On The Talk Show Live at WWDC26, John Gruber and Joanna Stern had the following exchange:
We talked about the fact that the overall keynote was very short compared to the previous one.
It’s hard to imagine them ever having a WWDC keynote that would be less time, but… … …I’m pausing for effect, because that included a lot of really long pauses for the demo.”
[Laughter]
“Because, as you said Joanna, they shot them as though they were on tape – but they were, like, live to tape.”
“And there was no doubt when you were watching – you were just like, ‘Okay, that’s a long pause because that is the real-time demo.’
Which was absolutely a reaction to watch happened to two years ago, and they wanted none of that.
And even as Nilay would say – it is not a joke how many times they said, ‘We want you to go download the software. We want you to go try it. We want you to know that what we showed was real and now we want you to experience it.’
Not what happened two years ago.
Were you at the Tech Talk at noon that Nilay was talking about? (Joanna: Yes, I was sitting next to him) Because they did live demos there too.
[…] Yeah. But you could see – they were nervous. Even though you knew that this was a pretty canned live demo and that they knew what they were going to ask.
[…]
They weren’t taking requests from us in the audience, but they seemed nervous.
[…]
Even in that moment, that guy seemed nervous. There’s this weird silence.
It’s weird to sit with the silence of Siri.
Such a poetic way to put it – it struck me while watching live in the audience, so much so that I wrote it down so I’d remember to post it here.
Watch the full exchange on YouTube.
P.S. Anyone else hear “Hello darkness, my old friend”?