As someone who has spoken on a lot of stages, it's hard. I do sort of agree that falling back on an obviously rehearsed (over-rehearsed?) style isn't great. Jobs wasn't that way but (mostly) but he was a real talent who could have sold sand to arabia.
I do think there's a general high-end corporate tendency these days to over-rehearse for big stages. I could name some CEOs who were doing it years ago. And I could name some CEOs who were terrible presenters but were very successful at least for a time.
Rehearsal is definitely real. I've certainly guilty of running through presentations mentally and then cringing here and there when I actually give them because some stuff that worked in my mind doesn't really work with an audience. They're almost certainly better when I deliver a modified version a month or so later.
That said, it's also the case that casually recovering from tech glitches is pretty key.
Heh, never saw that. But I have had clickers etc. not work and I just have had the AV staff do stuff manually on signal and joke that "this is why you have high availability."
But I think some people can't do it but that might have been me early on. I was at an event (though not at the talk) when apparently an exec at a large tech company had to deliver a talk at more or less the last minute because someone had to back out because of some emergency. They apparently panicked and pretty much walked off stage.
I know I wasn't paid those kind of bucks. But I like to think, at worst, I could improvise on the general topic. Doubtless wouldn't win awards but I wouldn't meltdown.
Also, if you've prepared a presentation and the system isn't working, you should be able to do a reset without visuals and just do it. May not be the plan but that's what we should be ready for. (I've also had 3am calls in Japan to fill in for someone with some presentation because the presenter turned out to be at some other event.)
It is just one approach, often referred to as method acting.
But good actors trained more classically can be just as convincing by pretending.
One is not better than the other, these are just different approaches, both capable of delivering excellent or terrible results, depending on your skills and practice. Being excited doesn't mean you look excited to an audience and vice versa.
I think everyone knows how many hours they practiced and the depth of talent they could draw from. The inhuman consistency demonstrates a deliberate choice, that undermines their own message.
Care about impact wasn't just a Steve quirk, it was the reason keynotes were worth having.
Try saying "And one more thing..." in recent-Apple voice, without laughing or crying.
> But find a voice that works for whoever is presenting
That's much much easier said than done. Sometimes the very rehearsed voice is as good as you're going to get, without the person being a professional lecturer.
> or get different presenters
It seems as though Apple is prioritizing having actual team leaders speaking about the products instead of just having hired actors do it. I'm perfectly happy with this.
You're not going to get Steve. For which I'm genuinely sorry.
But, yes, Apple has made the deliberate choice to have presenters who rehearse, rehearse, and rehearse. But many are not natural actors and will never be. You can mix things up a bit on a stage. But Apple does want a smooth production and puts a lot of money and effort into it.
The best presenters are those who have the natural affinity (or enough practice) to do method 2 really well. What we get from Apple (and most other professional-level speakers who aren't willing to take risks) is method 3C.
Infinite Loop seems to have missed somehow. The old Apple with multiple dodgy buildings all over the show was perhaps a bit more chaotically creative. Now it all seems very rehearsed, architected. Too perfect, just like the campus.
Just yesterday I was configuring my UniFi and being confused on where I can actually find everything in the new UI. I swear the firewall/policy UX changes every version.
its like a retail store where they force you to walk through the chips and chocolates to get to the fruit and veg... just in case you didnt know how yummy chips and chocolates are...
Doesn’t this ignore that the future of ads will probably just be some type of affiliate revenue going back to the agent for any product they help recommend.
Even if the FX is notionally "free" they pick the rates. So they can set those rates to generate exactly the same profit for them as with fees.
You will probably not see rates that are even competitive with a dodgy FX cash place at an airport, let alone with the numbers you've seen on financial networks for what FX transactions by banks cost, but you feel happy because there was "no fee".
>> Your bank may or may not use the rate indicated by this calculator to bill you
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(As a side note: the fine print follows up with this:
>> If your transaction is converted by the merchant or ATM operator, the exchange rate indicated by this calculator will not apply.
Don't ever let a merchant or ATM do foreign currency conversion for you. They charge astronomically high fees without exception. Pay in the foreign currency and let your card do the conversion.)
Huh. I wonder how long that's been true. I guess I haven't been to America since last century, but I could have sworn I had zero fee but unreasonable FX rates when I was in Poland which can't have been more than 25 years ago.
> You will probably not see rates that are even competitive with a dodgy FX cash place at an airport
You're crazy.
I have a Capital One account because they advertised "no foreign transaction fees". I checked on my foreign-currency payments and was always charged an amount that looked eerily similar to "1% more than you would have paid at the published exchange rate", so it's not clear to me why they say "no fee" and not "1% fee".
But the 1% fee that they actually have is very reasonable. An airport stall is in an entirely different league.
This is flat out incorrect. It's actually quite difficult to get a cash FX rate that's even close to as good as the standard credit card FX rate, which is also set by Visa/MC and not the banks.
Where the banks do get their pound of flesh, though, is the foreign transaction surcharge, which is often around 3%. No-fee cards exist but you need to look for them. And a whole new set of charges applies to doing a foreign cash advance on a credit card.
This is misleading. Banks put a fee on foreign transactions, many do this even if the transaction is in the card's native currency.
The card companies always add a margin to FX conversions, usually in the 0.5% range. This is fairly benign since the market rate can move between the transaction and the settlement, so sometimes you save money.
I think this is generally mitigated: When traveling, people use the card that doesn't have this fee. You have cards A and B. Has a fee; B doesn't. At home you use either. When traveling, you use B.
I stuck to a debit card for decades but got tired of the discrimination after it was rejected by the IRS as validation for COVID stimulus. Gas stations could be problematic. Canada could be problematic. Everything works with a credit card. If you are a responsible spender you may as well reap the benefit of the wealth transfer.
The costs of credit cards are higher in part because of the reward programs for using such cards. That's where the wealth transfer happens, and there's nothing like this for cash.
And often the credit card companies try to enforce this by writing wording into their contracts that try to stop merchants offering different prices for different payment methods.
This is true. In fact, if you come across a merchant that accepts credit with a minimum purchase amount or tacks an extra fee, you can take the receipt and call the terminal owner (visa/MasterCard) and report it. The receipt has a terminal ID, and it turns out the likes of Visa get really pissed if merchants do that.
I know this because I used to work on a US military base. There was a sole merchant on a particular installation that was doing this, but it was extreme. They'd force you to buy over 10 USD if you wanted to use a card, and it was the only place to grab a snack. One day there terminal was shut down, and for a period they only went to cash payments. Once they took credit again they removed the minimum purchase. Turns out somebody got pissed, and reported them.
Regarding the article, the ~390 USR sounds about right to me. I only use a credit card, pay it completely off at the end of the month. I've never once paid interest since in the 8 years I have used this card. Every few years I buy a plan ticket with the rewards.
> In fact, if you come across a merchant that accepts credit with a minimum purchase amount or tacks an extra fee, you can take the receipt and call the terminal owner (visa/MasterCard) and report it. The receipt has a terminal ID, and it turns out the likes of Visa get really pissed if merchants do that.
This also varies by country, but I think Visa/Mastercard relented on it in many jurisdictions.
In Australia, for example, merchants have been allowed to add on credit card fees everywhere, and their card readers automatically tack on the fee when they detect a credit card.
Card network rules in the US prohibit merchants from adding a surcharge for payment with a debit card. Most merchants are either unaware, or prefer not to care. If you are using a debit card at a business that assesses a card surcharge, point out that your card is a debit card when paying and refuse to pay the surcharge. If that does not help, there are online forms available from both Mastercard and Visa where you can submit a merchant complaint.
Places around me have been starting to itemize the credit card fee. Only car dealerships so far have waived the fee for debit over credit in my experience.
And it wasn’t out of the goodness of their hearts that they changed - they finally lost enough big court cases over it, it was to avoid heavy handed legislation.
It's not unheard of. Gas sometimes. My car dealer for one. (Whether it's a credit surcharge or a debit discount is semantics.) Though with the cashback on my usual credit card I use for domestic credit card purchases, the difference is pretty much not worth worrying about.
I think it's true for most businesses with single transaction being big enough - car dealerships, child care, rent. On the other hand many of them are not happy with cash either because processing cash also incur fees that are not nesessarily less than credit card fees. Most businesses that prefer to take cash are smaller ones because most likely they won't report it.
They have something like 8 different brains, can regenerate limbs, incredibly smart, can change colors & texture to match surrounds, and more.
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