Apple makes a virtue out of necessity at its latest launch
No, I’m not going to talk about Apple and the launch of the new iPhones: by now, everything you might want to read and more has already been said. What I would like to talk about are my impressions of the second Apple event to took place under the COVID-19 pandemic (the third if you consider WWDC 2020, a different type of event for a developer audience), which reinforced those from the first one: they are now much better and more colorful than when the company used to hold them in a crowded theater in the pre-pandemic era.
Apple is obviously an exception here: very few brands can turn a simple product launch into a world-class event that interests millions of people all over the world. There was a time when the company, in fact, took advantage of this to differentiate itself and to achieve broad media coverage: when journalists and opinion leaders were invited to one of these occasions, they not only attended, but felt enormously fortunate to participate in a kind of “liturgy”, uploading tweets with images or videos or doing live streaming, seeing it as almost a career highlight.
As bandwidth progressively improved, the company began to broadcast its events live, and the feeling of being among the chosen few diminished. Broadcasting what was happening was not as exciting when millions of other people were watching at…
