We get it. The wild overreaction to COVID-19 — blanket lockdowns, useless cloth masks (safe not to use when eating (smirk)), plexiglass partitions that did absolutely nothing, abjectly stupid “6-feet apart” stickers on floors, etc., etc., etc. — necessitated the suspension of live presentations at Apple events.
Yet, it’s 2023 now and even China — which very likely engineered and let loose COVID-19, partially funded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health, no less — has finally exhausted its prodigious authoritarian inclinations and largely resumed normal life. Regardless, Apple plans to continue doing canned keynotes.
Not that there was any doubt, but Sept 12 event is being prepared as an in-person launch. So recorded video + people watching at the Apple campus + hands on afterwards. Same as the iPhone 14.
As a journalist, I covered press conferences in the most diverse places with different styles of keynotes and executives. Still, none of them offered the same experience as an Apple event. In 2019, I covered the last in-person WWDC in San Jose, California.
Being surrounded by developers from all over the world, international media, and Apple staff was indeed a once-in-a-lifetime experience. During the keynote, I saw developers cheering about the latest software updates and gasping when Apple introduced the all-new Mac Pro and the Pro Display XDR.
But it seems Apple prefers to move on from Steve Jobs-like keynotes to error-proof presentations that only a recorded video can bring. The events are faster, but they lose that special Apple touch only a live keynote could have.
MacDailyNews Take: As we wrote back in September 2022:
It’s highly likely that Apple’s pre-taped, edited special event videos are with us for the foreseeable future due to the significant reduction on demand on executive presenters’ time alone. The hands-on area and access to Apple executives at these events are easily strong enough draws for the media to attend in person: Watch the movie, then play with — or at least see — and photograph the actual tech afterwards with an executive Q&A. It obviously works.
If Apple ever again gets a dynamic, charismatic CEO who’s mastered on-stage live presentations, we may return to such events, but, for now, enjoy the videos!
Please help support MacDailyNews. Click or tap here to support our independent tech blog. Thank you!
Support MacDailyNews at no extra cost to you by using this link to shop at Amazon.
Totally full of shit you are
Who are you talking about? MDN or someone else?
I hope not. cook is not good at them. truth be told jobs was the only ceo, to bring excitement to the introduction of a product reveal. he was the only superstar ceo, and he did it well.
why amd, Nvidia, intel, etc stand before an audience and hold up a chip is beyond me. what are we suppose gleam from that? look, even car introductions are boring. 4 wheels and is goes down the road.
excitement is, we never have to charge it or fill it with gas or hydrogen… or it get 3000 miles to a charge or 10 gallons of gas. excitement is the car drives itself back home and come back to get you when you call for it. excitement is, a train hits it at 150 miles an hour and you don’t get a scratch, not even an increase in blood pressure from the accident. that is worth a 40 min introduction.
the videos are fine.
I prefer the videos. So much info packed into a 1 – 2 hour presentation I don’t know why they would EVER want to go back. Of course the journalists loved it but for me I love the “new” format.
Wow! This person in the media is actually somewhat in the KNOW about COVID-19 origins. Imagine that.
Just in case anyone doesn’t know any actual data, here you go in short:
– OBAMA Admin bans US research on gain-of-function. AKA GoF is where a virus of one species is engineered to jump species to another, thus its “gained” function into another species. This CAN happen naturally, and has many times, which is why we have many non-human but in-human viruses.
This is not one of those times…
– NIH Director Dr. Anthony Fauci writes a nice dissension paper on why he believes the Obama admin was wrong (one of the first times they were actually right!), and makes it clear he wishes it could continue.
– Dr. Fauci then funds via Grants, to the tune of millions, Eco Health Alliance. Enter Peter Daszak. Peter then took said moneys from NIH Grants, and his knowledge of gain-of-function research and went to Wu Han’s Institute of Virology, where he taught Shi Zhengli (AKA The “Bat Woman/Lady”), the secret sauce of jumping viruses from one species to another. In this case, SARS COVID viruses from bats to humans.
NOTE: It was years earlier where the Obama Admin’s State Department also released a scathing report on the Institute of Virology in Wu Han saying conditions were deplorable and a major outbreak could easily happen from that location….
– And from there we somehow had a bat soup species jump from a wet market about 100 yards away from this SARS COVID Bat Lab that “caused” the outbreak… Never mind, that wet market doesn’t sell the bats that carried the virus. Those animals are from local hunting and raising. The bats that carried the virus were nearly 1000 miles to the south. And of course, China shut and burned that place down to the ground. Zero evidence please… Believe our story. We are Communists. Trust us.
Dr. Fauci and Daszak should be on trial for crimes against humanity. It was these guys with WHO claiming they would get to the bottom of this and they’ve covered up – tried too – their initial conversation with world-wide scientists stating the chain looks man-made and wouldn’t have made this sequential jump, but I digress…
Anyone who doesn’t know this stuff is:
– Either 65 years old+ and doesn’t know how to do their own research, and just watches MSM “news” which is nothing more than narrative of power.
– Deliberately doesn’t want to know and wants to just pretend it was natural and nothing bad happened – for denial of reality sake, or political allegiance / cult following sake. If that latter, I can’t help you only God can.
And here we are no more live events. And what is the Steve Jobs Theater used for now? Not much. Internal meetings on occasion? Who sad. Apple NOT following science acting like meeting with journalists in an auditorium could end us all still? Seriously? I bet all those Apple people go to movies, parties and and and, but you know, appearances. “We must look ignorantly safe like every other stupid large corporation…”
The videos allow for a much more polished presentation.
I’m glad the Covid madness is over, but the videos are better than live presentations.
That said, I would be happy to see them return anyway, they were a lot of fun!
Take your meds bobby
For me the thrill of Apple is long gone, and I guess it really died with the loss if Steve. I used to practically fly home from work to watch those events, but now I don’t even bother. I glean the relevant info from MDN and YouTubers on new products, and to be truthful I can’t stand to even listen to Tim Cook.
Geez, no wonder you’re disillusioned!
1,000+
I like both the live keynotes and the video keynotes and I can imagine that it must be very exciting to attend a live presentation. It’s definitely more risky to go live and there were some glitches in the past which Apple covered up in the recorded videos. But can you imagine if Steve Jobs didn’t have presented the iPhone live?
As for COVID-19: Some measures were definitely helpful. The lockdowns were hard but allowed time to find vaccines. Cloth masks were indeed mostly useless but surgical (disposable) masks were not useless – they worked. But some measures, especially the ones in China exceeded common sense.
I really enjoy the high production values in the video keynotes and their brevity. Don’t miss all that walking on and walking off of the presenters on that gigantic stage during live keynotes.
If you don’t have a presenter with the charisma of Steve Jobs, then the canned presentations are prolly the better option.
BUT, I would still think that Apple would want to get developers and industry insiders all together in one place at the same time with Apple gurus. The one-on-one feedback between the two groups has to be invaluable.
I miss Steve’s keynotes. They were the best even when Apple didn’t have much to announce. Can’t stand the current team of presenters. Tim can’t find the right tone of voice, Fred is ‘too much’. The goods days are behind us when it comes to Apple announcements.
Will Apple ever hold an in person shareholder meeting again? I think Apple is now a cowardly, mostly purple or pink, company.
I enjoyed attending two shareholder meetings, 2019 and 2020, just before the madness began. Got a group pic with Cook. Given a couple of tense moments with angry shareholders I bet they’d love to make them online-only forever.
Why is there always some CRAZY ass rightwinger trying to shove their bullshit COVID false information down our throats in the comments…. THEY are the ones who should be on trial for crimes against humanity! How many hundreds of thousands of people died as a result of the collective rightwinger refusal to believe science and constant mask denials? Ended up hospitalized after ingesting Clorox or taking horse drugs? Spread it to their loved ones who died as a result? The newspapers were chock-full of stories about them. Now watch rightwingers trying to rewrite history because they clearly don’t understand how scientific research functions… and refuse to accept blame for any of these actions.
These are the type of fanatics who create concentration camps and gulags 👆
The depth of libturd stupity is staggering…again..still.
It takes a very special kind of stupid to not know that you were, and are, being lied to.
Flat-earthers wearing red hats fancy themselves as scientific (and otherwise) genuses. So biased they don’t even realize when they’re off-topic. See a neurologist. Cardiologist. Scientist. Shrink.