WWDC Should Again Have Live Demos ⇥ 9to5mac.com

Ryan Christoffel, 9to5Mac:

Here’s the thing about pre-recorded videos: it’s way easier to market features via concept videos rather than true demos.

Sure, live demos can also be faked to fool an audience too.

But the Siri presentation was able to get a pass because highly edited videos make it easy for Apple to show something off that isn’t anywhere near ready.

Would any of this happened during the live keynote era? Sure, Apple had to contend with the many issues of prototype iPhones for the Macworld 2007 presentation — there were lots of iPhones onstage because memory management was so poor that Jobs would likely need to switch units several times, and the network connectivity was fudged to work more reliably. But it was real. The presentation contained a picture-in-picture feed of a camera set up over Jobs’ shoulder so that everyone could see he was doing everything live.

Apple Intelligence at WWDC 2024 contained none of that. It is not even clear to me which demos, not just Apple Intelligence, use real screen recordings — whether recorded for real or, more likely, masked onto devices in post — and which are mockups.