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Comment by sampton | Hacker News Reader

I bet they rehearsed a dozen times and never failed as bad live. Got to give them props for keeping the live demos. Apple has neutered its demos so much it's now basically 2 hr long commercials.

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The new Apple presentations are much more information dense, and tailored to the main (online) audience. They’re clearly better.

More dense but less trust worthy. I don't think they would have pushed apple intelligence the way they did if there was a live demo.

Live Apple demos were always held together with duct tape in the first place. That first "live" iPhone demo had a memorized sequence that Jobs needed to use to keep the whole phone OS from hard crashing.

Even with that, Live demos are incredibly more better than hour long demos.

They also force the developers to make it work, under threat of being fired, and in the ire of Steve Jobs case, being yeeted in to the sun along with their ancestors and descendents.

During that first iPhone demo they also had a portable cell tower (cell on wheels) just off-stage to mimic a better signal strength than it was capable of. NYTimes write-up on the whole thing is worth the read [0].

0.https://web.archive.org/web/20250310045704/https://www.nytim...

There was one demo where Steve Jobs told everyone to turn off their WiFi.

It was the demo of FaveTime with the iPhone 4 IIRC

That _was_ worth it indeed--thanks :)

They are boring infomercials now. The live audience used to keep it from feeling too prepackaged.

You gotta keep your infomercials engaging:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DgJS2tQPGKQ

Microsoft really nailed the genre. (Although I learned just now while looking up the link that this one was an internal parody, never aired.)

and so boring. I would take Jobs presenting a live demo than any of this heavily-produced stuff.

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