Today, I drove an hour down to Cupertino to watch a movie. It was actually a series of shorts about iPhones, Apple Watches, and AirPods, and it played in a cinema called the Steve Jobs Theater. It was a good movie. Better than expected.
Apple’s fall product reveal was the company’s first proper press event to be held on campus, in person, in three years. And it appears the pandemic might have permanently altered Apple’s events game: Apple executives once walked out on stage and gave live product presentations, like Steve Jobs once did. But today, it was just one product video after another.
That approach has its merits, I suppose; it seems designed to give people watching the livestream the same information as those in the theater. Yet, there are things you don’t get just watching the livestream.
“Even if it is mainly videos, it’s still nice to get the in-person vibe,” said tech industry analyst Maribel Lopez of Lopez Research. “It’s just not the same watching on the livestream because you don’t get the hands-on with the products, which really gives you a sense of what they are. You get the texture; the colors come to life. And you also get a feel for what resonated with the tech-savvy audience that attends these events.”
Here then, are some of the details I noticed from being there in person.
The first thing you see are the Apple greeters. They’re everywhere. At literally every turn in the underground parking garage, a greeter in an orange vest was there to guide me forward. A hundred more awaited me above. I estimate that for every member of the media, there were five Apple greeters. Having so many of them around might also be part of the security plan. Whatever the reason, I didn’t mind.
Speaking of security, everybody was asked to remove the laptop from their bag and then step through a metal detector. Security personnel also scanned our bags for anything harmful. This additional layer of security is new, and it was no trouble at all. In fact, I appreciated the extra safety (and I wasn’t the only one). It’s an unfortunate sign of the times that this is needed, I suppose.
