Attempting to watch the MacBook Neo video on Apple’s website

I tried watching the MacBook Neo video on Apple’s website using Safari. I might try again another day…

I’m in Germany, my Mac is set to English, Apple’s website suggested switching the website’s language to Croatian. I declined to get rid of the banner, then started the video and took it full-screen.

The dark overlay and video-controls didn’t disappear until after the initial animations showing the new MacBook. I never got to see them properly. Then I noticed that subtitles were turned on by default. To turn them off, I had to interact with the controls, which made them stick around even longer. To avoid missing more of the video, I hit the space-bar to pause it. This turned subtitles back on because it was the last thing I’d interacted with on the website, and hitting the space-bar is the same as clicking on the currently active element. At this point, the video was at 45 Seconds.

A few moments later, I noticed that macOS had turned on 3D/Spacial-Audio, which I’ve turned off a billion times before and never turned on—ever! Whoever thought shipping a feature that ruins audio quality and at the same time makes it difficult to determine if the audio is actually mastered spatially, or turned into soup by the OS, please email me and explain.

To turn it off, I tried getting to Control Center by moving the pointer to the top edge of the display. Nothing happened. I had to leave full-screen, so I paused the video because I didn’t want to miss even more of it. Pausing, however, disabled 3D-Audio. To turn 3D-Audio off for this video, it had to be running. I resumed playback, opened Control Center, disabled 3D-Audio, switched back to Safari. At this point, I had missed 1:10 minutes of the video and was thoroughly annoyed.

If I was in Apple’s marketing team, I’d be livid. The video was clearly a lot of work, and the point is for people to watch it and feel good about buying an Apple product. This experience made me want to throw my Mac out the window.