★ Nvidia, the New King of Keynotes
The answer to the question of which company held the keynotes which attracted the most enthusiastic large live audiences was always Apple. And they just walked away from that.
There were several interesting announcements made at Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s Keynote at CES 2025, including a new RTX 50 generation of gaming GPUs and an upcoming $3,000 Mac-Mini-sized “personal AI supercomputer” called Project Digits. But most interesting to me was the scale of the keynote itself: over 6,000 attendees in an arena at Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas. Just look at it: it resembled a rock concert more than a tech keynote.1
We — yours truly very much (and self-evidently) included — in the Cupertino punditocracy often bloviate about the pros and cons of Apple’s post-Covid pre-filmed keynotes versus the company’s pre-Covid live-audience keynotes. The argument in favor of the new pre-filmed format is that, no matter how big the live audience ever was (and for Apple that capped out around 5,000 for WWDC keynotes at Moscone West and the San Jose Convention Center), several orders of magnitude more people watch on video, so the format ought to be optimized for video, not a live audience.2 The pre-filmed format also lets Apple move through more topics, and bring in more presenters, more quickly. Of course everything just looks better and more polished. And because everything is pre-filmed, demos not only never fail, they never even hiccup. But you can also argue that demos in particular are a con, not a pro, of the new format — as I wrote a few months ago about a few AI demo fails at a Google event, live demos carry real drama, and as I noted in a footnote in September, I miss the drama of live Apple demos in particular.
But what struck me about the venue size and audience enthusiasm of Nvidia’s CES keynote is something much more general about live events than just the drama of live demos. There’s magic in a live audience. It just matters. Taylor Swift’s record-setting stadium-filling Eras tour was a worldwide sensation because it was a shared experience between enthusiastic fans. She’d still be insanely popular if she’d done that tour, but she’s more popular because she did. Attending a live sporting event is profoundly different than watching on TV. And as sports fans learned in 2020, watching sports on TV feels weird and flat and low-stakes if there is not a live audience present at the event.
Apple owned that in the world of tech. Even when Apple was, by market cap and market share, a smaller company, they commanded an outsized share of the world’s attention for live keynotes. That’s partly because Apple has always had fans of its products in ways that no other company in tech does, partly because Apple worked (and works) so much harder at its keynotes than any other company, and partly because Steve Jobs personally was just so spectacularly gifted and charismatic as a stage presence. Until Apple walked away from IDG’s Macworld Expo starting in 2010, Apple singlehandedly made Macworld keynotes a rival, attention-wise, to the entirety of CES. The most famous keynote in history, introducing the original iPhone, was delivered at Macworld Expo in San Francisco on 9 January 2007. Nobody remembers anything at all from the CES 2007 keynote, which Bill Gates delivered the next day in Las Vegas. I’ll bet Bill Gates himself doesn’t remember anything from that keynote.
Until Apple stopped holding live WWDC keynotes, those WWDC keynotes were events. The enthusiasm didn’t wane an iota without Steve Jobs. The answer to the question of which company held the keynotes which attracted the most enthusiastic large live audiences was always Apple. And they just walked away from that. Inviting a few thousand developers to watch the new pre-filmed WWDC keynotes on the lawn at Apple Park is nice, but it’s a different vibe. A live movie-watching event is not a live performance.
There’s clearly a new answer to the question of which company holds the keynotes which attract the most enthusiastic large live audiences: Nvidia.
I won’t lie and say I watched the whole Nvidia keynote, but I watched enough of it to get a feel for it. It’s good — primarily because Nvidia is killing it. They’re delivering exciting new products, across several categories, that are the best in the world. And those are categories that enthusiasts, of both gaming and AI, really care about. Project Digits is a genuinely innovative idea. And Jensen Huang is a charismatic presenter. He’s good. But one thing that’s very clear to my eyes is that they didn’t rehearse enough. Or more specifically, they didn’t rehearse nearly as much as Apple did when Apple performed live keynotes. Part of Steve Jobs’s on-stage appeal was that he came across as largely winging it, speaking off the cuff from an outline of prepared Keynote slides. But that was an illusion. Jobs rehearsed, rehearsed, rehearsed, and then rehearsed some more. Jobs might have been better than anyone else even if he had just winged it, but he still put in the work of rehearsing long hours to be as good as he could be.
Both halves of Penn and Teller have espoused the same sentiment as the only real “secret” of magic. Teller, in a wonderful 2012 profile by Chris Jones for Esquire: “Sometimes magic is just someone spending more time on something than anyone else might reasonably expect.” Penn Jillette, in a 2011 video interview for Unmasked: “I will tell you the absolute secret of magic, at the most honest level. The secret of magic is you would not be willing to work as hard as we are, and that’s the whole secret.” That’s basically the secret to Apple’s keynotes, both old and new. They don’t just work a little bit harder on them than most companies. They work way harder than any other company, or CEO, would reasonably expect.
Jensen Huang is good and Nvidia’s keynote was good, but they didn’t work as hard or rehearse as much as Apple does, and I don’t think Huang would consider doing so reasonable or a good use of his time and attention. ↩︎
And, as I reported — also in a footnote — back in September, I am very reliably informed that Apple’s keynote streams in recent years have higher viewership numbers than ever, and today dwarf the viewership of Jobs-era keynotes. Which of course is not to say that viewership of Apple keynotes is higher than ever because of the format change from live events to pre-filmed videos. But it might be true that more people enjoy this format, and the change hasn’t hurt. ↩︎︎