thrang

sacto joe said:

avon b7 said:

StrangeDays said:

thrang said:

Phil and Craig occasionally interject a little more unique personality into their delivery, and with some  unscripted asides - but mostly, its sounds very repetitive. 

This comes from it being a rehearsed event by non-professional-speakers. They depend on repetition and practice to come off as non-panicked (remember panic being the normal response for most when public speaking). Those who do it more get better at it. Craig is awesome at it now and can ad lib, but he wasn't in the beginning. Also natural charisma helps a speaker, but few office workers are hired for charisma. You would imagine that CEOs are all natural public speakers, but that isn't the case either, their primary skills are running successful companies. Not many have to get under a spotlight. 

I used to be in community theater and know how bad nerves are, so my hat's off to them.

We all take our hats off to them. We know how hard it is. We understand the difficulties for them.

You missed the point. The same criticisms are aimed at professional speakers too (politicians for example when in presentation mode).

Rehearsal isn't the problem. The script, structure and delivery are the problem.

Ah. So you're saying it's the script writers and the directors that are not doing their job? But what if they too are non-professionals?

And is that what we really want? A professionally written, directed, and acted performance? Or do we want the folks who really do the work out there winging it?

I kind of like it the way it is, warts and all....

The same voice/clichéd phrases creates a dull patina that obscures and numbs after a while. Obviously, Apple is a well-oiled machine, but they are also good at recognizing when things can be improved. Hopefully this is an area they will See as needing rework.

Some of the best moments are not on stage, but the recorded bits - commercials, sample work from others, real people stories. Because they generally are not clamped down by the onstage script writing crutches.

Game demos generally are boring because they are highly scripted, but gameplay is typically quite a random experience. I get that they have to show them.... but perhaps a well-edited video composite showing a variety of game highlights might be a better thing to do, not watching a stiff huff out false enthusiasm about Frogger crossing the road and navigating around the baby from Tin Toy.

Demos of things like photo editing or music tend to work better because the distilled steps they follow more or less mimic the steps you would take using the app.

Yes, the newer presenters probably needed to change their pants afterward, so I sympathize greatly having done some public presentations in the past. Thus I don't mind rote presentations to help combat that fear, but like any other good writing, you still need to have variety in the voices you use for different "characters", and ideally, write to the strengths of the specific speaker (animated, reserved, humorous, scatter-brained, youthful, whatever...). Just because it's "real" and not a work of fiction, it is a structured and choreographed event that would benefit from using long-proven writing techniques. I'm not saying it would be easy, but I think they should push in that direction...

Apple will fight this to a point, at least to where they make the legitimate concern about non-criminally specific data exposure clear to the courts to let them debate it and cite applicable laws. This helps protect Apple as an entity as well their customers. But if the courts say it is a legally binding request, Apple needs to comply. This is an issue for citizens to raise with law-making elected officials, not for private companies to decide.

There is a cost to providing the services regardless, so its not like its $30M a month vs. "nothing" if it was Apple's servers... More importantly, one would likely want more than one infrastructure to manage the enormous level of content and data Apple is delivering. This provides greater security for availability, scalability, and adaptability. I wouldn't be surprised if they utilized Azure as well...

could you find a worse image?