[sabertoothed]

I found that keynote terribly disappointing and uninspired. I had really hoped for Apple that they show something new and innovative - instead of two smaller versions of existing products.

EDIT: I did not mean that in an Apple-bashing way. But I wonder what Elon Musk would come up with if he had time and - let's say - 100 billion USD at his disposal.

[snowwrestler]

I think if we were to go back through Apple keynotes--say, the last decade or maybe 15 years--we would find that the vast majority of keynotes were incremental in nature.

There were a few major innovations--some of which, like the iPod, have an impact that is only visible in retrospect (it was met largely with question marks at the time). Others, like the iPad or watch, have a mixed record since then.

But in terms of groundbreaking, huge, obvious innovation, I think there are probably only a couple keynotes that meet that bar: the iMac, and the iPhone. The former rescued the company and set them on a new path; the latter transformed the entire mobile computing market.

For me, the biggest announcement today was the health stuff. It feels like a thin wedge under the huge load often known as "health IT." I think it's fair to say that so far, the promise of technology to revolutionize health care is mostly unfulfilled. And who knows whether Apple will have a real impact. But the work they are doing now seems to be connecting good technology with the right people.

[beachwood23]

I agree. There was little sign of the old Apple Arrogance that paved new product lines and pushed tech forward. Instead, the presentation explicitly mentioned several times that they only released these products because "customers asked for them."

As Steve Jobs famously said, "customers don't know what they want." This change of motivation in their product development is a significant one.

[parasubvert]

Steve Jobs never said that, or at least it's easily to misinterpret. Here's what he said:

"But in the end, for something this complicated, it's really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them." (Businessweek, 1998)

The point is that Apple is VERY concerned about what customers want, and listen to customers, and usually achieves that through an engine of incremental improvement once the product is out there. They just don't believe in a focus-group approach to new products.

Secondly, the current internet meme is that Apple needs to slow down and make their products more stable. Yet we still want our innovation "drug hit" from their announcements. This is hard to balance.

[imglorp]

> As Steve Jobs famously said, "customers don't know what they want." This change of motivation in their product development is a significant one.

I wonder... What visionary, long term, skunkworks projects did Steve initiate into the pipeline before he fell ill? It should be safe to assume there were a number of secret exploratory rods into the fire, if the end of his career there was similar to the rest of it. Some should be emerging from dev right around now.

Where are they now and why aren't we seeing them? Did Steve run out of ideas? Or did they all get mothballed in favor of safer alternatives?

[Eric_WVGG]

Right? Like last year's fall keynote where they just released a faster version of the previous years’ product, and the 2014 fall keynote where they just released bigger versions of the previous year’s products, and…

[mtgx]

I was hoping they'd at least announce some new security improvements (I mean besides patches). But perhaps it's too soon for that, and we may see them in iOS 10 (X?).

I'd like to see client-side encrypted iCloud sync and either adopt Signal's encryption protocol for iMessage or at least disable iMessage sync by default and give the user control over iMessage sync alone (as opposed to being an all-or-nothing solution as it is now).

[jgrahamc]

Well, I, at least found it great, because I am walking around with a dying iPhone 5 unwilling to 'upgrade' to an iPhone 6 despite all the features because it's simply two large for me to use in the way I want (i.e. one-handed). And I've tried with my SO's iPhone 6s.

So, the iPhone SE is great for Apple because they are about to extract $$$ from me.