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Comment by ehsankia | Hacker News Reader

These transitions are insane. The production quality is honestly fantastic. Apple has perfected the art of virtual keynotes.

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It looks impressive, but why does everybody talk in that weird way;"Wow. What an exciting day." It feels so weird and artificial. It actually makes them sound less enthusiastic and genuine to me.

They also present a lot of features (especially photos), but without comparison I am left wondering, how much better is the new stuff. And why should I buy it...

Sounds great with that new glass too; I wondered if they would show how much better it is -- Maybe do something funny, risky, and slightly stupid like the Cybertruck incident. Nope: Just 4x better than before -- Whatever those 4x means. Get some hammers out -- Do something...

The A14 is also faster than before. No real-life demo comparison. Wouldn't it have been easy to compare the games on the GPUs (stuttering frame rate on one side)? Just something. If you can't show us why it is better, it is not good enough.

Oh, and why no actual live demos with the phone instead of just 100 great photos and videos of the phone and by the phone?

The old keynotes had a slide with the comparison of the mini, normal, pro models and the end. Those actually served as an informative summary at the end. Instead Tim Cook just told us what we had seen, and that "it was the day everybody had waited for", and then I am left struggling to remember why the pro is more expensive and how much more it was...

They may be the best at this, and it does feel (overly) polished, but I feel the old much simpler Jobs keynotes were far ahead in enthusiasm and far more entertaining. Sorry.

Apple employees already have the corporate robotic, overworked aesthetic down.

Watching them attempt to display emotions is hilarious.

>but without comparison I am left wondering, how much better is the new stuff

When the comparison is 8 vs 10 bit HDR while 99.5+% are watching a crappy SDR youtube feed on SDR panels comparisons literally can't be real.

I believe you can generally just capture a scene with a lot of dynamic range (say a person standing in front of a flat wall with the light falloff ranging from dark to overexposed) and then zoom in on a frame and you'll see more or less banding because of the tough decisions the capture device has to make on what data to throw away/reduce and what to keep

> why does everybody talk in that weird way;"Wow. What an exciting day." It feels so weird and artificial

This gets me every time. It's so artificial that I'm pulling my hair. I honestly don't know, why everyone is always so so "excited". Every time I hear someone say "this is exciting", I think BS. We had a colleague and his go-to phrase was "This is super exciting". "SUPER EXCITING!"

Where do you live? Because I'm from Europe and I used to work for a US company but in a European office and it was kind of a running joke among us that the people from the HQ would always call everything "amazing" and have these all-hands meetings that felt like rallies to us.

I think this fits the cliché that we have about Americans, although I'm sure it's not like that everywhere.

I'm from Czech, but live in Silicon Valley. For last 10 years I have been really struggling with this. Every time someone calls something "amazing", I automatically ask them politely to tell me what they really think. Oh boy, I heard some harsh feedback after the first "it's amazing".

I don't know if you've seen this, but working with Eastern Europeans for a year, this really hit home: https://blog.ipspace.net/2019/11/s1600-Its-All-Garbage-Short...

I got an error message that said it rejects hotlinking, but you can see the picture in this post:

https://blog.ipspace.net/2019/11/why-are-you-always-so-negat...

Thanks for the link. Pretty much sums up my experience. And I can say it isn't so much about Easter European... it is more like American vs the Rest of the World.

Oh man, as a Yank who has worked at startups, I feel like that’s just the sales people we have sadly perfected. “Let’s all cheer instead of whistling past the graveyard.” FWIW, devs here struggle with it too.

lineup at 1:05:55

I kinda don't think Tim was in the theatre. It's much more likely he's match moved and laid over pre-recorded renders. they're not the first tech group I've seen go to full pre-recorded footage like this, it takes _all_ the risk out of a failed demo.

They actually wrote Keynote so Steve could give high-quality animated, uh, keynotes.

Agreed. I only wish they streamed in a higher quality. 1080p looks pretty bad on a 27" 4K monitor.

I'm getting what looks like roughly a 6000 kbps stream (quick calculation from fragment size/m3u8 fragment duration). It looks very good for 1080p.

As a comparison I'm typically getting like 1500 kbps from Netflix on a 1 gigabit per second connection on their "HD" plan.

Netflix is using H.265 with adaptive bitrate encoding if your device supports it, what codec is Apple using? Simply comparing bitrates is outdated.

With my browser (chrome) it was H.264. Still, I'd take 6 Mbps H.264 over 1.5 Mbps H.265 any day. I'm sure the apple stream was VBR as well - I tried to pick a representative/average segment to do the quick calcs on.

It is 4K on an Apple TV. At least it looks like it :-D

If you were watching on YouTube and Safari, you were limited to 1080p. The Apple site and ATV were in 4k.

it is hard at times to determine if the background you see is computer generated or not. I am not sure that difficult in distinction is a good trend

I was wondering how they'd done the house with open sides. Looked really realistic but even apple don't have enough money to burn on stripping the side wall of a house off for a 10 minute segment... or do they?

It's just a film set. Pretty simple to make, probably put that together in about 5 days plus planning!

Do you reckon they actually did though, or just CGI?

They built it, it's really not that difficult. The sky, view through window and trees around it look like they were added after. The top floor may have been a seperate piece perhaps.

the thing that caught my eye was that there was only 1 bedroom upstairs, so where do the kids sleep?

Maybe I'm being too negative but other parts of the production are throwing me off. The white balance is so cold and the profile photo style vignetting and background blur is so overbearing.

Its a great keynote but I would have preferred more subtlety in the production toys.

The one last month was a bit slow/boring. This one is keeping my attention so far; I agree, it's impressive.

I will say that the Apple Watch Series 6 has been a massive upgrade over my Series 3 though

Do we know what program they use for their presentations?

They supposedly use Keynote, but I think with these presentations it's more likely custom motion graphics in After Effects or possibly Final Cut Pro if Apple is imposing in-house software.

Apple have an in house team that specialize in just these kind of keynote slides. I imagine it's worked up mostly in keynote, maybe with a bit of extra software like After Effects on the side.

They employ an outside company to do the bigger CG graphics, promo introductions and renders of the devices

When your business model revolves around marketing and aesthetics, you need to put the extra effort.

You can tell Apple's target demographic isn't enterprise markets at every turn.

One could argue that a company like Stripe's target demographic is _precisely_ the enterprise markets; yet, their product pages are slick af! Smooth scrolling, animations and all that jazz. Because they're made up of folks who love JavaScript (and animations, of course)

Apple's marketing team is similar. They're probably a bunch of people who _love_ making videos; probably studied film or art or spent a ton of time on Final Cut Pro etc etc.

Could this be because Stripe has to sell, essentially, to developers, not executives, unlike most B2B products? Developers love slick product pages as much as the next guy, but none of that matters if sales are made over golf sessions with executives.

Hmm, yep, could be.

Although I personally feel it may just be innate appreciation or love of the craft. It's interesting to compare Stripe with other providers such as PayPal, AWS/Amazon, Square. AWS is (and has been) focussed on selling to developers, startups to massive companies. Yet, their product pages aren't as slick as Stripe's. They built out their product with the ethos from the Retail side -- frugality, ship fast & often etc. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Agreed that love of the craft seems like the general tone of their corporate culture as a whole, so that makes perfect sense too.

Data point of one:

Stripe got my business years ago because of the API (compared to the CyberSource merchant API at the time) and the competitive rates.

The pretty UI on their site had precisely zero bearing on the decision.

Fair enough. I agree: Pretty UI doesn't _necessarily_ win all the $$$s

But I feel there's something to be said or appreciated about building or striving to build something beautiful despite that.

Stripe has some serious frontend considerations too. I think their original value point was lowering friction in payment systems and reasonable rates. Stripe still does those things really really well, but so did Braintree (now part of PayPal).

Where Stripe absolutely nailed it is the infrastructure around it. Their SDK documentation and continous improvements still outpace Braintree.

For instance, Stripe has custom elements that you can use to interact seamlessly with their SDK, with little setup needed[0]

I could not find a similiar integration from Braintree.

Compartively, I find their informational SDK page a bit more polished than Braintree, respectively, though I realize some of this is personal style and taste, Stripe has clear pathways for me to find the information I want right on the side bar and referenced throughout the landing page for the client SDK[1] where as Braintree[2] is more narrowly focused, which with payments, may mean I miss a better set of features I should be aware of.

Reducing frictions and painpoints is what they won with, in the end. It was easy to setup and maintain. How many 3rd party services have both of those things that handle something as complex as payments? I can't even get AWS integrations with their own SDKs working together without some effort

[0] https://stripe.com/payments/elements

[1] https://stripe.com/docs/stripe-js

[2] https://developers.braintreepayments.com/start/hello-client/...

That's a tired and specious argument that might have held water if Apple were only successful for a year or two. There are a myriad of devices from competitors who also had large marketing budgets but eventually disappeared into the night.

But it's essentially been 13 years (if you only start counting from the introduction of the iPhone). Great engineering/product deserves a big marketing budget. They go hand in hand.

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