https://www.theverge.com/2018/9/14/17857596/apple-keynote-iphone-xs-narrative-frame

This year’s iPhone event is done and dusted, and now we’re all sitting in the interregnum between the announcements and the reviews. I’ve been lucky enough to live blog these events for years, but the process of creating a live blog is weird. I was taking photos for the site during the keynote, and since I’m a “spray and pray” kind of photographer, I took upwards of 1,600 photos in just a couple of hours.

I point that out just to say that my attention was more focused on what Apple was doing than the reaction to it. I only had so much bandwidth, and most of it was taken up by the camera. So when I had a chance later to look at all the coverage (and Twitter jokes), it didn’t come as a huge surprise to see that there was a lot of shrugging this year. “S-year” keynotes often feel like downers to the tech world, even though S-model iPhones are often Apple’s most popular and well-loved devices.