What a difference a year makes.
At WWDC 2012, Apple CEO Tim Cook's keynote opened with a comedian. Her name was Siri. She warmed up the crowd with jokes about Samsung's new fridge, and speculation that the new flavors of Android OS were being dreamed up by Ben and Jerry's. It went on to feature the up-and-coming executive Scott Forstall loudly proclaiming how fantastic his new iOS 6 app — Apple Maps — was going to be.
The WWDC 2013 Cook keynote couldn't have been more different. It opened with a video devoted to Apple's design principles.
"Designing something requires focus," it read over a quiet piano soundtrack. "It takes time. There are a thousand 'no's for every 'yes.'"
We came back to the same theme at the end, with an ad that was more like a meditation — all slow-motion moments of user satisfaction. You could barely see the devices they were using.
"We spend a lot of time on a few great things," said the narrator, over a quiet soundtrack of plucked strings. "You may rarely look at it, but you'll always feel it."
Is Apple trying to fade into the background? Not exactly. It's more that the company has started to take on the personality of its even-keel CEO. It wants to be known as a place of cautious, obsessive designers who iterate ruthlessly, hard workers who don't brag. Cook illustrated this perfectly by ceding the floor to a cool startup — Anki, which produces a real-life racing game with artificially intelligent cars — within five minutes of taking the stage.
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A dose of humility is exactly what the patient needed, given the year it's had. In early 2012, Apple could do no wrong. The halo of Steve Jobs still shone over the company. But the cracks were showing. Siri was not the genius voice assistant she was made out to be. Her server errors, mishearings and simple lack of abilities left her increasingly unused on the iPhone 4S.
Then, with the Maps debacle, the dam broke. Apple had made a product that was so sub-par, it became the butt of jokes. It looked good, but the data was flawed. Forstall couldn't see it. Cook put out an apology letter; Forstall refused to sign it. He was fired. With him went the skeuomorphic design craze (all those yellow notebook pages and green felt games tables), giving way to the cool minimalist Ive style we saw Monday in iOS 7.
Also leaving with Forstall, apparently, was a lot of Apple's swagger and bluster. Not all of it, of course. The 2013 keynote did include Phil Schiller introducing the new Mac Pro with a memorable swipe at critics: "Can't innovate any more my ass!" And Cook was not above having a go at Windows 8 or the increasingly fragmented Android market, whenever doing so would make Mac OS X and iOS look good by comparison.
Apple Maps and Siri were mentioned only in passing. Maps, now coming to the Mac OS desktop, was said to be constantly improving its data. Siri got a brand new look, a new and more natural voice and a wider range of system functionality. Yet all of these things were glossed over in a matter of seconds. Siri has been put in a corner; never again will expectations exceed her abilities.
The same is true of Apple — even at the risk of being called slowpokes who never make anything new.
Image by Mashable
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