The Dog Does the Work Apple Can’t

Every November, Apple drops its holiday ad and everyone watches it. This year it’s called Share Your Gifts, animated in a Pixar-adjacent style, and it’s about a girl who makes things—writes songs, draws, creates—and then hides everything in a box because she’s convinced it isn’t good enough. Her dog opens the window. Wind scatters her work across the neighborhood. People find it. They love it. She was wrong to hide it.

You can feel the corporate brief underneath the whole thing. Apple wants to sell you a MacBook, and the message "make things and share them using our products" is so perfectly aligned with their marketing that it barely registers as an ad anymore—just ambient ideology. And yet it works. It works because the anxiety it describes is real: most people who make things privately assume their work is too fragile or too precious or too embarrassing to show anyone. The leap from making to sharing is the actually hard part. The tools are almost incidental.

It also works because Billie Eilish’s Come Out and Play is the soundtrack, and that song is a perfectly calibrated piece of quiet encouragement—not inspirational in the poster-on-a-wall sense, but the way a friend might say something that lands differently than expected. Eilish was still a relative unknown at this point, which makes the choice feel less like a brand sync and more like someone at Apple actually had good taste that year.

There’s a small bonus in Apple finally centering a MacBook again instead of making their annual pitch that the iPad has replaced the computer. For everyone who actually makes things—design, writing, music, code—the laptop is still where the work happens. Nice of them to acknowledge it, even if it took a Christmas commercial to get there.