The Underdogs: OOO (Out of Office) is a roughly 10-minute film released in July 2024 as part of Apple’s Apple at Work campaign. It follows a design team racing through Thailand to solve a packaging crisis using a Mac, iPhone, iPad and Apple Vision Pro.
The joke is that an ordinary workplace assignment is staged like an action thriller. The serious pitch is that Apple’s real product is not any one device, but an integrated environment in which work can move between devices, people and locations with minimal friction.
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Which Underdogs ad is this?
“The Underdogs ad” can refer to several films in Apple’s recurring workplace campaign. The headline most directly refers to The Underdogs: OOO (Out of Office), released in July 2024.
It is the fifth entry in the fictional team’s story, following earlier films including the original 2019 commercial and 2023’s Swiped Mac. The 2024 film moves the characters out of their normal office and into Thailand, where they must find a new packaging factory and complete major changes for a client under intense time pressure.
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Apple’s in-house creative team made the film with director Mark Molloy through Smuggler LA, according to Campaign. It is workplace advertising presented in the form of a short comedy adventure.
A packaging crisis staged like a caper
The plot is simple enough to support a large number of product demonstrations. The team is away from its familiar office when the client changes the packaging requirements. It must locate a new manufacturing partner, communicate across language barriers, revise the design, create or inspect prototypes and keep the project moving.
Mac, iPhone and iPad appear as parts of that process rather than as isolated products in a catalogue. Apple Vision Pro is used to present spatial or three-dimensional work and to interact with several virtual windows. The film turns design revisions, calls, translation and travel logistics into a chain of urgent obstacles.
That transformation is the central comic device. A normal business problem is given the rhythm of a chase movie. The characters panic over changing requirements, react to small setbacks as if the fate of the company were at stake, and continue working through a series of increasingly unlikely complications.
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The comedy depends on contrast.
- Routine work becomes high drama. A packaging assignment is filmed like a thriller.
- The team is capable but chaotic. Its members can solve problems, but they make enough mistakes and overreact enough to remain entertaining.
- The technology stays calm. Apple’s interfaces appear polished and dependable while the humans around them become increasingly frantic.
- The products have narrative jobs. A device is not simply shown in close-up; it helps the team communicate, revise, present or coordinate.
- The recurring cast creates familiarity. Viewers who have seen earlier films understand the team’s personalities and the campaign’s comic rhythm immediately.
The humour is therefore not separate from the sales argument. It makes a long product demonstration watchable. Instead of saying that Apple devices support collaboration, the film gives viewers a crisis in which collaboration is visibly happening.
The message beneath the product placement
The strongest reading of the film is not merely “Apple products help employees work faster.” Its larger proposition is that work is becoming distributed, mobile, asynchronous and less tied to one particular computer.
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The Computerworld commentary identified this shift directly: the task increasingly matters more than the machine being used to perform it. An employee might begin work on a Mac, continue on an iPhone, present on an iPad and use Vision Pro for spatial material, while the project remains conceptually continuous.
That is Apple’s strategic message in OOO. The company is selling a connected workflow:
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| Product | Role in the film’s argument |
|---|---|
| Mac | Demanding design, administration and core creative work. |
| iPhone | Communication, travel, identity and quick decisions. |
| iPad | Portable work, review and presentation. |
| Apple Vision Pro | Spatial or three-dimensional work, multitasking and immersive presentation. |
The individual capabilities matter, but the real pitch is continuity between them. Apple wants viewers to imagine that the devices form one workplace that is available wherever the team happens to be.
How the Underdogs campaign has evolved
The series has gradually expanded Apple’s workplace story:
- 2019: The original Apple at Work—The Underdogs followed the team racing to develop a “round box” concept using Apple hardware and software. AppleInsider covered the original campaign.
- 2020: A follow-up continued the fictional team and recurring workplace narrative.
- 2023: Swiped Mac shifted the crisis toward security, with the characters trying to recover a stolen Mac.
- 2024: OOO widened the setting internationally and added Vision Pro, translation, travel and spatial collaboration to the campaign’s vocabulary.
The progression is useful to Apple. A familiar cast allows the company to introduce a different strategic theme without starting from scratch. General productivity becomes security; security becomes mobility and spatial computing. The format makes new products feel like natural additions to an ongoing workplace rather than separate launches.
A B2B ad disguised as entertainment
OOO is workplace-focused and B2B-oriented, but it does not look like conventional enterprise advertising. It does not lead with deployment, procurement, total cost of ownership or device-management policies. Instead, it shows a team coping with deadlines and changing requirements.
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That gives the film three audiences at once:
- Business decision-makers see a pitch for a coherent technology environment.
- Knowledge workers and creatives see familiar frustrations dramatized as comedy.
- General viewers can follow the characters even without caring about enterprise software.
This hybrid format is one of the campaign’s strengths. It makes a B2B proposition emotionally legible. Apple is not asking viewers to remember a list of specifications; it is asking them to associate the brand with creativity, competence and composure under pressure.
What the film gets right about modern work
The commercial exaggerates, but its underlying observations are recognizable. Teams do work across locations and time zones. Product development often involves rapid iteration. Employees switch devices depending on whether they are designing, travelling, presenting or communicating. Digital prototypes can shorten the distance between an idea and a physical object.
Those are real changes in how many organizations operate. The office is no longer necessarily the place where every stage of work occurs, and mobile devices handle tasks that once belonged exclusively to desktop computers.
But these observations do not prove that Apple uniquely solves the problem. They describe a workplace trend first; they support Apple’s commercial conclusion only indirectly.
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Where the message becomes aspirational
The film presents a particularly frictionless version of collaboration. Everyone appears to have the right hardware, the necessary permissions and a shared understanding of the tools. The technology works at exactly the moment the story needs it.
Real organizations face questions that the film largely omits:
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- How are devices purchased, approved and replaced?
- Can the organization manage access, security and data governance across locations?
- Do the required apps work with existing Windows, Android or mixed-platform systems?
- How reliable are the network connections and translation tools in practice?
- Who handles training, accessibility, licensing and support?
- What happens when a supplier, colleague or client does not use Apple hardware?
- Can the organization justify the cost of equipping an entire workforce with the same ecosystem?
This does not make the demonstration false. It makes it selective. The film shows what an integrated Apple workflow can look like in ideal conditions, not what every enterprise deployment will look like.
There is also a strategic trade-off. Integration can reduce friction because hardware, software and services are designed to work together. It can also increase dependence on one vendor. The more coherent the ecosystem becomes, the more difficult it may be for an organization to change parts of it independently.
Vision Pro is persuasive on screen—but not proven by the ad
Vision Pro gives the film a visual way to represent Apple’s future-facing workplace argument. Spatial content and multiple virtual windows are easy to dramatize. The viewer can immediately see the difference between ordinary screen-based work and a more immersive presentation of a design.
But the ad only depicts Vision Pro as useful for spatial work and multitasking. It does not establish how widely such workflows are used, whether they deliver measurable productivity gains or whether the equipment is practical for a particular organization. The product’s presence strengthens Apple’s story about an expanding ecosystem; it is not evidence that every workplace needs spatial computing.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.The Thailand controversy changes the reading
The film’s most serious problem is not technological but cultural. After its release, critics in Thailand and elsewhere said that it relied on stereotypes and portrayed Thailand in a reductive or disparaging way. The criticism focused on elements such as chaotic travel, language barriers, unfamiliar infrastructure and the contrast between the visiting team’s difficulties and the technology that helps overcome them.
Online discussions reported that Apple removed the film and apologized, saying its intention had been to portray Thai culture positively. Because the available reporting is based on those reports and discussions rather than a primary Apple statement confirming every detail, the withdrawal and apology should be described as reported, not presented as an independently verified corporate timeline. Sources documenting the reaction include discussions on r/Thailand, another discussion thread and a later thread reporting the response.
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The controversy is not an unrelated public-relations footnote. It collides with the campaign’s central idea. Apple wanted to show borderless, globally connected work. But the setting could also be read as positioning Thailand as a backdrop of disorder and friction that superior technology helps Western visitors conquer. In that interpretation, the story’s hierarchy is not simply humans versus deadlines; it is also the visiting team and its devices versus the place in which the work occurs.
That tension explains why good intentions were not enough. A company can intend to celebrate a culture while still using familiar visual shortcuts that audiences experience as insulting. The cultural framing affects the credibility of the wider message about global collaboration.
Is Apple demonstrating something competitors cannot?
Not conclusively. A comparable modern workflow might involve Microsoft 365, Teams, Windows PCs, Android phones, Google Workspace, Adobe tools, Slack, Zoom or specialized design and manufacturing software. Those alternatives can also support distributed work, communication, review and rapid iteration.
Apple’s advantage in the film is the coherence of the demonstration. The same brand appears at every stage, so the story feels unified. That is different from proving that competing combinations cannot perform the same tasks, or that Apple is the better choice for every organization.
The ad also risks confusing product integration with workplace transformation. Devices can support flexible management and collaboration, but they do not create good processes, sensible deadlines, effective leadership or successful international partnerships on their own.
The verdict: effective brand storytelling, selective workplace analysis
The Underdogs: OOO works because it turns an ecosystem into a plot. The team’s frantic movement between countries, devices and tasks makes Apple’s integration strategy easy to remember. The humour gives a feature demonstration momentum, while the recurring characters make a corporate proposition feel like an ongoing story.
As an account of real work, however, the film is aspirational. It leaves out cost, procurement, mixed-platform compatibility, administration, governance and the ordinary failures that make workplace technology difficult. Its Thailand setting also produced a backlash that directly challenged the idea of seamless global collaboration.
So the message is real, but narrower than the spectacle suggests: Apple wants viewers to see its hardware and services as one continuously available workplace. The ad is persuasive when judged as entertainment and brand positioning. It is much less persuasive as proof that Apple has solved the complicated realities of modern work.
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