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. 

In the end, Cook leaned hard into the two-hour ad thing, commissioning pre-recorded segments of extreme 4K slickness — which also ended up dripping with science-fiction dystopia feels. (And no, not just because of our first glimpse of Foundation on Apple TV+, which takes place in a Galactic Empire that shuns experts and is collapsing.) 

Apple’s campus is known as the spaceship; this keynote felt like it was filmed on the Starship Enterprise holodeck. A team of Starfleet hosts led by dad joker extraordinaire Craig Federighi — sorry, Federighi — seemed like they were filming a tech news informercial for the 23rd century using 20th century lingo. “Not cool!”, Federighi, the SVP of software engineering, chided the old iOS phone app for its full-screen notifications. 

Later he ran to a different floor of the ship to the sound of a guitar break, then teleported to a “secret location” where we checked in on the construction of chips. Clever edits disguised the fact that no two presenters could be in the holodeck at the same time, lest the space virus destroy them all. 

More slickly produced still was Cook’s intro, which felt less like a keynote and more “Tim Cook would like to remind you that he could quite easily run for president.” Cook leaned into that soulless auditorium hard, using empty seats as his backdrop the way a movie reviewer might. With the soft projector lights, it felt like a TV host was presenting a very special episode of America. 

The Apple CEO was right to lead with Black Lives Matter, and he made the right noises about systemic racism. “The events of this past month are not new, [but] they have forced us to face longstanding inequalities and social injustices,” Cook said over stirring monochrome images of protesters. “For too many people and too long, we haven’t lived up to those [American] ideals.” He touted Apple’s $100 million “commitment” to a Racial Equity and Justice Initiative, and a program for Black developers. 

Later on the holodeck came a bizarre moment that seemed to hint at the Black experience, but left it buried under layers of obfuscation. “Privacy matters now more than ever,” Federighi emphasized meaningfully, standing in front of a virtual screen with a Black man holding up an iPhone to cover his face. Was this a reference to the very real fears of Black Lives Matter protesters being targeted by facial recognition technology? Federighi didn’t say. He moved swiftly on to Apple’s plan of “data minimization,” limiting the amount of information on the iPhone that Apple “or anyone” could ever access. “Anyone,” presumably, being overreaching authoritarians. 

Who knows for sure? Apple likes to keep such things fuzzy; it just wants you to feel it’s on your side in the privacy wars, unlike that nasty Google, which has a business model that thrives on selling data. But when it comes to what threats Apple’s focus on privacy can help protect against, the company is strangely mute. In a world where we’re starting to understand the flaw in staying silent on systemic problems, Apple’s sunny disposition fails to read the room. 

Similarly, it would have been nice if Cook or Federighi had said the words “coronavirus” or “COVID-19” just once. Cook mentioned “the virus,” thanked healthcare workers, then quickly pivoted to how much Apple products were helping people stay connected. Federighi risked tipping over into self parody too, when he touted that 40-percent-more-iMessages number without naming the reason. 

But hey, don’t want to upset the cheery vibe, right? And remember, remain indoors! 

What we’re all craving in 2020 is a measure of honesty. We value the unvarnished truth over slickly produced videos. No reason Apple couldn’t have given us both — perhaps by, just once, swinging the camera around to give us a chance to know the hard-working crew. A card at the end of the broadcast assured us of the temperature checks, social distancing, and mask-wearing involved in the production. Fail to document this unique moment of history, however, and you end up on the side of reality-denying dystopia.