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John Ternus, and his co-presenters, still presented with the now institutionalized Apple-voice: obviously-rehearsed, emotionally-flat, robo-replay. They spent
by Nevermark 7d ago
John Ternus, and his co-presenters, still presented with the now institutionalized Apple-voice: obviously-rehearsed, emotionally-flat, robo-replay.
They spent their time practicing to recite, instead of talk, to people.
So hard to sit through.
I had assumed that was a genuine, if not inspiring, reflection of Cook's controlled non-spontaneous personality. Relative to Steve's emotionally-rich casual-coded excited-to-share delivery.
- dogscatstrees 7d agoCraig F with his constant foot-shuffling...
- ricardobeat 7d agoDespite that, still one of the most natural speakers in all their recent events.
- ardit33 7d agoGive him 6 months... usually it takes a bit to change things around (including marketing / pr presentations). But, he has been part of Apple for too long, and probably has internalized that style. Hope he brings good change though...
- tiffanyh 7d agoPeople under estimate how hard it is to talk naturally in front of a camera. There’s a reason why acting as a profession exists.
- Nevermark 7d agoDo they? I think everyone knows how many hours they practiced and the depth of talent they could draw from. The inhuman consistency demonstrates a deliberate choice, that undermines their own message. Care about impact wasn't just a Steve quirk, it was the reason keynotes were worth having. Try saying "And one more thing..." in recent-Apple voice, without laughing or crying.
- boonzeet 7d agoYou can have the best acting coaches in the world and still not get ‘it’. Comparing anyone at keynotes to Steve is challenging. He really was among the best at presentation.
- Nevermark 7d agoI agree, expecting Steve would be unfair. And trying to duplicate him would be a mistake. But find a voice that works for whoever is presenting, or get different presenters. The visuals and videos were excellent. The product was cool.
- ghaff 7d agoYou're not going to get Steve. For which I'm genuinely sorry. But, yes, Apple has made the deliberate choice to have presenters who rehearse, rehearse, and rehearse. But many are not natural actors and will never be. You can mix things up a bit on a stage. But Apple does want a smooth production and puts a lot of money and effort into it.
- Marsymars 7d agoI always think of this piece: https://waitbutwhy.com/2016/03/doing-a-ted-talk-the-full-story.html https://waitbutwhy.com/2016/03/doing-a-ted-talk-the-full-sto... The best presenters are those who have the natural affinity (or enough practice) to do method 2 really well. What we get from Apple (and most other professional-level speakers who aren't willing to take risks) is method 3C.
- joemi 7d ago> But find a voice that works for whoever is presenting That's much much easier said than done. Sometimes the very rehearsed voice is as good as you're going to get, without the person being a professional lecturer. > or get different presenters It seems as though Apple is prioritizing having actual team leaders speaking about the products instead of just having hired actors do it. I'm perfectly happy with this.
- thdr 7d agoNah, this is a deliberate choice.
- saghm 7d agoSurely they have enough money to hire either someone to teach them to do it better or someone to give the presentation instead.
- ricardobeat 7d agoApple trying to make presenters 'act professionaly' is the problem, not the solution. Somehow it worked pre Apple campus?
- vegabook 7d agoInfinite Loop seems to have missed somehow. The old Apple with multiple dodgy buildings all over the show was perhaps a bit more chaotically creative. Now it all seems very rehearsed, architected. Too perfect, just like the campus.
- ghaff 7d agoAs someone who has spoken on a lot of stages, it's hard. I do sort of agree that falling back on an obviously rehearsed (over-rehearsed?) style isn't great. Jobs wasn't that way but (mostly) but he was a real talent who could have sold sand to arabia. I do think there's a general high-end corporate tendency these days to over-rehearse for big stages. I could name some CEOs who were doing it years ago. And I could name some CEOs who were terrible presenters but were very successful at least for a time.
- nielsbot 7d agoHe maybe didn't present that say but he did rehearse a lot
- ghaff 7d agoRehearsal is definitely real. I've certainly guilty of running through presentations mentally and then cringing here and there when I actually give them because some stuff that worked in my mind doesn't really work with an audience. They're almost certainly better when I deliver a modified version a month or so later. That said, it's also the case that casually recovering from tech glitches is pretty key.
- nielsbot 7d agoslightly meta, but remember the time SJ got mad on stage and threw his demo camera? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1M4t14s7nSM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1M4t14s7nSM
- ghaff 6d agoHeh, never saw that. But I have had clickers etc. not work and I just have had the AV staff do stuff manually on signal and joke that "this is why you have high availability." But I think some people can't do it but that might have been me early on. I was at an event (though not at the talk) when apparently an exec at a large tech company had to deliver a talk at more or less the last minute because someone had to back out because of some emergency. They apparently panicked and pretty much walked off stage. I know I wasn't paid those kind of bucks. But I like to think, at worst, I could improvise on the general topic. Doubtless wouldn't win awards but I wouldn't meltdown. Also, if you've prepared a presentation and the system isn't working, you should be able to do a reset without visuals and just do it. May not be the plan but that's what we should be ready for. (I've also had 3am calls in Japan to fill in for someone with some presentation because the presenter turned out to be at some other event.)
- paxys 7d agoIt’s also hard to be the CEO of a multi-trillion dollar company. Speaking is part of the job.
- mikenew 7d agoThat's true, but if you wanted to boil down the art of acting to one sentence it would be "do not pretend; actually do". Jobs was a great actor in that he did not pretend to be excited. Whatever coaching is being given here is exactly in the opposite direction of acting.
- GuB-42 7d agoIt is just one approach, often referred to as method acting. But good actors trained more classically can be just as convincing by pretending. One is not better than the other, these are just different approaches, both capable of delivering excellent or terrible results, depending on your skills and practice. Being excited doesn't mean you look excited to an audience and vice versa.
- pupppet 7d agoDon’t forget about how they desperately try to figure out what to do with their hands.
- behnamoh 7d agoyes, the cringiest thing in the entire show.
- nu11ptr 7d agoIt is distracting. Just use your hands normally. It just feels a bit alien and scripted.
- khazhoux 7d agoPersonally, I always loved the way Tim Cook would always do this little bouncy thing while he talked. He kept his knees always bent a bit, and every few words would do a little tiny bounce. Once you see it…
- thenthenthen 7d agoI noticed in the cook years that presenters legs are often strangely spread apart. Looked very … weird like ‘stand up man spreading’
- khazhoux 7d agoSince 2019 it has been a requirement for promotions above Senior Director, to be able to stand with your feet 24" apart while conducting a product review. They have a special ruler (titanium!) in the Apple Park basement to measure promotion candidates.
- thenthenthen 6d agoDid you miss the /s or are you serious? Wow
- sajithdilshan 7d agoThat’s something I noticed as well. It was very subtle, but my brain was telling me that something was off and the way people spoke was very artificial.
- gxs 7d agoPeople are insufferable with the amount of criticism Like no one is above reproach and def everyone is open to criticism, it to open a thread with 1200 comments and see this as the first comment was super annoying So much stuff to discuss and we are focusing on some presenters tone? jfc
- deleted 7d ago[deleted]
- rootusrootus 7d agoI use it informally as a metric for whether there is anything meaningfully bad that I should be aware of. If this is what people bitch about, then probably the product is mostly pretty good.
- sixothree 7d agoI couldn't agree more with the criticism being too much. The negativity adds up and drowns a thread so much faster than the neutral comments. I don't know the reason it feels that way. And it seems so pervasive in so many places. I wish there was a way to just put all criticism in a single thread and leave other thread trees for technology topics. Of course my first thought is a technology answer to a human problem. That said, I simply couldn't sit through this presentation and did find it insufferable; and I've been waiting for a foldable iPhone for a long time. Having to close the presentation out of frustration tainted my purchasing decision.
- SllX 7d agoI do hope John Ternus & his team change it up, but I wasn’t expecting it from this event. He’s only been CEO for 9 days & this was probably shot before then.
- snowwrestler 7d ago> Relative to Steve's emotionally-rich casual-coded excited-to-share delivery. Example 1,494,298 of “most people aren’t Steve Jobs.” Can’t believe we are still doing this comparison. In a few weeks it will be 15 years old.
- Nevermark 7d agoFalse dichotomy. The right response to an inspiring founder that cannot be replicated, isn't to go for uninspiring.
- montagg 7d agoOne big difference from Steve: it isn't the Steve show anymore. The people showing this stuff off are the people who lead the the teams that work on these things. It's so much cooler to me to see the people closer to the work talking about it rather than just Steve Jobs, as amazing as he was to watch. I'll take slightly stilted any day of the week as a tradeoff. Ternus did introduce a new rhetorical thing, though. He framed some of the guiding principles during the opening and throughout as ideas originating from himself, not Apple. Cook rarely said "I" in relation to a claim, other than "I'm so proud of" X, Y, Z. That's a bit more product guy, a bit more Opinionated. I am hoping for more of that.
- gpt5 7d agoI disagree twice. It was very cool to see Steve Jobs, and he was heavily involved in the work and design decisions, perhaps even more than the people presenting.
- subw00f 7d agoHow? How involved? Like what exactly did he do?
- boplicity 7d agoHe was often critical down to the specific detail, such as amount of padding on a button.
- montagg 7d agoSo replier is right here: Jobs had opinions about literally every detail, he pushed people to work out those details and challenge their own assumptions, and he talked about these things in public like a designer—not just about beauty but also HCI. You could see in his presentations that he understood the fucking details about why things were good. No tech CEO is able to tell you why their version of showing that a window is currently in focus is good, and on the off chance they do, they probably wouldn’t use the term “key window” because they don’t know it. There was a Jobs story about how he was bothering the engineer who was working on the calculator so much about the layout that the engineer just made a layout engine Jobs could play with, so he could design it himself. I do consider that fundamentally different from the people lower in the hierarchy though. That’s what I value about the Cook era keynotes: seeing Apple as not just a single person.
- mvkel 7d agoapple needs to rethink so much more fundamentally. Ternus talks identically to Tim Cook. Indistinguishable. It’s like when Jobs left, Apple became a reflection of the superficial touchstones that Jobs left behind, rather than the CEO defining what the culture is, and evolving it.
- browningstreet 7d agoBrand is brand. CEO is not brand.
- Nevermark 7d agoSo... we agree. Sort of. We don't know what Ternus can do. We know this event was a reflection of Cook, but that is all we know.
- pwthornton 7d agoThere is no matching Steve, but I would like to see Apple try at least one live event again a year. Covid is what brought around the super rehearsed video presentation, and it fit Cook well, but are the days of live keynotes really done?
- FireBeyond 7d agoI loved the disclaimer at the end of the iPhone Pro model that felt distinctly non-Apple and more akin to a drug commercial, "Usage of heavier models may be limited. Subscribers to certain iCloud+ plans will likely receive higher usage quotas. Now here's Sri to talk about electronics!"
- paxys 7d agoApple needs to bring back live keynotes instead of this overproduced TV show.
- ddlsmurf 7d agoa very neurotypical response
- websap 7d agoSteve Jobs built sand castles at Apple, these guys are building Kings Landing.
- notatoad 7d agoIt’s been a while since I watched an Apple presentation, but I caught a bit of this one. And I spent the whole time trying to figure out who it was for - the presenters didn’t seem to express any genuine excitement about the products, and it didn’t convey any useful information that couldn’t be better shared by just posting the slides. The only thing I can see is that it generates some clips for the presenters to share on their LinkedIn pages. I assume there is prestige in being selected as a presenter, and the rest of the show serves its purpose simply by existing.
- spectra-cole 7d agoThey need to do these live again with an audience. Miss the old steve days.
- pcurve 7d agome too, but I guess they feel they cannot afford any missteps. I still enjoy Marc Benioff presentations. He's very engaging to watch, though not nearly as good as Jobs in terms of storytelling. I feel Jobs honed the craft more though.
- notatoad 7d agoDoing it live isn’t going to bring Steve back. He was a natural showman, the people doing it now aren’t. They’re engineers and executives. Putting them on a live stage is going to make it even tougher on them.
- starky 7d agoThe entire presentation fell into the uncanny valley for me. Not only was the presentation flat, but the appearance of the video just felt off for the entire presentation. At one point I was questioning if they were going for something that looked like an AI generated video.