And what shows they were. When Schiller unveiled the iPhone 5, it rose from the stage floor on a smoothly-rising and rotating pedestal, pinpoint spotlights hitting the phone and only the phone. The rotation of the iPhone atop the pedestal was in perfect sync with the rotation of the iPhone projected on the big screen at the back of the stage. There’s no store where you buy such pedestals; Apple designed and engineered it specifically for this event. It was on stage for about a minute.
I think I may actually be physically sick from reading this. There's just no room to satirize something this ridiculous.
For Apple to maintain its market-leading brand prestige and profit margins it has to be hands-down better than the competition and no matter how much heavy breathing hype you want to shower on them the last two iPhones have been predictable, incremental upgrades that in some important ways are actually playing catch-up to the competition. Good, but not good enough.
Steve's most successful keynotes were noticeably devoid of this kind of Las Vegas showroom trickery.