"It's been way too long," read the press invites for Apple's iPad Air 2 launch event Thursday. Presumably this was an attempt at a pun on the fact that the new tablet is ... thinner?

Nope, that pun doesn't quite work, and neither did the event — which was easily the most underwhelming example of Apple stagecraft since Gil Amelio was CEO in 1997.

Far from giving the impression that it had been too long since it had seen us, this famously guarded, introverted company seemed almost fatigued, like it was welcoming guests back in a dressing gown the morning after a very heavy party.

And who can blame them, given that the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus launch event — a blowout bit of hoopla at Cupertino's cavernous Flint Center, complete with Apple Watch and U2 — was just a little over a month ago?

Whomever is in charge of scheduling at Apple may want to reconsider this whole September-October split for iPhone-iPad launches, and give the events team a bit of a breather between them, or the second event is bound to feel as flat as iPad sales.

If you felt underwhelmed, rest assured you're not alone. According to social media tracking firm Crimson Hexagon, just 730,653 tweets mentioned "iPad" Thursday — roughly 50% below the 1.25 million tweets that used the word on launch day last year. The iPhone 6 event, by comparison, drew 6.3 million tweets.

Most product changes Apple announced were glacially incremental — the new iPad Mini 3, for example, has little more than a TouchID sensor and some tiny camera tweaks over its predecessor. But the event itself suffered from the same kind of stultifying sameness, and a sense of having been phoned in. (Literally so, in the case of Stephen Colbert's painfully scripted comedy bit.)

For example, Tim Cook kicked things off by telling us the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus launch was the "biggest" and "most successful" iPhone launch ever, and the first month of sales for the smartphone beat its predecessors "by a whole lot." But for the first time I can remember in a long history of covering Jobs and Cook keynotes, the CEO failed to deliver a single actual sales statistic for us to sink our teeth into.

Having the biggest iPhone launch ever isn't hard given the scale of this simultaneous international launch, or the fact that Apple was launching two distinctly new iPhones at the same time. The company started taking pre-orders in China last week, which should goose the numbers even further. So it would be surprising if this past month wasn't the biggest for iPhone sales ever. Without even a single number, why even bother mentioning it?

See also: How to Rewatch the Entire Apple iPad Air 2 Event

The next half hour of the keynote, covering iOS 8 and Mac OS X Yosemite, felt just as rote. Even Senior Vice President Craig Federighi's now-traditional dad jokes fell flatter than usual.

Poor Federighi was given the task of cracking wise about a couple of things that aren't particularly funny at the moment. He guffawed over the amount of "feedback" on iOS 8, in the wake of the iOS 8.01 update that bricked a lot of phones. Then there were the jokes at the expense of internal Apple security, which culminated in a video of Apple employees having to perform an elaborate hip-hop handshake to get into the building.

What that has to do with the company accidentally leaking information about the new iPads in an iBooks document — or worse, not requiring two-factor authentication that would have helped prevent thefts of celebrity photos from iCloud — I'm still trying to figure out. But hey, at least Federighi didn't take out a rubber iPhone 6 Plus and pretend to bend it.

Meanwhile, Phil Schiller — normally Apple's cheerleader in chief — was strangely subdued as he introduced the main event, the iPad Air 2. Schiller hardly seemed to believe his own spiel, which largely revolved around the iPad being a great device to take photos with. (I can buy the notion of consumers wanting a large viewfinder — but wouldn't an iPad Mini, or an iPhone 6 Plus, suit that role better?)

What's odd about all this is that Apple actually had one or two interesting things to announce. One of them, the fact that the SIM card in the iPad will support multiple carriers, didn't even get mentioned on stage. The iMac with 5K Retina Display is a thing of beauty, worth far more than the few minutes it got at the end. The fact that we can get Yosemite now, and that Apple Pay is starting as early as Monday: These are news items worth a half-hearted whoop or two.

But perhaps a day like this was inevitable. Apple has become both complacent and cautious. By the time the Apple Watch comes out next year, it'll be half a decade since Apple last entered a new product category. In an era of phablets, the iPad looks less sexy to many consumers, and its sales growth has been nothing to write home about for much of the last two years.

It's no surprise that the launch event, a formula Steve Jobs invented and restlessly tinkered with from 1997 until he perfected it in 2007, should start to look staid and old too, bereft of ideas or enthusiasm.

Apple needs to reinvent this show soon, because it's been way too long.