“Of course the iPhone 6 wasn’t the big surprise. Many people predicted 6 would come after 5.”
apple
One silly paper-based Apple story…
I’ve been leaning toward the larger phone because I’m really curious about how a bigger screen would change my relationship to my iPhone. I really like my iPad and if I had some of those features in my pocket at all times, I may really like that. I’m so curious that I’ve made a mock-up with this template from Ars Technica. I printed the page, folded it around the 6 Plus size, and taped a stack of index cards to the back to give it the approximate thickness of the actual phone. I’ve carried it so far in my fancy work pants and my jeans. It fits fine in my pocket.
Here’s the Ars Technica link if you really, really want to do this daft thing. I saw that they’d done it, I just didn’t think anyone would use it.
Sparks, who I might mock for this bit otherwise think is an interesting guy, explains more in his full piece and mentions the ribbing he’s had today.
Apple’s other product: the presentation itself
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.
How and probably why Apple’s streaming event failed so badly
My interest is in how a bad presentation – the video stream was so very poor though the actual talk was good – can affect the audience’s experience. I’m interested because I present and I’ve had things go wrong. Just never on this scale.
The short answer is that it wasn’t how many people tried to watch it at the same time. It was the fancy page that Apple put it on.
Unlike the last live stream Apple did, this time around Apple decided to add some JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) code to the apple.com page which added an interactive element on the bottom showing tweets about the event. As a result, this was causing the page to make refresh calls every few milliseconds. By Apple making the decision to add the JSON code, it made the apple.com website un-cachable. By contrast, Apple usually has Akamai caching the page for their live events but this time around there would have been no way for Akamai to have done that, which causes a huge impact on the performance when it comes to loading the page and the stream. And since Apple embeds their video directly in the web page, any performance problems in the page also impacts the video. Akamai didn’t return my call asking for more details, but looking at the code shows there was no way Akamai could have cached it. This is also one of the reasons why when I tried to load the Apple live event page on my iPad, it would make Safari quit. That’s a problem with the code on the page, not with the video.
No more callers, we have a winner: Apple Watch
That’s it, I’m done. I’m buying an Apple Watch.
Previously, I’ve ignored the whole smart watch fad, I’ve been tempted by the announcement of Motorola’s Moto 360, I’ve got bored and lost all interest, I’ve been re-tempted by the eventual launch of that same Moto 360.
It got to the stage where yesterday I would recommend the Moto 360 being worth your having a look. And I had decided yeah, maybe, that is good and someday that will be a really great thing. But I didn’t know whether I would actually want one.
That’s over now. No chance I will ever buy or even bother to look at the Moto 360.
But I will have an Apple Watch on my wrist next year. Yes, it looks good but what sold me is the depth of thinking they’ve done on this: the myriad tiny details that make this watch something genuinely useful that you will genuinely use.
Go take a look at the mass of detail now available on the Apple site.
If Microsoft’s video had gone so badly I’d be mocking them
Apple’s event today wasn’t really overshadowed by its technical problems, but it felt like it was. I could tell you that the video feed started and stopped, began again, dropped out to colour bars, ran catchup like a Benny Hill sequence and when it would come back would also be accompanied by a Japanese translation soundtrack.
I could tell you all that and it would be true but it doesn’t convey the frustration. I truly do not know why I carried on watching. Actually, I gave up many times, but still I was drawn back. And eventually it did work – but the live feed ran so many minutes behind reality that I had to hide my iPhone to ignore texts that were coming through from people who happened to have a better feed.
But the texts, they did come. Because of the Apple Watch.
By the time that was announced on my screen, the feed was fixed and the frustrations were fading. But I have to wonder: is the reason I’m not fussed about the new iPhones just that they were announced when the feed was down?
Video and systems and launches and infrastructure are crucial – and Apple got it wrong today.
Where to watch today’s Apple event
Short answer: www.apple.com
Slightly longer answer: http://www.apple.com
Slightly longer and a little more useful answer: it used to be that Apple would post videos a few hours after the event but now they stream it live.
This has somewhat scuttled the many news sites and unofficial Apple ones which still post second-by-second typed updates live from the venue. Think of that as a really specific single-topic Twitter and, naturally, there’s at least a lot of the same updates going on the real Twitter too.
In the years of watching these things, I never did find one such source that I could recommend. Some typed faster than others, that was good, and some had websites that updated automatically instead of your having to hit Refresh all the time. But still, I would end up with two such text feeds rolling up the screen while I wondered what in the world it is that gets me so interested. I suppose there are people who study football results so maybe it’s that we all have a natural capacity for minutiae.
Or maybe it’s just men.
Anyway, fun is fun, so whyever this appeals, let it appeal at 6pm UK time on apple.com
Update: the 1,179 news stories I won’t read
Five days ago I wrote about The 319 News Stories I Won’t Read. If you’ve heard me wibble on above ten minutes then you might figure that these 319 are sports stories. No. I ignore sports but just as one amorphous blob of nothingness, I don’t understand it enough to determine individual news stories.
The 319 were the Apple news stories in my RSS newsreader. And right now there are 1,179 articles about Apple. That’s quite a lot of stories and I would like to tell you about them, except I still won’t read them.
I may never read them. You can be sure that a gigantic majority are to do with the launch of the iPhone 6 and whatever else Apple may or may not release tomorrow. I’ve been staying away from the firehose of news because most of it is wrong, much of it is clickbait emptiness as well as wrong, and you end up being convinced that Apple will announce the discovery of alien life.
After tomorrow’s event, there will be many more stories and I might read some of those. But these 1,179 are dead to me.
All of which is a long way of saying that a lot gets written about Apple, that a lot gets read about Apple by me and that is KILLINGLY DIFFICULT to ignore 1,179 articles.
Apple is streaming its event live on apple.com from 6pm UK time tomorrow, Tuesday. I’ve skipped the articles but I’ll be watching the event. If you enjoy these as much as I do, please write in and explain what I get out of them.
Apple campus: less a spaceship, more Moonbase Alpha
That’s what I thought at the top of this video, a flyby of a drone over the new Apple office buildings currently under construction.
And I would like to say now that no, I haven’t gone back on my word to not read Apple news stories – see The 319 News Stories I Won’t Read and, incidentally, the total a few days on is 947. I came across this while looking for productivity videos for you to watch.
Not an Apple product, this is the iKea
Via Swiss Miss