Apple executives almost never explain themselves. … If it's not in the keynote, or in the marketing materials on apple.com, they don't want to explain why they did x. … It's just part of their culture.

"Apple event" today implies an Internet broadcast, typically an hour or more, about new hardware or software products. The technology presented, from the iPhone to the now-yearly updates to the system software run by the long-since-legendary Mac, is still cool, innovative and trend-setting.

But there's a certain feeling they've acquired, like that of a super-refined and less-disguised modern infomercial. They're now flawlessly filmed and impressively spliced together with music underscoring fantastical transitions around the physical locations between sections. The locations themselves look pristine, to the point of feeling free even of rogue dust specks. A number of executives and employees can be expected to appear with zero "um"s or badly-timed blinks, and while we're told each was involved in the work on the product they're presenting, the scripts are worded with such meticulous consistency that their slots within the presentation feel interchangeable. All is evidently painstakingly crafted to seem exciting, inoffensive and accessible across the world. In a word, these events feel like "marketing."

From a business perspective, anyone can understand this. Since Steve Jobs' death in 2011, Tim Cook has grown the company over tenfold from an industry underdog back on the rise to a name and brand happily and simply associated in every continent with everyday life. Its communication has to be exciting, inoffensive and accessible, even when intersecting with a given year's contentious topics.

This last event was the somewhat louder strike of the nail that produced this feeling. It was the announcement of the M3 chip, an improvement on the already-impressive M1 and M2. But more than a typical portion of its already unusually short half-hour was spent pointing out the potential for upgrading to them. The M3 MacBook Pro, it was suggested, was an appreciable upgrade from the not-quite-two-year-old M1 model. All right, perhaps if you're a pro, can afford it, and can appreciate the relatively subtle difference.

Then came the M3 iMac. Here, the points in favour of upgrading included a full 30 seconds on the notion that its 24-inch display was the "perfect" replacement for those of both the 21-inch and the 27-inch Intel iMac. I had spent much of 2020 and 2021 waiting to upgrade my own 27-inch Intel iMac to the presumably upcoming model of similar size, and as this much-later-in-coming pitch suggested, I wasn't alone. (Apple then put out quieter communication that they don't plan to make one.)

Apple has always made new and better devices knowing their loyal customers will return to upgrade, and they know some will even upgrade based on incremental advances. But encouraging that category of upgrade was, more apparently than ever, this event's primary reason for being. To that end, it felt like they'd ever-so-slightly crossed a line for the first time: after three years of silence about the completeness of the modern iMac line, a 24-inch display, the "perfect" replacement for a 27-inch display? And poor John Ternus, who had to look at the camera and say it. It feels unsettling because, when they do choose to break their silence with a few words, Apple's track record for honesty and sense-making is pretty decent, and that's one reason their customers are loyal. This must have been debated in the meeting room.

It seems strange that it's been twelve years since the last Steve Jobs keynote before his death in 2011. Looking back from this point, the difference across this technically unbroken tradition of "events" is striking. For example, no Apple event was prerecorded before the pandemic, and none was filmed except in front of a live audience of developers or tech journalists. To hear a presenter in today's events make a little joke or flub a phrase and chuckle self-effacingly and good-naturedly along with a few people in the audience before moving on? I think more recent Apple fans would find that unrecognizable, perhaps fascinatingly arcane.

But the gradual change feels more fundamental than a stylistic shift. Apple events were what they were because Jobs, when he returned to Apple and oversaw its course correction from near death, wanted to get on stage and talk in his own words about what he saw going wrong, and what the company was doing to change it. The cultural staple of a tech executive standing in front of a presentation screen for a general audience, now recognizably parodied in TV shows and movies, I believe he invented. While up there, he tended to eschew the word "marketing" for phrases like "telling people about," even when just rolling ads. He sometimes revealed products by literally pulling a black cloth from them, but those moments were never the beginning of the presentation. Rather, he thanked people for being there, chatted about the state of the company, and then, when it was time to get to the announcements, talked for a while about the current situation, the status quo, its excitements and problems, and arriving at the seeming need for something there wasn't.

This practice grew in popular consciousness at a time when there was so much talent and potential available, so much ground to tread, and so much to invent for the first time. Home computers were still typically beige, typically "tower"-shaped, and not even found in many households. It wasn't normal to search your whole system by typing a phrase. Backing up your data was more of an aficionado thing to know how to do. Editing video on a computer had only just become possible and doing much of it required more storage than most people had. The concept of a "bird's-eye view" of running apps or open windows had barely been dreamed of. Programs crashing, having to restart, lamenting that you didn't save, even several times a day, were considered "just how it is," and casual users who expressed more than a fleeting frustration at this state of reality struck enthusiasts as unreasonable.

I suppose that's what the essence of a "status quo" is. Some deeper part of people could imagine the fuzzy outlines of a better future, but that part is silenced by a sense of pragmatism and the common sense of the day.

That's why Jobs resonated when he chose to talk mainly about the thinking behind the products and updates he would eventually reveal and detail. Even those casual users would receive the message not only that their frustrations were real, understandable, and shared by the people at his company, but that Jobs thought they'd figured out how to solve them. And that's when it came time for the black cloth.

Other executives and employees appeared on stage too, and there was a certain thread of corporate-sounding consistency which perhaps foreshadowed the "events" of today. But you still got more of a sense that each person's segment was their own manner of explanation and subtle style of extemporaneous interaction with the audience, rather than the sense that their script was scoured, stamped and handed to them. It all seemed less like "marketing" in the sense that they were a company and therefore needed to market. Rather, it seemed more like everyone in the room, audience and presenters, were communally excited about the prospect of solving these apparent problems when they thought they'd finally found clear ways to do so, and some had formed and joined a company because that was, at least in this age, the only real way to see that through.

I don't think Apple is "doomed," or that it "died with Steve Jobs," or anything like that. Jobs' spirit is rightfully enshrined there without nerve-wrackingly domineering, and I give the executives and employees good marks at carrying on the tradition and trying to "just do what's right." But it's been long enough that I have observed that shift over time, like a mammoth sailing ship that tilts just a little further than usual before its centre of gravity asserts itself.

Apple Events have gained some cool stuff. But that sense of candidness, that perceptible, observable humanity directly from the mind of one person to another, is something they've lost a little of. And I miss it, because I know the current and upcoming years will be some of the most exciting ever, and I know that kind of thinking does exist in the minds of the people who are working on what's next.

One place it can still be found? That opening quote was from John Gruber in the latest episode of his long-running podcast, The Talk Show. Nerds will know John as an independent blogger who admirably tread a narrow path to making a living on the maxims of the early Web and open podcasting, well-regarded enough to have formed relationships with Apple executives. In recent years, I concluded that the "heir apparent" to the keynotes of Steve Jobs' day are probably Gruber's "live from WWDC" episodes in which Apple executives seem keen to appear and chat for the length of a typical Apple event. Fascinating how that happens. (To find those episodes, search for that phrase: "live from WWDC.")

Happily, most of those earlier keynotes by Jobs himself are on YouTube, and Apple – while it certainly tries to take stuff down – seems to quietly let those be. For some of his most cumulative and distilled thoughts, I would also suggest the final one of his rare interviews with Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher. His tone and opinions feel so candid, thoughtful, and incisive and humanistic that it's hard to notice the absence of such traits today without such a reminder.