Talking about the new iPhone’s augmented-reality features at Apple’s announcement event Tuesday, Philip W. Schiller, the senior vice president for worldwide marketing, showed how an app could overlay an image of the constellations on a live camera picture of the sky. This got him excited. “This isn’t some generic sky!” he said. “This is the sky around you!”

I don’t know. It looked like a generic sky to me: clouds, blue, sunlight.

But it did look better on the phone — or rather, on an image of a phone, projected on a screen in Cupertino, Calif., streamed to my computer. It was luminous. The constellation labels, appearing and fading, gave it a look of magical whimsy.

I looked up through the skylight over my desk. Yep. That iPhone sky looked way better than the garbage regular sky that I could see through my garbage human eyes.

This enhancement of reality is what each video-streamed Apple event sells, more than any particular iPhone or set-top box. If advertising once told us that “Things go better with Coke,” this event — a jewel box for Apple’s products and the people who use them — says that “Things look better with Apple.”