It’s Lowtime — Observations on Apple’s September event

No, the title is not a typo. It’s me using wordplay to condense my impressions of Apple’s It’s Glowtime event of September 9 in just one word.

You’ll find very little here in terms of tech specs or feature breakdowns. You can find this kind of information in many other sites, starting from Apple’s own site. My impressions and observations are of a more general nature and, spoiler alert, are admittedly affected by the undercurrent of disappointment I’ve been feeling about Apple for a while.

The first thing that I found off-putting was the event format itself. Not because of something that stood out compared to other events of this kind, but precisely because it was the same pre-recorded and pre-packaged stuff Apple has been delivering since COVID hit four years ago. I miss Apple events with a live audience. On the one hand, they were more ‘static’ because everyone was in the same place, on the other they were also a bit more memorable and with a bit more character. Ever since Apple switched to this pre-packaged delivery format, the novelty has worn down quickly and these events all look like sophisticated PowerPoint presentations and, worse, they all look alike. When I try to isolate one from the last dozen I’ve watched, I can’t. They’re all a blur. If you ask me, “Remember the launch of the Apple Watch?”, I’ll tell you, “Oh yeah, I do!”. If you ask me, “Remember when Jobs announced the switch to Intel processors?”, I can still picture in my head some of the slides that were used. If you ask me to remember something about an iPhone event since the launch of the iPhone 11, my mind draws a blank. iPhone 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16… Yeah, nothing.

The structure and schedule of these events has progressively fossilised, too. Classic opening with a self-congratulatory video with the not-so-subtle message that ‘Apple saves lives’? Check. Tim Cook’s brief introductory speech with the same platitudes and trite turns of phrase we’ve heard since he became CEO? Check. Incredibly smooth overprocessed transitions from one presenter to another, located in starkly different locations at Apple Park and environs? Check. Claims of amazing new designs (where actually little has changed) to introduce the nth iteration of an Apple product? Check. Claims of Apple getting greener and greener as a company as we speak? Check. Hero video shorts that introduce the product starting from extreme, ultra-quality closeups to then reveal the final form with sweeping, liquid motions and epic background music? Check. Craig Federighi outgoing segment talking effusively about how Apple has turned the most basic features into something fantastic? Check. Hardware person blurting out technical details over technical details explaining how the SoC has improved, how many more cores it has, how much speed and efficiency have been gained, etc.? Check. You get the idea. I actually rewatched bits of past events, just to see if this was bias or me misremembering; but no, it’s all there.

It’s Apple going through the motions, and I couldn’t help noticing it at every turn of the hour-and-a-half event.

Three products were presented on Monday: the new Apple Watches (Series 10 and Ultra 2), the new AirPods (4, Pro 2, Max), and the new iPhone 16 and 16 Pro. Everything about these products was iterative. Despite Cook’s claim of a ‘beautiful new design’, the new Apple Watch doesn’t look particularly new. It’s a bit thinner than its predecessor, its display is larger and more readable, the materials are different, sure. But the design bears the same characteristic as the first Apple Watch. It’s an almost 10-year-old idea that has been refined year after year after year. There’s a particularly fitting phrase in Latin that describes this iterative process: labor limæ — literally ‘filing work’ — that was used to express the patient, assiduous, meticulous refining work of poets and writers after outlining their pieces in order to bring them to perfection.

The segments about the new AirPods and new iPhones were no different. And Apple loves talking about their refining work, indulging in descriptions of which materials they chose, how such materials were treated and processed, how they were able to achieve certain finishing details, and so forth. As we were watching the event, a friend joked in private chat that Apple has to add some filler stuff, otherwise the event would last only 40 minutes or so. I don’t know whether this is filler stuff; my feeling is that Apple revels in such details because it’s still what Apple does best. I don’t think there’s another hardware company that has developed such advancements in material research, treatment, and finish. But I’m increasingly afraid that hardware manufacturing and engineering are the only ‘cores’ that can still effectively propel the company.

What I loved about Steve Jobs’s keynotes is that there was a compelling underlying narrative giving a sort of human connective issue to all the ‘techy’ bits. Jobs weaved a coherent context that justified what was behind a change in design, a technical choice, the need for an advancement in specific areas of a product. Sure, there were data samples, there were tech specs and comparisons, but you didn’t reach the end of a keynote thinking that it had all been about tech specs and speed boosts. Conversely, that’s precisely what I felt at the end of most of these pre-recorded events I’ve watched for the past four years. I get to the end of an event thinking it has been like sitting in a conference room with employees and shareholders listening to the same well-oiled PowerPoint presentation showing how these latest machines are a bit sleeker, faster, and more performant than last year’s models. There’s a distinctive corporate stench.

And it seems to me that Apple is progressively losing itself in these minute details while missing the fundamentals of what made Apple a special company: the vision, the ‘thinking different’, the ‘technology is not enough’, the ‘innovation is saying no to a thousand things’.

The engineering feats of the Apple Watch, the research on the various materials, the meticulous finishing, are all undeniable and unparalleled. But it’s a watch for technophiles. Traditional horology enthusiasts and experts may appreciate the Apple Watch from a strictly technological standpoint, but to my knowledge few of them have praised its visual design. I love traditional watches and even those digital watches from Casio and Citizen that were incredibly popular in the 1980s, and I find the Apple Watch’s design to be nondescript at best and unattractive at worst.

But it’s a product that sells, as-is, so Apple doesn’t seem inclined to mess with it. They don’t seem to even think about, I don’t know, releasing a different model, maybe with a different shape or style, that may appeal more to lovers of traditional watches. They don’t even seem to consider maybe rethinking watchOS to make it more adaptable to the needs of different users. Every year, the new iteration of the system adds more stuff to the already dizzying array of stuff that was added the year before. Apple Watch is almost ten years old, and in all this time what we have got is an unstoppable amount of feature creep on one side, and still a surprisingly limited system when it comes to true customisation on the other. As I was losing myself in the presenters’ drone about all the new things the watch was able to do now, I was thinking about how I wish watchOS were actually a modular system, letting me install only the features I need. This would be great from a UI standpoint, because fewer features and fewer information to display and interact with would mean a cleaner UI. And it would potentially increase the watch’s efficiency and battery life. What I want in a smartwatch is the timekeeping, the steps/calories count, the heart monitoring, and little else. And I know a lot of people with similar needs.

Instead, Apple Watch is becoming more and more a smartphone for your wrist. We already have a smartphone in our pocket. But this feature cramming, in my eyes, is yet another sign of a company led by businesspeople and hardware specialists who don’t seem to be able to look past their iterative mindsets. The UI, UX, software design, don’t feel prioritised. Every year a new layer is placed on top of the previous; gestures accumulate, operations you memorised now have variants to accommodate the new, bolt-on features. The user interface silently deteriorates, becoming more fiddly, less intuitive, more crowded by additional elements that require impossibly precise and purposeful navigation on the part of the user — this applies in part to watchOS, but especially to iOS.

I didn’t pay much attention to the AirPods segment because it’s a product I have little interest in, and not because I have something against it — my ears do. I simply can’t use true wireless earphones, no matter the brand, as one of the buds always falls off and the other stays barely in place. I could never use this kind of earphones on the move: I would lose them instantly. The only AirPods I could be interested in are the over-the-ear AirPods Max, but if you’ll forgive my bluntness, I just find them ugly and overpriced. I love my Sony WH-1000MX3 and MX5 too much to look elsewhere. They have great noise cancelling, a very nice audio profile (for my ears), good design, they’re very comfortable to wear even for hours, durable, and worth every penny of their overall reasonable price.

During the event, I chuckled at Francisco Tolmasky’s observations, particularly this one: The number one thing they could add to AirPods is putting a LATCH ON THE CASE. Do a study of people dropping the fucking AirPods and having them pop out like popcorn. I don’t want a smaller case, different shape case, I want a case that STAYS CLOSED.

I don’t have direct experience of this, but know a fair amount of people who complain exactly about this aspect. Apple, the company that’s all about sweating the details, could be a little less shortsighted when it comes to more practical matters related to the use of their products.

Finally, the iPhone segment clearly revealed (if that wasn’t clear enough already) just how much Apple has become ‘just another tech company’. First: emphasis on tech specs and performance increase. It’s all bigger, faster, better. The performance graphs are getting comedic. It’s like the car manufacturer introducing the revised version of their flagship sports car, telling you that, while the older model ‘only’ reached a top speed of 300 km/h, with this new one you can reach 400 km/h! As if that made any real difference in your day-to-day life.

Second: let’s jump on the ‘AI’ bandwagon and drop ‘AI’ everywhere in our products. And Apple Intelligence (Apple’s personal spin on ‘AI’, which looks like they finally found some expensive makeup to beautify Siri) seems to permeate every aspect of iOS 18 and the iPhone 16 models. I watch Federighi affably explain how with Apple Intelligence in Messages, Notes, Photos, you now can do this and that… And the first thing coming to my mind is, Dude, you have no idea how regular people use messages, notes, and photos, do you?

I know, unfiltered thoughts may be rough, but let’s be honest: Messages, Photos, Notes, Reminders, Calendars… it’s the same old shit we’ve had on our Macs and iPhones and iPads for years, but every year they need to reinvent the wheel to make this same shit ‘interesting’. It was text, then came emoji, then animoji, memoji, now it’s ‘AI’-generated emoji. In simpler times, it was just taking a photo, look at your photo roll, maybe share it with friends or on social media; then it came photos (badly synced) in the cloud, then moments, memories, themed albums, albums with soundtracks, then spatial photos, then make your own little movie based on your albums and memories and whatnot. But don’t worry because all the heavy lifting is done by ‘AI’. I don’t worry about that, I worry that you’re so far removed in your aseptic, frictionless ivory tower that you have little to no clue as to how people interact with their phones, their photos and notes and messages. Spoiler alert: not much differently than what they used to do 10–15 years ago. Your reinventing the wheel only confuses non-tech people because it messes with their simple, tried-and-true workflows. The workflows they learnt when iOS was lean and naturally intuitive, 15 UI layers ago. The cries for technical assistance I sometimes get from friends and acquaintances are for issues that are so ridiculous, and so non-Apple, they remind me of when I was doing tech support in the era of Windows 95 and 98.

My impression that Apple is severely removed from how actual people use their phones is reinforced every time they show a short video to illustrate how certain features work. These videos are supposed to showcase how Apple products naturally embed in regular people’s daily lives. What we see are slices from utopia. Impeccable people moving about in their impeccable homes living glossy-magazine lives, everybody fluidly relating to their personal tech devices. They’re filmed in a way Apple people think will look relatable, while you’re sitting at your messy desk in a modest studio in your decent-enough apartment that is costing you your life savings, watching the Apple event, watching these little videos and thinking, Who are these people, what do they do for a living, and what the hell is that girl doing on her iPhone?

These videos, the whole pre-recorded Apple event, it all feels like a controlled environment. I want back those live demos on stage done by Apple’s senior management. Every now and then there was some goofy banter or awkward moment. Every now and then something wouldn’t really work 100% as planned. But they were fun to watch. They felt real. They were memorable. Apple felt more hands-on with the product(s) they were introducing.

Back to the iPhone. Oh yes, I don’t want ‘AI’ in my phone. It should be a togglable feature, like autocorrect. For the moment, due to EU legislation if I got it right, it seems that in the EU iOS 18 won’t feature Apple Intelligence at first. I wish things could stay this way indefinitely, but if indeed Apple Intelligence will eventually be part of iOS everywhere, again, I would really really love for it to be an opt-in functionality. I’m not interested in ‘AI’-generated emoji. I don’t need Apple Intelligence to correct or summarise a message, email, or other text for me. I can do the work myself. I want to do the work myself. This is the good friction that keeps your brain nimble and makes you sound like you when you write to someone else.

And then of course there’s the usual part when Apple talks at length about the camera technology in the new iPhone. And again, here everything is faster, better, smarter. Without doubt, camera technology in iPhones is getting ridiculously powerful, to the point that the feature offer far surpasses the feature demand. I still find all the emphasis on speed to be adorable. The unsurmountable speed bottleneck is deciding which of the 45 photo apps you’re going to choose to take the shot.

Camera Control is a good example of a new feature that works great on paper, and even in some pre-recorded animations on Apple’s site. In practice, the simple and effective idea of having (finally) a dedicated camera button (and I say finally because with iPhones that are becoming more and more like small tablets in size, they are also more and more awkward to handle when used as cameras, so a dedicated camera button is definitely a godsend) is immediately contaminated by assigning multiple functions and gestures to this button, in a way that reminds me of the jog-dial in many personal devices like phones and PDAs manufactured by Sony in the 1990s and 2000s. A dial that was context-aware, that you could turn but also push because it was a combination of a wheel and a button. It wasn’t terrible at the time, but it wasn’t always intuitive either.

The general impression that stayed with me after the iPhone camera segment was that everything is getting to a bewildering saturation point which goes beyond photography and kind of steals its soul in the process. So many ‘exciting’ camera upgrades, so much computational assistance, you’ll end up forgetting what it means to take a photo. Point and click and get the perfect photo. No wonder more and more people share this mindset that makes it all about the gear. No wonder people come to me, unprompted, and justify their need for a new iPhone Pro because “it takes better photos” than their two-year-old iPhone.

At this point you may understandably wonder whether there was something, anything I liked about the new devices Apple presented on September 9. Yes, actually. I like the materials Apple is using both for the watch and for the iPhone. I especially like titanium for its durability and lightness, and I like the titanium colour variants in the iPhone 16 Pro models — their colour scheme is overall very ‘Dune’. I also like the colour variants of the regular iPhone 16, especially the Ultramarine, but it’s a pity they dropped warmer, more vibrant colours (I’m also not seeing a PRODUCT(RED) option when simulating a purchase).

I also like the boosted video capabilities of the new iPhone Pro models. I’m not a videographer or video expert of any kind, mind you, but from what I’ve seen, the iPhone 16 Pro is capable of delivering a one-stop solution for filming stuff in at least a semi-pro capacity. I’ve toyed with the idea of starting a YouTube channel for a while, but one of the many aspects holding me back has been what kind of gear to use to deliver decent audio and video without much fuss. And an iPhone with these capabilities would be a perfect single-tool answer, probably even overkill.

The AirPods and AirPods Pro are also a great product. I hated the design of the first-generation AirPods, with those stupidly long, ungainly stems, making them look like replacement heads for an electric toothbrush. For once, the continued iteration has brought a better, more elegant design, and they’re packed with interesting audio technology. I still think true wireless earbuds with non-replaceable batteries are an environmental issue, and from a more practical standpoint, I wouldn’t invest in a product with a potentially short lifetime. As for the AirPods Max, as I said earlier, I’m not a fan. They’re available in different colours now, and they have USB‑C connectivity, but Apple hasn’t changed or improved their design, which is probably what some people were expecting.

So, is it time for me to upgrade to a new iPhone? No, not yet. There are things to like about this last iteration, but I’m not fond at all of the fundamental design choices Apple has been making: as I’ve said (too) many times, I don’t want notches or dynamic islands to contaminate the screen’s real estate. I also hate the disappearance of a Home button and related Touch ID functions. And I’m not a fan of the ever-increasing device sizes.

And then there’s the matter of the price, which cannot be ignored. In my country, prices for the regular iPhone 16 start at €959; starting prices for the iPhone 16 Pro and Pro Max are €1,219 and €1,469 respectively. The M2 Pro Mac mini I purchased last year was about €1,530. This is nuts. After one year, what the Mac mini has enabled me to do has already paid for itself. What I would do on an iPhone 16 (Pro or not) is basically the same I’ve been doing with the iPhone SE 3, and the iPhone 8 before that. Yes, better video performance and ‘pro’ video features could be of use, if I decide to do video-related stuff down the road.

All in all, it’s a frustrating outlook. My iPhone SE 3 still works great and will probably last me another year or more. It also retains the iPhone design I love most: the perfect size for my hands, a rectangular display without notches or similar crap, and Touch ID via a proper Home button. But it’s the last of its kind, and there won’t be another one like it. I’ll probably keep using it until it no longer supports the latest iOS, investing in a battery replacement if need be. But switching to Android — gasp — isn’t out of the question either, and while certain Android flagship models have similar prices as the new iPhones, I don’t need a flagship phone for my use cases. Further, this Surface Duo I acquired second-hand for a pittance is a surprisingly good device and doesn’t even run the latest Android version.

In conclusion, this latest Apple event did very little to bring back any enthusiasm towards the brand. I feel more alienated event after event. I no longer see a company with the technological vision of a pioneer in its field, but a corporate entity that’s becoming indistinguishable from other tech giants. A company that, for the most part, still iterates on designs and ideas that are 10–15 years old — and it’s excellent at iterating, hardware-wise, but I keep feeling it’s losing the plot and the ability to carve new paths. And don’t “Vision Pro” me, because I’ll just laugh back. A company that keeps reinventing the wheel with its products, obsessed with improving tech specs, investing a lot of resources to keep the same applications (in the sense of practical use cases) relevant and interesting, instead of pushing the research & development envelope and devising some entirely new ways and applications aimed at a true technological progress.

But maybe I’m expecting too much from a company which lost its founder and visionary 13 years ago, apparently fired a lot of people who understood user interface and software design, and is run by largely unimaginative businessmen and hardware nerds.