dewme

danox said:

nubus said:

melgross said:

The videos are much better than the live presentations.

Videos are like not going to that concert or play. There is nothing at stake and presentations are worse for it. We get 10-15 minutes of Mother Nature and too many odd managers from Apple. Nvidia and AMD do live while Apple is to lazy/scared/... to enter the circle.

Live would give us a CEO taking a computer from a manila envelope, a marketing guy jumping to a gym mat showing wireless, and "you get a mouse" moments. It gives us something to talk about while keynotes today are "long build ups and disappointing drops" matching electronic dance music and celebrity funerals. Go live and connect with users.

Apple doesn’t need to do live. They had the master at doing live at one time…… Which is the reason they probably don’t do live anymore the other called competitors are just bad me-too copycats of the original SJ.

I think you hit on a key point here. There’s nothing inherently wrong with Tim or any of the other current crop of presenters when it comes to “getting the word out.” But Applle doesn’t have Steve anymore and nobody could capture an audience quite like he could, whether you loved him or loathed him. Like you mentioned, many have tried to copy the stage setup, the room lighting, the presentation style, the gestures, the mannerisms, etc., in an attempt to emulate their own interpretation of Steve. But Steve was himself and he wasn’t trying to be like anyone else, he was the real deal, good, bad, or somewhere in between. 

All you can do is try to do the best you can with what you have to work with. The recorded presentations are slick, well produced, (generally) move along at a good pace, and hit on all of the key points that Apple wants to get across, sometimes to our chagrin. I would be perfectly happy with Tim and company getting up there and doing a live presentation and doing their own thing to the best of their ability. I’m not expecting Tim or Craig or any of the other carefully selected managers of whatever program they head to get up there and try to capture the audience like Steve did very naturally. It would just as pathetic as most of Apple’s Competitors keynotes. 

On the technical side of things, the main purpose of WWDC in my mind is to get the development community excited and energized about taking advantage of the new technology, tools, and capabilities Apple is putting in their hands. WWDC should really not be a marketing or sales pitch to get end users and investors all charged up about what is coming down the road. Developer’s conferences used to be about getting the developer community, including partners, OEMs, and software and hardware app/add-on makers all charged up and onboard with what Apple was doing, things they could latch on to for their own benefit. In essence, the attendees at WWDC are hoping to latch on to Apple’s coattails and share in the riches of what that entails. It was also a geek fest.

That’s not what WWDC is anymore. It’s still a developer conference for the most part, but it’s also a massive sales pitch and “state of the future” and technical roadmap presentation to all of Apple’s stakeholders, including us enthusiastic followers who enjoy staying on the leading edge of what Apple is up to, and eventually weighing in on how good or bad Apple did relative to what they promised. It is what it is and there’s no turning back.

For what it’s worth, I think Microsoft came to the same realization about their Professional Developers Conference (PDC) events several years ago. The PDCs turned into being huge marketing and investor focused events in addition to being totally developer focused. They became ginormous and were almost like stadium level events with more information, big announcements, deep-dives, entertainment, junk food, swag, expensive freebies, dancing Balmers, and more multi-tracked than any single attendee could absorb at any level of understanding or depth. Microsoft’s switchover to the Build Conference was an attempt to tone things down, focus more on the developers, and not be shy to consider incremental changes rather than huge new technology strategies.

Maybe Apple will peel back some of the layers they’ve added to WWDC and make it more developer focused. But the Apple of today is starting to look a little more like the Microsoft of yesteryear.

I watched the final two Season 2 episodes tonight. I really enjoy the show a lot, but I thought the producer overdid the darkness with barely visible faces effect. A little bit of dramatic lighting can add a lot of drama and hyper focus, but at some point I start thinking, “Why don’t they just turn on a friggen light?”  If it wasn’t so overused in so many movies and TV shows I’d be more okay with it, but sometimes it’s too much. 

So Apple Intelligence is a running a little behind. That's not unusual for any large software project. Going to court about anything these days is also not unusual. Beer manufacturers used to promise, or at least strongly infer, that drinking their product would make buyers more attractive and popular with others, and that drinking watered down beer would keep them skinny. Did anyone ever pursue a class action lawsuit against the beer makers because buyers ended up lonely, with a beer gut, or a rancid liver? Not that I know of, but there is still time. And no, Red Bull never made anyone escape the bondage of gravity by drinking whatever liquid industrial compounds they put in those skinny cans. What's next, suing people who break their New Years resolutions?

Easter is coming soon. One of the popular meat dishes for Easter is Lamb. Sounds like Apple got their order in early this year.

Holy cow, here comes the invasion of the drama queens and other self annointed armchair experts who think that can run Apple way better than Tim Cook runs Apple.  Tim Cook has done a fabulous job for Apple's stakeholders and has created enormous wealth for so many people. That doesn't mean that Tim Cook should stay around forever. He's skippered the ship amazingly well and kept it out of harms way. All great leaders must eventually step down and the most important job that Tim Cook must do at this point in his leadership role is to ensure that a suitable successor is being prepared to assume the CEO role in as bump-less a fashion as possible. This is obviously something Tim Cook does not do alone and the planning for his transition has been in the works for a long time. 

When I think about Siri and how it relates to Apple Intelligence my honest take on it is that I don't know what I'm missing. I mean that literally. I've never been a big user of Siri so I haven't been laying in bed at night staring at the ceiling and wondering "What is to become of our little cyber helper who hasn't been able to get past third grade?" Siri being stuck where it has been for more years than anyone at Apple would like to admit hasn't bothered me at all. I've undoubtedly enjoyed some of the ML conveniences that Apple has added here and there in their operating system, and quickly disabled other things that I found were annoying for me personally, but the future of Siri has never really been on my mind. That's just me, but I know there are lots of other people out there that do have legitimate needs and desires for Apple's automation and intelligent agents to bring more capabilities and conveniences to their lives.

That said, I have no reservations at all calling out Apple for how they handled the launch of the iPhone 16 product line. They overpromised and underdelivered on the value that Apple Intelligence meant to both the iPhone 16 and the latest operating systems. It was impossible to watch an Apple iPhone advertisement without a gushing pitch for Apple Intelligence and how it was a transformational addition that made buying the latest iPhone so very attractive. The problem was that Apple Intelligence was still doughy on the counter and had yet to be rolled out and baked. In the ensuing months it went from cookie dough to half baked, if we're being very generous. Those who got all excited when they smelled the cookies baking are still wondering when all those promised goodies are going to be taken out of the oven. If I bought an iPhone 16 to bring Apple Intelligence into my life, I would have a little twinge of buyer's remorse over the past several months. My exact thoughts would be, "Hell, I could've just waited for the iPhone 17 or maybe the iPhone 18, dammit, and be another year or two out from its obsolescence day of reckoning."

Finally, I will still admit that there is part of me that believes Apple calling their AI "Apple Intelligence" was more of a chaff cloud than a grand enlightenment by the Apple executives. It was easy to say that "Hey, we're not behind on our 'artificial intelligence' programs because we aren't doing 'artificial intelligence,' we are doing 'Apple Intelligence'." Yeah, sure, and that furry four legged barking and drooling mammal you just adopted from the pound is not a dog. It's a dog, admit it.