Behind the magic curtain
Next week Steve Jobs of Apple will grab media attention with another simple-looking stage show. Mike Evangelist tells the insider secrets of his gruelling preparation — If the chief executive of Cadbury-Schweppes speaks at a conference …
Context & Ripple Effects
This piece lands two months after October's Independent profile casting Jobs as Apple's guru, but it flips the angle: instead of another portrait of the man, former Apple employee Mike Evangelist documents the gruelling rehearsal machinery behind the simple-looking stage show itself. The timing sharpens the point — Jobs takes the stage the following week, and the rumour mill already has him relaunching the Mac mini, with unconfirmed chatter about a return to console gaming giving the performance genuine product stakes rather than mere theatre.
Why it matters: Evangelist's account treats the keynote as engineered output — scripted, drilled, and controlled — rather than charisma, and explicitly contrasts it with how a Cadbury-Schweppes chief executive handles a conference stage. That framing invites readers to see Apple's launch events as a repeatable discipline other companies lack, which is precisely what makes them newsworthy independent of whatever ships.
First-order effects
- Evangelist's insider account hands the press a ready-made frame for covering next week's keynote as staged production rather than news event, shifting scrutiny toward Apple's preparation process alongside its products.
- Jobs walks on stage carrying rumour-built expectations — a Mac mini relaunch and speculative console-gaming ambitions — so the show's success is measured against pre-set whispers, not just what he announces.
Second-order effects
- Rival communicators are implicitly benchmarked against the rehearsed Jobs format: the Cadbury-Schweppes comparison frames conventional executive appearances as flat, pressuring competitors' PR teams to industrialise their own launch staging.
- Pre-show rumour cycles like the Mac mini speculation become part of Apple's operating environment — each keynote now has to outperform the leaks preceding it, tightening the secrecy discipline the company runs on.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, product announcement power consolidates around a single rehearsed star presenter, making Apple's media strategy structurally dependent on one individual rather than a distributed communications function.
- The keynote hardens into an institution — a recurring manufactured spectacle that competitors must answer with equivalents of their own, converting launch events from information delivery into competitive theatre across the industry.
The trend: Corporate product launches are consolidating into tightly rehearsed single-presenter spectacles, with Apple under Jobs defining the template others are measured against.