Apple iPhone unveil lacks sizzle of past events

Show Caption Hide Caption Apple event reaction - Graham and della Cava Jefferson Graham and Marco della Cava weigh in on the Apple event and offerings of new iPhones, iPads and a revamped Apple TV. Their take? Tune in.

SAN FRANCISCO — Apple events typically are of the tent-pole blockbuster movie variety. Big news. Big guests. Big wow.

But Wednesday's iPhone update seemed more like another episode of the old Must-See TV: an incremental plot advancer for what has long been hottest tech show in the business.

Apple carted out new iPhones with force-touch technology. It made a play for the corporate market with a re-imagined iPad that was vouched for by a Microsoft executive onstage. It unveiled voice-activated commands for Apple TV. And it ended the show with a pop-rock band.

In a two-hour press event that made numerous nods to the enterprise market and the benefits of viewing video and game content on bigger digital displays, Apple stressed the bottom line: It has every intention of milking the iPhone juggernaut for the foreseeable future.

And sell, they will. The iPhone 6S and iPhone 6S Plus are expected to rack up hefty sales when they become available Sept. 25 for $199 to $499 with a two-year contract, or installment plans of $27 and $31 a month for 24 months.

But this isn’t Jobs’ Apple, whose era was marked by breathless announcements to stampeding attendees. This time around, guests started leaving even while the closing act, OneRepublic, was still performing.

This new era was vividly on display in front of about 7,000 at the historic Bill Graham Civic Auditorium. Product upgrades ruled the day, starting with the new iPad Pro, a larger version (12.9 inches) of the venerable tablet that now comes with a smart keyboard and stylus, called the Apple Pencil.

Jobs famously dissed the idea of a stylus device when he introduced the original iPhone in 2007. He told biographer Walter Isaacson, "As soon as you have a stylus, you're dead."

On the flip side, Apple sees great potential for iPad as it dives into the corporate market. It has teamed separately with Cisco Systems and IBM to sell its mobile devices and Macintoshes to big businesses. It is being positioned as a replacement for a laptop computer with Apple executives promising desktop performance in a tablet. The Pencil costs $99, the smart keyboard $169.

The new Apple TV offers the world's couch potatoes the ability to summon not just programming but also news, weather and sports with Siri, the voice-activated assistant. "This really is the golden age of TV, yet the experience has been standing still," Cook said. "Today, we are going to do something about that.”

But there was no news of original content or any partnerships with studios. Indeed, there were few surprises: Rumors were rampant in the days leading up to the event, a rarity during the Jobs Era.

If anything, Wednesday's show underscored Cook's preoccupation with sales growth and market share. Enterprise, increasingly, is king for Apple.

Even the closing act struck a flat note. Apple fired up its fan base with the likes of U2 and Foo Fighters to wrap up its major events.

On Wednesday, OneRepublic ended things. But with whispers of Taylor Swift, Drake and others rumored to perform, the show ended with a whimper instead of a bang.

Perhaps next time Apple will save the fanfare for truly new product launches. If the expectations bar is set too high, the hit-making Cupertino, Calif.-company truly has only itself to blame.

Follow USA TODAY San Francisco Bureau Chief Jon Swartz on Twitter: @jswartz and USA TODAY tech reporter Marco della Cava: @marcodellacava.