Press briefings are usually boring, information-laden yawnfests. One would usually involve a marketeer waxing lyrical about a service/product, and an ‘expert’ brought on later to expound an ‘unbiased’ point of view which supports the marketeer’s message.

I can’t count how many times in the past I’ve wished for a change. Cut out the expert, cut out the graphs and figures, cut out the jargon, I thought.

But today I take it back. All of it. That’s what an Apple press conference will do to you.

Unveiling the new iMac and some of the software that it comes with, the Apple people succeeded in cutting out all the boring stuff—the expert, the business advice, the jargon—and jam-packed the two-hour long presentation with an enthusiastic marketeer and fluff, fluff, fluff.

It was what I asked for, but I virtually felt brain cells jumping ship.

Or maybe they were jumping ship onto the girl behind me, who was having everything short of an aneurysm watching the presentation.

“Wah,” she cooed. “Oooh!” she breathed. “There goes my year-end bonus,” she told someone next to her. “Amazing, amazing…” she giggled, throughout.

All for…glass. And aluminium. I know an Apple presentation is about simplicity and aesthetics, but when you have a slide with a big box saying “GLASS”, accompanied by “sophisticated, sleek, scratch-proof”, you’re waxing a little too lyrical, aren’t you?

The functions of the programs within the iLife suite are nice, I’ll give it that much. But if only the marketeer wouldn’t look so pleased with himself for buzzwording what really are quite basic functions:

Some examples:

• Folders: “You have tons of pictures, right? I have, like, 5000 myself? But now you get to have…ALBUMS!”
• Reorganising photos within albums: “Split and merge!”
• Batch processing: “Copy and paste!”
• Lead photo: “Key photo!”
• Track changes in Microsoft Word: “Now, and you are going to love this…okay check it out…oooh okay check it out…you can have CHANGE HISTORY!”

Given that he’s probably under strict presenting guidelines from the Apple Powers that Be on dumbifying everything and user-friendlisising the whole scary computer concept, he was speaking to a roomful of tech journalists, so I don’t know if he could’ve let up on the schpiel for a while.

“Aperture priority?” he said, encountering the term in iPhoto. “I don’t know what that means…but hey, it sounds cool.”

And then he wiggled his eyebrows.