Apple's new keynote 'Superman' is Craig Federighi, despite the bad jokes

Apple’s CEO Tim Cook might have to re-think the nicknames he uses for his colleagues like the one used for SVP Craig Federighi on the WWDC stage last evening. The CEO called Federighi ‘Superman’ before inviting him back on stage for the presentation.   According to a report by Mashable, which calculated the number of minutes Federighi spent on stage, the SVP got whopping 78 minutes out of the 112 minutes of the keynote. That’s about 70 percent of the total time of the event, so clearly Federighi was in Superman mode. In contrast, CEO Cook spent a meagre 20 minutes on stage. This is not surprising considering the huge software focus, which is Federighi’s responsibility.   If you missed the event last night, Cook said “I want to invite my colleague, Superman, back to the stage.” To which Federighi responded “This is clearly some kind of endurance training thing Tim is doing to me”.   Another thing that stood out was Federighi’s constant attempt to infuse a bit of humour into the proceedings. While we are sure Federighi is great at his job, perhaps comedy is not his thing, at least not the way it was done last night. While the late Steve Jobs would enthrall the audience with his charismatic presence on stage, Federighi took the more slapstick route. Federighi used supposedly-funny skits ranging from gesturing devil horns while introducing the graphics processing system Metal, to refusing a call from his mother on stage, only to call Dr Dre, Apple’s newest employee.   With Federighi on stage, jokes about his hair are not far behind. He demonstrated video messages in iMessage backstage wearing a large wig, a dig at his blown-up hair. He also got another Apple employee take a chainsaw to it. We believe the ‘Hair Force One’ joke is tiresome and stale (it’s recycled almost every WWDC), perhaps next time we can joke about something else.   For those wondering, Federighi has been with Apple since 2009, developing the Mac OS X, and has had stints with NeXT and Ariba previously. In 2012, after the **bitter departure of Scott Forstall from Apple** , Federighi’s role also included iOS development along with Mac Software Engineering.