Maybe I’m super old here, but I didn’t get anything new from the presentation besides the AI stuff, and that stuff appears to be poorly thought out (at least, at this point, but it looks like it was a super early appease people type announcement).
The new photos app for example, is the same thing as the old photos app. All the new features we currently have. Nothing changed except presentation, and then only slightly. And it’s scary to see people praising it’s new features when I’m looking at them in my hand, but also remembering that iPhoto had these back in 2002(?) (and other companies like Picasa definitely had it too but the point isn’t about them).
Siri can do quite a few of the things they demo’d with the new AI, and some of the features existed in one way or another back to the iPhone 4, but things get removed and shuffled around. We lose features, then we get them sold back to us again. They sold us widgets how many times, and after destroying the company that did a good job with them?
Many of the new features we did in the early 90’s on 20mhz processors. The unified search, the AI assistant stuff, the handwriting recognition (okay, it got usable in '94, '95), etc. I know its kinda cynical to scream about there being nothing new ever, but this keynote felt like being fed emotional instructions to be excited about things I had 2 decades ago as if they were new, and features I already had today as if it was new. Wasn’t there a simpsons episode about this in the 90’s too?
The satellite features were cool, but just when things would have been interesting, they cut away to talk about… a damn calculator app on the iPad that has new amazing feature of … writing math out and having it solved and ugh … look, I’ve had Soulver for years, and I’ve used a handwriting math application (myscript math) since 2013. And I don’t want answers written in my handwriting – that muddies the presentation.
And on release, if its anything like their current state, there will be usability issues that would have never been allowed even pre-iOS 7.
Apple (and pretty much everyone at this point) should probably demonstrate they can release something solid before trying to expand their app coverage, etc.
The keynotes used to be better and actually informative. They’ve become something me and my high school kid MST3K together. But this time, after the first 30 min we made it a contest on who would give up watching it first – I let him win.
Also, admittedly nitpicky thing, but the skydive drove me nuts, because Google did that in 2010(?) and did it for real, and live.
Regarding hard to understand people… I did just fine. They seem to be polishing their speaking presentation, and the hardest part to hear was the skydive but … subtitles are something they still do well.