Apple erases hand from OLED iPad mini ads in South Korea to avoid backlash

Apple appears to have made a small but telling regional change to the marketing for its new iPad mini (A20 Pro). The company's Korean website has dropped the hand from a promotional image showcasing how thin the new tablet is, leaving only the device itself.

On Apple's China site, on the other hand, the hand is there, just as in the US, and it is pinching the tablet between the index finger and the thumb. The image is meant to show off the new iPad mini's svelte 5.4 mm profile. The Korean version of the same poster shows no hand at all.

The likely reason is the gesture itself, as in South Korea, forming a "C" shape with the index finger and the thumb is considered offensive by some. The promo of MapleStory, for instance, featured a gesture resembling the C shape, and its developer Nexon had to publicly apologize.

The episode showed how quickly a seemingly harmless image can turn into a public controversy in Korea's rather heated online climate. The way a hand grips the iPad in Apple's original image bears some resemblance to it, and Apple evidently decided it wasn't worth the risk. The new OLED iPad mini is, after all, more expensive than its previous mini tablet with LCD display that got discounted on Amazon. 

This isn't the first time Apple has done this, too, as it made a similar regional adjustment around the launch of the iPhone Air, which suggests Apple now treats the gesture as a standing item on its localization checklist rather than an accidental fix. For a global brand, the cost of being wrong is far higher than the cost of editing a picture, so removing the hand takes little effort and avoids a possible social media backlash and an awkward apology.

The sheer fact that Apple is going through the effort also shows how much work goes into worldwide product rollouts. Behind a single launch announcement, the regional teams quietly adapt images, wording, and details to local sensitivities. Usually these adjustments go unnoticed unless one is browsing to compare regional prices or just stumbles across a difference accidentally, but in the case of South Korea, editing the offensive hand gesture in promotional images has seemingly become a pattern when Apple has to showcase the elegant nature of this or that new device it is launching.