In the meantime, make no mistake, Apple continues to sweat the details on these events. This year they customized the entrance to the gallery building at Yerba

In the meantime, make no mistake, Apple continues to sweat the details on these events. This year they customized the entrance to the gallery building at Yerba Buena Center, ripping out the doors in the back — just for this event — to create a sunlit open-air entrance to the post-event hands-on area. This is cool and all, but not many of us got to see these polishings. This sitcom of a presentation was, indeed, predictable in most senses. There is little delight to be had, and I don't necessarily blame Apple, but I sort of do. They know it's predictable; they read the unbelievable amount of prediction blogs that exist out there. And yet, they rely largely on video and proverbially screaming things we already know (like iPad selling better than every other tablet) to present their new products. I'd rather see them play 10 very well-made games and demo 10 very well-made everyday applications. Maybe show us more about how beautiful and powerful the Mac Pro is. I don't want to see them tout how awesome Apple is, and then introduce incremental products, even if incremental products is the right thing to do. For the record, I do think incremental is the right choice for this refresh anyway - there's a better way to present it. This is the iPad Mini I expected to see in October 2014, not 2013. Really? I have a hard time believing that Gruber actually believed this. This was obviously the next step for the iPad Mini. Better performance, retina screen. Last year’s Mini was a triumph of design; this year’s update is a triumph of operational efficiency. This is why it makes the event so boring. A great summary. This is another way of saying, "while it's not exciting or visually stunning, it's a big business win for Apple, and subsequently will sort of drive prices down for millions of consumers." This doesn't really combat against the primary criticisms. While I understand that public speaking isn't really his gig, Cook sounds a lot like he has a thesaurus for buzz words that he brushes up on while looking at pictures of Apple and big 3d pie charts of how much of a piece of shit the Microsoft tablets are. I understand the updates - but the presentation is largely underwhelming. This could have been spun better. Oh yeah - did anyone catch that there's a new MacBook Pro? Does anyone know the differences introduced? What an understated rollout. The big disappointment for me is that Apple did not announce 4K Cinema Displays to go along with it. Why make a machine capable of driving three 4K displays but not make the displays? My thoughts exactly. This should have been the one more thing. [formatting edit]