Apple's coronavirus keynote was slick but extremely dystopian

This is the world of the 2020 apocalypse, where pre-recorded propaganda segments are brought to you from gleaming white saucer-shaped bunkers. 

As wide-eyed, perfectly-coiffed executives find the bright side of a global pandemic that goes unnamed in uplifting updates (customers just so happen to be using iMessage 40 percent more than they did this time last year), masked camera crew members try their best to stay away from airborne droplets propelled by their enthusiastic mouths. And the animated opening portrays the people of Earth as having ascended to a new cloud layer of happy memoji.

To be fair to Apple, the first keynote of the coronavirus era was always going to be weird. WWDC, the company's annual conference for app developers, announced it was going virtual back in May. CEO Tim Cook couldn't just not have a keynote, the event that is so integral to Apple's strategy of surprise reveals. But he also couldn't have executives do software demos live and in real-time, goodness no. Especially not to an empty auditorium, where the lack of applause and whooping from rows of employees would have laid bare the fact that millions of fans are really just tuning in for a two-hour ad.  Read more...