Apple does this stuff well. I’ve stolen from their playbook: I make the simplest, shortest, briefest slides I can.

Others have gone a lot further. Chinese smartphone company Xiaomi’s CEO dresses like Steve Jobs, presents products that look remarkably like Apple’s, and recently did Jobs’s famous “One more thing” in a presentation.

I would hope he got laughed at. I would hope that I get away with my short slides. But we both have reason to steal from Apple: they do this stuff so well.

Quartz (qz.com) looked at the last many years of Apple event presentations and analysed them rather a lot. So much so that it’s a bit of a shame they didn’t wait until after yesterday’s which would’ve seriously affected the findings.

Still:

One of Apple’s most successful products—which rarely gets recognized as such—is made not of aluminum and glass, but of words and pictures. The Apple keynote is the tool the company uses a few times a year to unveil its other products to millions of people. To understand their hidden structure, Quartz reviewed more than a dozen Apple keynotes, logging and analyzing key elements. Here’s what we found.

The Apple Keynotes podcast on the iTunes Store lists 27 events since Steve Jobs unveiled the first iPhone on Jan. 9, 2007. (A few are missing.)
They are an average 88 minutes long, with a similar look and feel—a minimalist slide presentation with live demos from Apple executives and industry leaders, punctuated by videos explaining Apple’s design and manufacturing processes. These videos—a genre in themselves—have been frequently parodied.

The Hidden Structure of the Apple Keynote – Dan Frommer, Quartz (8 September 2014)

Read the full piece for more minute by minute details, including who is the funniest Apple presenter ever. It isn’t Steve Jobs.