I’m trying to remember the last time a company’s big event came on prime-time television the same way Apple’s 8 pm ET keynote is trying to grab our attention tomorrow. The only company I can think of that has done this successfully lately is Victoria’s Secret with their fashion show. While I suspect there’s some audience overlap between that and an Apple Keynote, I also suspect Bella Hadid is a bigger draw than a new iMac.
But Apple is still trying! Promising a keynote speech that will stream on their website, YouTube and Apple TV, while things like Monday Night Football air on TV. The company is ready to take advantage of all the cultural cache its phones, Bluetooth headsets and computers have earned it and turn that fan base into a larger audience to advertise its products.
This big Apple prime-time event seems like a natural next step for the company. No one else in the tech space has had the same success as Apple in getting people to treat its announcements like big events. Almost every big tech company has tried it. Sony had Taylor Swift at a CES keynoteand Samsung brought out a BTS member to applause at a Galaxy Unpacked event. Google had the slow motion guys. Intel had dancers and acrobats adorned with LEDs. But something about an Apple event seems to resonate more with people.
And after the iPhone event, it seems pretty clear that the company has approached the peak of what it can do with an hour-long midday infomercial. One of the only ways to grow, gain more attention, and become a more consistent part of the conversation is to go into prime time (or buy a social media company and ruin it). Take that impeccably produced product that captures the attention of techies and a few of your closest friends and move it to a time of night where many more of those close friends can see it.
And Apple is probably doing it now, rather than with the iPhone, because the stakes are lower. Fewer people care about a Mac event than an iPhone one. My brother calls me before an iPhone event to talk about phones. He doesn’t do that as often in the case of a Mac. More, The iPhone event can drastically affect Apple’s stock price.. A spec bump for the MacBook Pro, while welcome, probably won’t move the needle as dramatically.
I can’t guarantee that fewer people will tune in to this event than last month’s iPhone event, but I hope Apple is less worried about breaking its viewership records (the company doesn’t make them public). Instead, I’d hazard that Apple is thinking about next year’s keynotes, especially those focused on the Apple Vision Pro. Apple will need all the tools at its disposal to get people interested in a $3,500 AR and VR headset. If there’s a chance that a late-night keynote will attract more attention than the traditional morning keynote, then Apple will want to take advantage of it when trying to sell people on why augmented reality and virtual reality are the future of computing.
So why not test out a series of Mac upgrades that wouldn’t really benefit from the traditional keynote where hundreds of reporters and analysts fly to Cupertino to sit in a theater and watch a video before trying out the products?
But it will have to be an incredible show. Tim Cook will have to do more than walk out in an AFC Richmond uniform with a Ted Lasso mustache plastered to his upper lip. The announcements (at least the rumored ones) are not going to be enough. I suspect that in addition to those rumored Mac updates, we’ll also see more sketches like that one from the iPhone event starring Octavia Spencer as Mother Earth.
It probably won’t be as star-studded, given that SAG-AFTRA is currently on strike and negotiating with Apple, among other studios. Therefore, there probably won’t be a series of cameos from actors from Apple’s best-known shows and movies. Which means no Jennifer Anniston and Reese Witherspoon will make the Apple equivalent of a SNL digital short featuring Eddy Cue or Adam Scott and Patricia Arquette staring at each other from across a table for a disturbing amount of time before Craig Federighi interrupts as the group’s newest member. Breaking off program and shows an iMac. But maybe Martin Scorsese will show how easy it is Access your new Letterboxd account on a MacBook Pro. Or maybe half of the keynote is rendered in the game. Resident of the bad town (naturally done on a Mac).
Still, I still assume Apple will go in a more creative direction, because in addition to the company wanting to test keynotes at new times, it’s also increasingly showing its Hollywood ambitions. We heard rumors about his ambitions earlier this year when Bloomberg reported that the company was looking to spend approximately $1 billion on new movie programming this year.. Now the movies of him like Flower Moon Killers and Napoleon are Oscar contenders (he won his first Academy Awards last year for coda). Earlier this week, Apple TV Plus even saw its second price increase since its launch (along with a host of other Apple services).
The company wants people to associate it with entertainment. It would be crazy for its first prime-time event to ignore that entire side of its business just to show off some new M3 iMacs. Apple can’t just give us a delayed keynote. Well, you can… but that won’t really match your ambitions.
