....quite literally. Seriously, does anyone else notice that Apple commercials are at least half again as loud as the rest of any given channel's entire programming? It's driving me nuts because I have to be quick on the draw with the volume button, else it ruins my mid-range drivers.

this is why i time shift all american TV by atleast 20 minutes just so i can skip all the adverts

It can't only be apple ads, surely you must have a discount warehouse kind of place that screams "BARGAINS!!!!!" at a volume loud enough to shake your windows

TV adverts are always louder than TV shows. That's a well known fact.
Also, those Apple ads are shit. Yes, I get it, the iPhone 4 is great for telling your husband you're pregnant. Aaargh

nono you can't do that because your holding it wrong and theres no signal!

Ohhh burrrn
But to be fair, more people probably have issues with AT&T than with their crappy antennas.

You don't need advertisement when these tools saved the earth with a Mac.

Not here =) At least when you're watching a bilingual broadcast and are using the sub-channel. As all adverts tend to only use the primary channel, they end up muted or even silent altogether =)
I don't think Apple even bother to push the iPhone 4 over here. Haven't seen any Apple adverts for a few months in fact. I'm either just good at missing them (as I rarely watch TV) or they finally gave up!

Shouldn't volume normalization be standard on televisions by now? I have that on my four year old crt screen. Yeah that's right, still using 480i fullscreen tube televisions only.
As for apple, well there new slogan should be : stubborn as a mule. Seriously, they feel they can do no wrong as do apple sheep and when something is wrong, it's someone else's fault or it's not as bad as random company x.

It's not the iPhone ads, it's the iPad ads. The ones that start off with the ratchety sounding noisemaker then moves into someone plunking on a piano.

I like being Deaf :)

That DUH DUH DAH DUH-DUH DAH over and over again in that iPad commercial DRIVES ME UP THE WALL.

*cough*link*cough*

The HughesNet (satellite ISP) ads are super-loud, as are the hotels.com ads. Ohcrapohcrapohcrapwhere'sthemutebutton - aaahhhhhhhh, much better. One thing I've found is that standard-definition ads on a high-def channel are significantly louder than the high-def content, and both of those are shown in standard-def.
I think I read a few years back that Italy, among other nations, has volume normalization laws for tv programming. I can't imagine that it's a particularly difficult technical exercise handled at the broadcaster level...

I SO wish we had laws like that here in Denmark. Here, commercials are always much louder than the programs themselves, leading to the aforementioned "Ohcrapohcrapohcrapwhere'sthemutebutton - aaahhhhhhhh, much better" situation. And I can see no good reason for this being so. It can't be good for the advertisers that everyone automatically mutes their TV as soon as the commercials start.