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Thanksgiving has come and gone and the first weekend of Advent has signaled the beginning of the season of preparation. Although it’s just begun, we may have already seen the best Christmas advertisement of 2024, released by Apple on Thanksgiving Day. Not only does it focus on a beautiful family moment, it is filled with pro-life sentiment as well.
The advertisement, titled “Heartstrings,” is for the AirPods Pro 2, the latest iteration of Apple’s wireless headset that is being pitched as an alternative to hearing aids for the hearing impaired. While this is an excellent new feature, it is the heartwarming way that Apple introduced the new product that has captured the public’s attention, garnering nearly 8.4 million views in just four days since its release.
The brief, two-minute ad begins with a teen girl being presented with a brand new guitar for Christmas. While she unwraps the gift, the dialogue between her and her mother becomes a little muffled as the focus turns to her father, sitting on a couch and remembering memorable moments from her childhood.
In a similarly muffled montage, we see his daughter unwrapping a toy guitar as a toddler, sitting at a piano, saying some of her first words when she was really little, and pointing to the sky to say something that we can just barely make out as ending with “daddy,” but little can be heard besides that she’s talking to her father.
When his wife indicates to him that his daughter is playing her new guitar, he takes out the AirPods and suddenly the whole soundscape of the commercial comes into focus. Now he can hear not just his daughter’s song, but the sounds of all the moments he could not hear as she was growing up.
While the product has received praise for offering a hearing aid option that has less of a stigma attached to it than the bulky, ear cavity filling hearing aids of yore, we are more than happy to praise it for offering an innocent and heartwarming view of a family simply enjoying one another’s company. Meanwhile, the grateful tear in the father’s eye after remembering the joy of watching his little one grow into a talented musician is a beautiful pro-life message that cannot be denied.
