Apple product keynotes · 2021–2026
Six years, phrase by phrase.
Nine keynotes · what arrived, what faded, what never leaves
The hype curve
Hype phrases per 10,000 spoken words, keynote by keynote. Normalising by words is what makes a 30-minute Mac event comparable to a 98-minute iPhone one — and it shows the short events are the concentrated ones.
When AI arrived
The product stage was almost silent on AI until 2024, then "Apple Intelligence" landed fully formed. "Machine learning", the phrase it replaced, never had a moment here at all.
Share of stage
Which product owned each keynote, by how often it was named. September belongs to iPhone; the autumn and spring events are where everything else gets its hour.
What it's made of
Materials talk is not constant — it spikes when the material is the story. Titanium is the clearest example in the set: absent for years, then suddenly a headline.
The pledge, year by year
Recycled materials, carbon neutrality, the environment. A segment that grew into a fixture and then, on the evidence here, got shorter again.
Stage rituals
The lines that show up because a keynote is a keynote, not because of anything being announced. Totals across the whole set.
Every phrase, every keynote
The whole vocabulary at once. Darker means the phrase was said more often in that keynote, relative to its own busiest showing.
What debuted
Phrases with a clean run of zeros behind them and a real showing the year they arrive. This is the pattern tonight's watchlist words would follow if a foldable lands.