I have no takes on today’s iPhone 16 phone keynote/ad/whatever

I feel kind of dumb, because it took me far too long to realize:

These canned (pre-recorded) keynote events are just long ads for Apple products and services, nothing more.
Why would I want to watch a 90+ minute ad?

Even if I wanted to, there are reasons not to:

Everything is incremental upgrades (which is fine, just not exactly exciting).
Things that aren’t upgrades, like services, are inherently uninteresting to showcase. I actually don’t even know why Apple is in TV and movie production, other than the C-suite has an insatiable appetite to make more money, and will greenlight anything that is tangential to Apple’s vision/mission/whatever.
Apple’s keynote presentations have grown trite, predictable and overlong.
Everything can be summed up in an article that takes five minutes to read.
Because the events are just pre-recorded segments massaged to within an inch of their virtual life, there’s no chance of something going wrong to keep things interesting, like when Face ID–the signature feature of the new iPhone X–literally failed onstage the first time it was demonstrated.

So no hot takes, no medium-warm takes, no cold takes, nothing of that from me.

Well, except a summary, because I like lists. Here’s what Apple showed: