taken over our lives.

Have you ever tuned someone out?

You hear them, but you don't. They're there, but for you, they're not.

Yes, mom. I know.

That's the difficult scenario that Apple is enduring with the iPad. In so few years, people feel like they know it. They have their uses for it. They're perfectly comfortable with what it does for them. And they don't really need a new one because there isn't a new one that offers anything radically different.

So as Apple attempts to renew interest in the slightly taken-for-granted product, its effort is that of a half-hearted mom. She knows that her kid has grown up and the touches of protruding stubble on his chin mean that he's about to do things for himself and by himself. (He already is. He just hasn't told her.)

Whatever she tells him will be tuned out. And woe betide if she uses logic, because that will get tiny shrift.

The new iPad ad Apple has released tries to show logical, even inspired uses.

But are too many people going to be moved to trot excitedly to their Apple store because it'll help them with their domestic chores, their gardening or even signing contracts on a plane?

Don't people sort of know? Should they feel a need for that particular form factor, they'll buy one.

But as phones get bigger and Apple wants you to stare down at your tiny new little Watch, however silly you look answering a call on it, what can it possibly say about the iPad that will make people suddenly pay attention?

This ad is maintenance and it does feel half-hearted.

There's something slightly disingenuous in claiming, as Apple does, that "Everything Changes With iPad," when you're simultaneously claiming that, actually, everything's really changing with the Apple Watch.

iPads are simply there. Less personal than a phone and slightly more personal than a laptop. They're part of the furniture, but they don't necessarily say anything about us.

So we use them and we use them and we use them, even admitting at rare times we're grateful for them.

Yes, just like our moms.