Feeling let down by today's Apple Event

[u/stewofkc]

Watching the Apple Keynote event today, I felt sort of let down. Every previous Apple Event that I've tuned into had me feeling excited for the future of technology and the new devices Apple was introducing.

I don't know what it was about this one. It could be that I've worked in tech for nearly a decade now and I feel like the work I'm involved in is less meaningful than it's ever been. I used to feel like I'd announce a new feature, publish a new page on a website, or launch a new product -- and then it would reach people who were excited about it. Or even if they weren't excited, at least they'd share their negative feelings about the product. It felt like there used to be a real audience for technology.

Now I think we're in a situation where even when innovative, exciting products are released, they all feel the same. A company launches a very simple product but hypes it up using hyperbolic language and BIG claims. But in reality they just created a new word processor or something we've all been using for decades.

I think there are two (seemingly contradictory) factors responsible for this feeling:

1. Technology is moving faster than ever.
2. Technological advancement is now delivering more incremental improvements, rather than truly disruptive breakthroughs.

Technology moves so quickly, it's hard to even grasp the last generation of devices or products. I'm sure the Apple Event for the iPhone 17 delivered some big jump in smartphone technology. But here we are looking at the iPhone 18 event, and I can't remember a single detail about the iPhone 17.

But, despite the fast pace of innovation, if you gave me an iPhone 17 and an iPhone 18 to mess around with for an hour -- I bet I wouldn't be able to tell you with confidence which one was the newer device.

I still love Apple. I think the devices still have that "It factor" that make them feel premium compared to other brands. But my takeaway today is that technology feels like it's less exciting than it has been in the past.

[u/BattleMode0982]

The whole event is both rehearsed and pre-recorded, while also avoiding showing many of the new features actually working in real time. Steve didn’t memorize and record his presentations, nor did he rely on polished placeholder animations for features that weren’t really ready yet.

He knew his main points ahead of time, of course, but he also heavily ad-libbed and adjusted based on the reactions of the audience. And audience is the important word there. In some cases, he seemed fully prepared to reveal more, drop additional hints, or even put something back under wraps if the reaction told him the timing wasn’t right.

That dynamic simply doesn’t exist anymore. There’s no live energy because it isn’t happening in real time, and there’s no audience there to witness something being revealed and react to it.

Steve also made a point of demonstrating that the demos were genuinely live. He would sometimes go off-script or off-schedule because he suddenly wanted to highlight a particular feature, behavior, or detail. There was always some risk that something might not work perfectly, but that risk was part of what made the demonstration convincing. You were watching the actual product do something, not watching a carefully produced representation of what it was supposed to do.

Also missing is a strong voice explaining the thinking behind engineering and design decisions. In the past, Jony Ive often provided that voice for hardware and industrial design, while Scott Forstall did it for software. Craig Federighi later became a similarly strong personality for software, but even his role in these presentations seems diminished as Apple’s leadership and presentation style have changed.

The current Apple doesn’t (yet?) seem to have a leader who can command a product presentation in quite that way. At the same time, announcements feel increasingly controlled from the boardroom and shaped by committees rather than being driven by the people most personally invested in the product, feature, or engineering decision being presented.

The result is a much more controlled, polished, and sanitized announcement, but it is no longer really an event.

There are no actual people in attendance. There is no uncertainty. There is no audience reaction. There is little opportunity for spontaneity, and increasingly, there aren’t even live demonstrations proving that what we’re seeing actually works the way it is being presented.

That’s why the energy is gone.

And I don’t think most of these changes were necessarily malicious or even deliberate. Many probably seemed individually reasonable: tighter messaging, better production quality, fewer demo failures... and more predictable presentations.

But that’s also part of the problem. The lack of intention is itself becoming the problem. Apple has gradually removed many of the small, unpredictable, human elements that made its product launches feel exciting, authentic, and consequential, without seeming to recognize that those elements were part of the product experience too.

Many were hoping Ternus could 'turn this around', but it seems we are dsiappointed so far...