Apple over the last years has made a very conscious effort to have a set of speakers with diverse backgrounds.
It’s good in many ways, but also hard to ignore just how obvious that effort is once you realise it’s there. That’s true for all presentations, including the dev talks at WWDC.
It is hard for me to push aside the impression that nowadays the speakers - regardless their background - are entirely chosen for optical reasons. My only favourite moment in a recent big presentation was the M1 chip part with Srouji. That guy is not made for the camera but man he lives hardware with every fibre of his soul.
Good summary. I can’t take huge corporations seriously when they virtue signal to this extent. Apple cares so much about diversity, while kids mine their cobalt in the Congo.
I think that's fine honestly, if you want to maximize your talent pool you have to motivate the entirety of society to become interested and not just the groups already overrepresented. For example it's not like women are genetically predetermined to lack interest in hardware, that's a social construct.
There is a whole segment of society that cannot watch a 12 minute video unless there is at least one offensive joke. They are the audience of every right-wing grift YouTuber and dirtbag leftist podcaster.
Everything else is "politically correct" according to this segment.
