Apple Christmas ad shows off the iPhone X and AirPods in a beautiful way

Although not everything in the Apple calendar happens when it should – there’s the occasional delayed iPhone X or postponed Apple HomePod, for instance – there’s one fixture you can depend on.

That’s the Christmas ad.

Now, while it may not have the same cachet as the John Lewis ad, this elegantly filmed drama, called the Holiday Ad, is always worth waiting for. It’s always poignant, even moving.

There was the year when a girl finds a recording of her grandmother singing to her grandfather, and with the aid of Apple software and an iPad creates a duet.

Or the award-winning commercial where a teenage boy who seemed withdrawn and unmoved by Christmas had been quietly recording stuff on his iPhone, and creating a movie with which to wow his family on the big day.

This year comes a commercial which has the lightest of touches in terms of Apple hardware.

There’s a brief appearance of the iPhone X, but it’s the tiny wireless headphones, the Apple AirPods which are the main element.

As a young girl walks down a moonlit snowy street, she starts listening to, and then dancing to, the music on her phone through her headphones. Bumping, literally, into a guy on a corner leads to a duet that defies logic, lighting and gravity as the two are entwined.

I won’t spoil the ending for you, but the dancing is sublime and the staging evokes La La Land’s seductive style without ever being derivative.

Like the best commercials, Apple is selling a feeling, a seductive atmosphere, rather than products.

Here, it’s a sense of a free spirit, a fantasy of what if.

Oh, and how liberated you feel when you don’t have headphone cables tying you down.

The couple in the ad are a couple in real life, NYC dancers Lauren Yalango-Grant and Christopher Grant who met at a casting, fell in love and married. There’s no clue as to whether AirPods were involved in the real-life romance.