Oh jeez. It's almost like there's a certain ... legendary source of charisma and showmanship missing. Give the hand-wringing a break. Steve Jobs could have changed his wardrobe and people would say it would have had an impact on the feel of the presentations. Now the guy's dead. Of course they're different.
Marco has never been one to wonder "if only Steve were still alive..." That's not the point at all, he's never made these comments about previous post-Jobs presentations.
Further to this point: the iPhone 5S event last month also had nothing but already known and completely predictable updates. There was no "one more thing". It even featured pretty much the entire same cast of presenters. It even had the more difficult task of selling prices that were much higher than the media and the market had expected.
But no-one seemed to think it was odd.
Plenty of people griped about the lack of the wondrous "one more thing"s they'd invented in their own fevered imaginations -- but it didn't leave people mumbling to one another, "did that seem weird to you?"
It's a trajectory. Look at Apple before Jobs' return and the time it took to turn the company around. Now, that trajectory has changed, and this moment may well be the inflection point.
That's not it at all, this is not the first post-Jobs press release. The presentation lacked modern salesmanship. Perhaps, they don't really want to sell a lot of these products. Why would they want that? I bet the mini iPad is being sold below cost, thus Woz's comment that the 128GB iPad isn't a big enough premium price for his tastes, he's trying to pull the market away from the low-end offerings by popularized consumer fads, preserving some of the value of his AAPL holdings.
