After the Shock and Awe: How Apple reiterates key messages following an event

The Spring Loaded event was a one-hour Shock-and-Awe whirlwind of product reveals, flashy product shots, music, and entertaining made-for-meme videos.

So much information. So much dazzle. How does Apple surface and reinforce the core messages it wants reiterated after the big show?

By following up with precise and consistent messaging. One key tool in Apple’s post-event PR arsenal: one-on-one (or, in this case, two-on-one) executive interviews.

Let’s look at the iPad Pro as an example. 

Joswiak and Ternus: On tour 

Greg Joswiak, Apple Senior Vice President of Worldwide Marketing, and John Ternus, Senior Vice President of Hardware Engineering John Ternus were interviewed by Andrew Griffin at The Independent and Matthew Panzarino at Techcrunch. And they did so with remarkable consistency. 

The iPad Pro and Mac are not merging into one product 

At the 2018 WWDC keynote, Apple's Senior Vice President of Software Engineering took a moment to subtly address questions about a Mac-iPad product line merger:

Nevertheless, the storyline lingers.

The new iPad Pro gets the powerful new M1 chip, just like the Mac computer line. Online forums and Twitter lit up with speculation that the iPad Pro will ditch iPadOS and move to macOS, or enable some kind of dual-boot scenario. 

Said Andrew Griffin in The Independent: 

Many ... argue that Apple’s real plan is not to keep the two devices around but instead to mash them together into one device: a touchscreen Mac, or an iPad that can run macOS, or perhaps both.

Jozniak in The Independent:

“On the one hand, people say that they are in conflict with each other. That somebody has to decide whether they want a Mac, or they want an iPad.

“Or people say that we’re merging them into one: that there’s really this grand conspiracy we have, to eliminate the two categories and make them one.

“And the reality is neither is true. We’re quite proud of the fact that we work really, really hard to create the best products in their respective category.”

And then Joz, in Techcrunch:

“This is my favorite question because you know, you have one camp of people who believe that the iPad and the Mac are at war with one another right it’s one or the other to the death. And then you have others who are like, no, they’re bringing them together — they’re forcing them into one single platform and there’s a grand conspiracy here,” he says.

“They are at opposite ends of a thought spectrum and the reality is that neither is correct. We pride ourselves in the fact that we work really, really, really hard to have the best products in the respective categories.

Right on message.

The iPad Pro is ready for professional-level applications 

The iPad Pro has always been fast. Now, it’s chip is on par with the Mac, and so is the iPad Pro’s RAM spec (8 or 16GB of RAM, depending on how much base storage you buy).

But the iPad’s ecosystem has lacked high-powered applications to take advantage of the hardware horsepower. Whether that’s Apple’s own professional apps, like Final Cut Pro, or full-featured third party apps, the Mac has remained the primary place for professionals out of necessity. 

Apple wants to position the iPad Pro for, well, pros, and Joswiak’s messaging is on target, using Adobe Photoshop as a key example. 

Independent:

“We provided that performance even before the need was there, if you will,” he says. “When you create that capability, that kind of ceiling, developers will use it.

[...]

“And our developers are pretty quick about taking advantage. It isn’t like, it languishes for years. Trust me the Adobes and the Affinities and all the people creating pro stuff – this is like music to their ears, they need this kind of power to have more capability to do more features.”

Techcrunch: 

“When we created the very first iPad Pro, there was no Photoshop,” Joswiak notes. “There was no creative apps that could immediately use it. But now there’s so many you can’t count. Because we created that capability, we created that performance — and, by the way sold a fairly massive number of them — which is a pretty good combination for developers to then come in and say, I can take advantage of that.” 

The Center Stage camera is a breakthrough for video conferencing 

Apple’s new software technology attempts to appease complaints that the iPad’s front-facing camera is in the wrong place. When using the device in landscape mode, the camera sits on the front left bezel. But now it features an ultrawide lens that will follow a user as they move around, and adjust to include multiple parties, such as when family gathers in front of an iPad Pro for a FaceTime call.

Tenus, in The Independent:

“One of the things that I found really cool about it is – spending all this time in these meetings, you sit a lot,” says Ternus. “And it’s so liberating to be able to just stand up and stay framed in the image, and stretch and move around and sit down,”

And in TechCrunch:

“What’s been really cool is that we’ve all been sitting around in these meetings all day long on video conferencing and it’s just nice to get up. This experience of just being able to stand up and kind of stretch and move around the room without walking away from the camera has been just absolutely game changing, it’s really cool.”

The new Pro Display is on par with Apple’s top-of-the-line XDR display

The 12.9-inch iPad Pro gets a new Liquid Retina XDR display, as described by Matthew Panzarino:

Apple has essentially ported its enormously good $5,000 Pro Display XDR down to a 12.9” touch version, with some slight improvements. But the specs are flat out incredible. 1,000 nit brightness peaking at 1,600 nits in HDR with 2,500 full array local dimming zones — compared to the Pro Display XDR’s 576 in a much larger scale.

The key message, shared by Panzarino, is that the Liquid Retina XDR display is not only did Apple shrink its Pro Display XDR, but made it markedly better: 

“[With the] Pro Display XDR if you remember one thing we talked about was being able to have this display and this capability in more places in the work stream. Because traditionally there was just this one super expensive reference monitor at the end of the line. This is like the next extreme of that now you don’t even have to be in the studio anymore you can take it with you on the go and you can have that capability so from a, from a creative pro standpoint we think this is going to be huge.”

Precision and consistency 

When Apple floods the media with as many product announcements and details as it did last week, the follow up clarifies and pulls forward the most important points for each product. The company strategically deploys its executives, as we see with Josniak and Ternus, who reinforce key product messages clearly and repeatedly.