Glowtime Ennui ⇥ mjtsai.com
Michael Tsai has a good roundup of the generally muted responses to Apple’s annual September product presentation. This year’s bit of consumerist fun did feel overlong and tedious to me, too — like homework for understanding the lineup rather than an exciting demonstration of tomorrow’s technology available today. Apple’s employees were doing their best onscreen to show excitement. Yet it did not translate so well for me and, it would seem, many others.
[…] Ever since Apple switched to this pre-packaged delivery format, the novelty has worn down quickly and these events all look like sophisticated PowerPoint presentations and, worse, they all look alike. When I try to isolate one from the last dozen I’ve watched, I can’t. They’re all a blur. If you ask me, “Remember the launch of the Apple Watch?”, I’ll tell you, “Oh yeah, I do!”. If you ask me, “Remember when Jobs announced the switch to Intel processors?”, I can still picture in my head some of the slides that were used. If you ask me to remember something about an iPhone event since the launch of the iPhone 11, my mind draws a blank. iPhone 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16… Yeah, nothing.
I think Mori’s perspective about the presentation’s format is correct, but I disagree with the choice of examples. My memories of the iPhone 6S, iPhone 7, and iPhone 8 launches, for example, entirely blur together in the same way as for the recent years of iPhone launches. Routine updates tend to do that.
What is more notable is that I, like Mori, remember the Intel switch like it happened yesterday. It is not as though I obsessively rewatch it, and perhaps my sharp memory is because I first saw it when I was young and impressionable. But it meant something. Yet I could not tell you anything about the announcement of Apple silicon Macs.
Perhaps that is because that specific media event happened during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, and it was the first in Apple’s pre-recorded style. This format also allows Apple to jam more stuff into its presentations, which is useful with a more extensive product line. But surely these prerecorded infomercials are not made more memorable by being relatively undifferentiated pieces of high-gloss marketing.