Wow. That was a big deal. For a mere “s” upgrade, Apple went way above and beyond with today’s big product showcase. Three major product lines have been not just upgraded, but reinvented, and finally there’s a reason to buy the one that has been languishing — the Apple TV, which is now a gaming console as well as an entertainment center.
Maybe I’ve drunk too much Kool-Aid, but I thought this morning’s presentation was one for the history books.
Apple has struggled with its big product events post-Steve Jobs. Following his death in 2011, the events were initially stilted and awkward. Lately, the presentations have become more confident, but have been marred by bad shirts, cheesy jokes and long, rambling guest appearances. Nothing has approached the near-perfect blend of charisma, techno-lust and hyperbole that Jobs so effortless conjured.
But Tim Cook’s Apple is starting to get the post-Jobs format right. The demos are shorter, the bad jokes fewer and, by golly, the technology is just sparkling.
I still miss Steve Jobs’ magnetic charisma — his ability to make even the most mundane feature seem revolutionary — but at today’s event, such showmanship wasn’t necessary.
Photo: Apple
Let the technology speak for itself
The low-key, straightforward presentation by Cook and his deputies served well the spectacular amount of innovation and creativity Apple is bringing to the world.
Indeed, it’s hard to decide what innovation unveiled today will have the most impact on our lives.
Will it be 3D Touch, which adds an entirely new interaction model to the iPhone? Or the bigger iPad Pro, which looks gorgeous and sports a hotrod chip to power it? Or will it be apps coming to the Apple TV, which will bring second-screen interaction to, well, the TV itself?
Or maybe Live Photos, the new tech that automatically captures short video clips every time you fire off a frame with your camera? It might seem like no big deal, but it sounds seamless and I think will be a big hit on home screens everywhere.
Pithy presentations
Apple’s presentations today were informative and mercifully brief.
Take the first Apple Watch demo, a medical app for doctors called AirStrip. We saw a doctor remotely checking on a pregnant woman, who streamed her heartbeat remotely via her Apple Watch and a special cardio strap. Not only could the app collect a detailed and medically accurate cardiogram, it could detect and differentiate the baby’s heartbeat.
My jaw hit the floor.
I’m not a big fan of baseball, but I was similarly impressed by MLB.com At Bat‘s new baseball app for the Apple TV.
The app allows the viewer to become their own director — choosing between games, rewinding plays and calling up stats and other info. It brings what people do now on their second screens, on their iPads and iPhones, to the main screen. It clearly demonstrated how apps will make TV more interactive and less of a lean-back experience.
Siri on the Apple TV also looked smart and useful. Most impressive was, “What did she just say?” and watching Siri rewind the video 15 seconds and add captioning. That’s clever and useful. Maybe it will kill the universal remote forever. (I’m withholding judgment until I test it in the pandemonium of my household.)
On the mobile front, 3D Touch looks like a powerful and profound new interaction model for multitouch devices, and it will clearly change how the iPhone works in important ways. We’ll have to wait until it’s added to the next generation of apps, but it looks as though it’ll make lots of interactions — especially tasks that currently take multiple steps to complete — a lot easier.
And then there’s the incredibly accurate and detailed iPhone camera, which adds the ability to shoot 4K video; the iPod Pro’s huge screen and four-speaker sound system; Wii-like games on the Apple TV; and the iPhone Upgrade Program, which starts at $32 a month and gets you a new device every year (with AppleCare+).
What a bunch of treats.
Photo: Apple
Product theater perfected
Apple and its partners did a fantastic job today of letting all these incredible technological innovations speak for themselves. Like the best Hollywood scriptwriters, they showed us (rather than telling us) how the future will work — and just how awesome it will be with Apple devices in our hands and at our sides.
Some jokers call Cupertino’s fall event “Apple Christmas,” and it is. We’re going to be dropping thousands on new Apple gear this year.
As a producer of near-perfect product theater, Apple remains unmatched. But with products this polished, they almost sell themselves.
Leander Kahney is the editor and publisher of Cult of Mac.
Leander is a longtime technology reporter and the author of six acclaimed books about Apple, including two New York Times bestsellers: Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple’s Greatest Products and Inside Steve’s Brain, a biography of Steve Jobs.
He’s also written a top-selling biography of Apple CEO Tim Cook and authored Cult of Mac and Cult of iPod, which both won prestigious design awards. Most recently, he was co-author of Cult of Mac, 2nd Edition.
Leander has been reporting about Apple and technology for nearly 30 years.
Before founding Cult of Mac as an independent publication, Leander was news editor at Wired.com, where he was responsible for the day-to-day running of the Wired.com website. He headed up a team of six section editors, a dozen reporters and a large pool of freelancers. Together the team produced a daily digest of stories about the impact of science and technology, and won several awards, including several Webby Awards, 2X Knight-Batten Awards for Innovation in Journalism and the 2010 MIN (Magazine Industry Newsletter) award for best blog, among others.
Before being promoted to news editor, Leander was Wired.com’s senior reporter, primarily covering Apple. During that time, Leander published a ton of scoops, including the first in-depth report about the development of the iPod. Leander attended almost every keynote speech and special product launch presented by Steve Jobs, including the historic launches of the iPhone and iPad. He also reported from almost every Macworld Expo in the late ’90s and early ‘2000s, including, sadly, the last shows in Boston, San Francisco and Tokyo. His reporting for Wired.com formed the basis of the first Cult of Mac book, and subsequently this website.
Before joining Wired, Leander was a senior reporter at the legendary MacWeek, the storied and long-running weekly that documented Apple and its community in the 1980s and ’90s.
Leander has written for Wired magazine (including the Issue 16.04 cover story about Steve Jobs’ leadership at Apple, entitled Evil/Genius), Scientific American, The Guardian, The Observer, The San Francisco Chronicle and many other publications.
Leander has a postgrad diploma in artificial intelligence from the University of Aberdeen, and a BSc (Hons) in experimental psychology from the University of Sussex.
He has a diploma in journalism from the UK’s National Council for the Training of Journalists.
Leander lives in San Francisco, California, and is married with four children. He’s an avid biker and has ridden in many long-distance bike events, including California’s legendary Death Ride.
You can find out more about Leander on LinkedIn and Facebook. You can follow him on X at @lkahney or Instagram.
34 responses to “Apple doesn’t need glitz and glamour when it’s got the goods”
I think you were caught up in the hype. Sure, the iPad pro was cool, but really what else was there? A Frogger rip-off was featured. Featured. The Apple watch couldn’t detect the baby’s heartbeat. A special band goes across the mother’s stomach. It was said so fast I almost missed it as well.
The Apple TV stuff you liked so much were the apps. I personally thought the entire Apple TV segment was brutal. It dragged on and on about stuff no one wanted. Sure, the Wii interface looks good, but shopping? People have been trying to force personal shopping through the TV for decades and it has failed for decades because no one wants to do it.
A $100 pencil & $170 keyboard that connects magnetically? My Surface Pro has done that for years. Cheaper as well.
Nothing really earth-shattering in the iPhone presentation either. Force Touch, sorry, 3D touch looks “meh” at best. Jailbreakers have had something similar for years. “Live Pictures?” Yawn.
Just about everything in the presentation was “Me too. Just better.” I know you’re going to think I’m a “hater”, but I’m not. I’m a huge Apple fanatic, but this event was just uneventful and parts were painful.
shut up.
it was the best apple presentation in years, and by far the best products in a long time!
tell me about any other company doing one tent of all this?
Wow. Someone has their self-esteem fully wrapped up in Apple products.
just answer… what other company does this at this level of perfection?
I’m with @disqus_a0EcZVTp7J:disqus Rui Jorge. I think most of us take innovation for granted. We think it’s easy and trivial to add this or that, but the reality is that it is extremely hard, especially for a company the size of Apple.
Apple is shipping stuff in numbers that are unprecedented in the history of industry. Adding a feature like 3D Touch means setting up enough giant factories to turn out new screens in the hundreds of millions. This is a huge undertaking — up to three years of effort just to industrialize the process — set up the process, buy the machines, and work out the kinks.
Then there’s the software; the interaction model; the SDK; all the dev tech docs; the marketing materials. The amount of work and coordination is mind boggling.
Add to this the camera; the hardware for the taptic engine; the better networking; and so on.
And this is just one product line. There’s the Apple TV, the iPad, the Apple Watch, etc.
To me, I think it represents an astonishing outpouring of corporate creativity.
All this stuff was way beyond a simple “S” upgrade; it’s a fundamental reboot of three major product lines, and more than worthy of praise and celebration.
Tim Cook’s Apple is firing on all cylinders.
Do you even hear yourself talking? Just because force touch is a major manufacturing undertaking doesn’t make it useful to the end user, it just makes it look like Apple is desperate for innovation and is pushing a gimmick with very little utility. I’m not an Apple hater by any means but somewhere in the last couple years I have grown less enamored with Apples products and I can see now how truely blinded I was by Apple fandom. I expect that a writer for an Apple news site is going to have a large degree of bias and buy into Apples hype machine but its scary to me to think that people have drank the koolaid so deeply they lose objectivity. Apple is doing something right but its not new product innovation it is marketing brainwashing they have the lock on.
Right on point, troll. Yet you say you aren’t an apple hater. Pfffhhtttt! Right!
I actually watched the keynote, it was astonishing what they announced today, any one of the four announcements was enough for a keynote by itself but combined it was mind boggling, and 3D touch looks especially useful for the end user. No gimmicks here, straight up innovative magic…
Yeah, I’m an Apple hater.
I’ve only owned or currently own
PowerCenter Pro
2 PowerMacs
3 CRT iMacs (Original, Blue, & SE)
G4 Sunflower iMac
Cube
G3 laptop
G5 PowerMac
2 Mac Minis
Intel PowerMac
Original iPad
iPad 3
iPad 4
iPad Mini
iPhone 3Gs
iPhone 4s
iPhone 5s
and an Apple Watch
3 Newtons. Original, 2000, 2100
And I’m sure more Apple equipment if I took more time to think about it.
So go away knee jerk troll.
I suggest you read the Bloomberg article about the “multi multi multi year” development of 3D touch (not force touch) it is a truly REVOLUTIONARY development, if you don’t see that you really are jaded…
Dude just stop. All you’re doing is just attacking because you don’t agree with my opinion. You like it. I didn’t. It’s really that simple.
You don’t give up do you. Can’t you take your hate and put it to something useful, like self harm? You’re a bore and a troll, now buzz of blow fly.
For the first time the best selling iPad got zero updates. Zero! Nothing! That’s firing on all cylinders?
We could also talk about the mess that iOS 7 and 8 have been. Bug ridden, performance zapping, broken software. That’s firing on all cylinders?
iPad sales are down due to incompetence and profit greed.
Agreed, Apple is the best at it. But, it was not the best “ever” event like you quote. Last year’s event was much more exciting with the Apple Watch and two brand new form factors for the iPhones. This event was average at best.
That is what Apple does best, they invest you into their products, where your freedom of choice is gone but you are happy and content in Apples warm embrace so you never have to think for yourself again. Its easy, its simple, join the cult and prosper!
Come on troll. Give me some new material to be inspired by.
Maybe you can explain why they are skipping right over 64gb of storage for the iPad Pro from 32gb to 128gb.
What are they trying to accomplish and what is that saying to the consumer? I think it says they think you are dumb by spreading their own FUD to trick you into spending more on the 128gb because 32gb might not be enough.
Not only that, the 128 is the only model with LTE.
I think, and I mentioned this a little further down, it’s the market for the display. I think Apple is after two markets. The first is a business that needs a dedicated iPad Pro for a specific application. They don’t need extra storage. The second is the really high end end-user that isn’t going to buy 64GB and it’s going to balk at the price.
Plus I think they are looking to have real separation between the iPad Air 2 and iPad Pro price.
He’s having a day off from pulling the wings off butterflies, so he comes here. A sad pathetic soul. Ahhhh soul that is.
At least he doesn’t troll Apple blog to post his depressive uninformed and hateful crap. Like he said, just shut up, people like you are why people drink and take drugs, you bore the world shitless.
Funny how are our perceptions were polar opposite. Like you say, you saw ‘meh’ while I was choking on my popcorn.
Maybe that’s the way it always is? I know I’ve sat through plenty of Apple product demos and was stifling yawns while everyone around me was clapping wildly.
But like I outlined below, I really do think this one was different and more significant than usual. This was a big one.
Of course opinions vary. :)
Let me try to type a little clearer.
I thought the presentation was a disaster. Absolute disaster. From Cue with his shirt unbuttoned to his navel, to Federghi pushing his hair and making silly faces for a selfie, to Schiller making dumb jokes, we’ve been there before. Over and over again. Cook can’t hold a room. He just can’t. Part of that is because he’s following the personification of charisma. You never want to be the guy that follows the guy. You always want to be the guy that follows the guy that follows the guy. Honestly, no one could. But still, he can’t.
The watch stuff was nice, but other than completely eliminating the reason to buy a gold or rose gold Watch Edition and adding a few bands, what was new? We knew about 2.0.
The iPad Pro can be a huge deal, and that’s the thing I was excited about the most, but it’s looking like a “me too” Surface Pro. Especially when the stylus and keyboard were mentioned at the same time.
Then came AppleTV. That presentation was brutal with a capital B. A Frogger ripoff was featured? Not mentioned. FEATURED for at least five minutes that seemed like twenty. Sure, the two REALLY cool things were Siri and the Wii interface but that was lost in Frogger, shopping on the TV that has always failed miserably, and the “really cool custom apps” that were really just themed interfaces for channels. Talk about burying the lede.
Then came the iPhone. 3D touch looks ok, but jailbreakers have had that functionality for years and everyone knew that it was coming. Live photos? Sounds dumb. I could be wrong, but really who cares about 3(?) of short video? Don’t forget that people have to hold their phone still for that 3 seconds. Where are people going to watch it? It just sounds like a convoluted solution looking for a problem. The better camera looks nice but everyone was expecting that. The last breakthrough tech Apple had was TouchID. That was a technology shift. Nothing shown today way and it wasn’t even shown in an attractive way.
Just to be clear, I’m not arguing with you and I’m glad you didn’t take it that way. I was just expressing my disappointment with the presentation and the “me too” of most of the new stuff.
I’m just relieved that there isn’t compelling reason for me to get a new iPhone and that frees up cash for maybe a new iPad Pro. :)
I think this Apple event showed how similar Apple is becoming to other competitors.
Essientlly, iPad pro was is the iPad Air but bigger, albeit some smaller things like the speaker system and accessories port. $500 base price is what people have come to expect of a full size iPad, and I think this will show when iPad sales come back lackluster. Where did they really need to innovate? The iPad Air. It’s their middle of the line product. Anyone with $700 will save their money and buy a regular iPad Air, invest in the MacBook Air, or even go with the surface.
Apple TV was also slightly disappointing. Now, I do believe that the games were a nice touch, as was having all your shows in one place. But, I think it needed a new hardware look and a new ui to really sell.
Overall, I think this event was fine; in the same sense that Samsung/HTC/LG events are “fine”. Tim Cook and friends rushed through their announcements, with no updates, and none of their casual banter that always made apple keynotes feel personal and unique. And I don’t think that’s the road Apple wants to travel down.
Leander,
you’ve choked on your popcorn and your jaw dropped during every Apple event.
These are not things to take be taken easily, your teeth can be damaged, your jaw ligaments can slacken and even worse, you may choke and there will be no one around to resuscitate you (coz all other losers are camping outside Apple emporiums to show their loyalty to the cause).
Perhaps you shud avoid eating during Apple events?
If people can’t see it, they will in a year or two. Why is Apple so heavy into all things Medical. Why the IBM partnership? You can print your own money when deeply entrenched in medical+enterprise, enterprise which gives that unparalleled connection to the medical establishment. Apple knows exactly what their doing even if most of you don’t. The fit-n-finished of Apple products cannot be compared to by any other company. And the company’s reputation is second to none. Talk about the silliness of ‘last years specs’ all you want, but this company will dominate for years to come. They see the future, even if you don’t. It’s not about the phones, it’s where the phones get them, into the hands of people that respect the quality and safety of their products, and want to make their own lives and businesses better using them. And all those companies playing the phone game, won’t see what Apples doing til it’s to late. Hell its already to late.
I think you’re right, but I think you’re a little off on the reason. It wasn’t the phone, it was the display. Look at the market for items that required a third party display a decade ago. They were low resolution, insanely expensive, each had their own hardware interface, and manufacturers knew that. Now, everyone already has the screen or a screen can be added for the dirt cheap price of a 16 GB iPad, iPhone, or iPod Touch.
Apple plays a long game and when they move into a market and develop a new product they always seem late to the game, then they finally reveal a product that a lot of pundits scream at but proves to be what people really needed. Over a couple of cycles they develop it until it’s a jewel and build an infrastructure to support it. And what I love is that they quietly and ethically outwork, outthink and outspend their competition, who spend their time copying, and flinging out phony BS to a paid off tech media, until Apple wins by delivering consistent quality and performance. Now people call their new phone upgrades “boring” before they even release them
What annoys me is the old argument they throw out that Apple is successful because they dazzle the apple sheep so much with their flashy advertisements that we rush out and buy whatever “crapple” they decide to feed us. And we don’t catch on for DECADES.
It’s just too easy of a response. Like them or not, Apple wins by delivering superior, innovative products that work reliably for years
“Haters gonna hate, but we’re giving Apple’s latest product revelations a big thumbs up.”
For the first time an iPad gets no update at all. The size iPad that sells the most. You see that as a big thumbs up? That’s supposed to help decreasing iPad sales??
Apple is in the business of selling. If they were to make a mini tower with expansion options that the geeks would like, their entire product line would be destroyed. New users would have modular solutions where they’d buy the cheapest monitor, keyboard and mouse from other vendors. And the all in one experience would be gone. The Pencil is a gateway drug and the keyboard is to have something to sell to businesses with the CISCO and IBM partnerships. We all watch this keynote presentation and react to it and give opinions based on a whim or two. I’m pretty sure Apple knows what they’re doing. For one thing, they’re out there doing it day in and day out while you and I are posting on CultofMac.
No, you cherry pick a fact that is irrelevant, they introduced a major upgrade to the iPad line the iPad Pro and upgraded the processor on the other to the A8, it’s called iterative improvement…
Exactly, it’s an iterative improvement. But we are told by sycophantic media and proselytised by evangelist fanboys that Apple “invented” this and “revolutionised” that.
Why on earth would you listen to anyone’s “predictions” about Apple? Some of the so-called pundits out there are seriously brain dead, ignore the chatter…
Well when you compare it to Ignite and Build this Apple thing was one big YAWN only thing impressive was touch first Office
“Apple doesn’t need glitz and glamor when it’s got the goods” – precisely the opposite, Apple didnt have any real “goodies” and so it needed all the rather pathetic bells and whistles.
“This is our best ever iPad!” No sh!t Sherlock!