The Apple of our eye: turns out people loved the WWDC keynote

It may have clocked in at more than two hours in length, and there may have been no devices on offer, but it seems people were still overwhelmingly positive about Apple’s WWDC keynote.

According to sentiment analysis recorded by Oxford University’s TheySay tool, the event as a whole and the keynotes itself received 93% and 94% positive sentiment respectively. Drawing on nearly 95 000 tweets recorded immediately prior to, during, and in the aftermath of the event, the company’s analysis shows just how much good will there is toward Apple.

“It is fair to say that no other company exists whose positive sentiment ratings are constantly so extremely high,” says TheySay CTO and co-founder Dr Karo Moilanen.

The new products announced also received seriously positive sentiment. Apple Pay, for instance, received 98% positive sentiment while iOS 9 received 96%. Slightly cooler but still very strong signals were detected for OS X 10.11 at 88% and Apple Music at 85%.

Apple’s attempt to increase diversity was apparently also well received.

The ghost of Jobs past

Another interesting thing to come out of the data is that despite it being nearly four years since the late Steve Jobs’ last WWDC keynote, his influence remains strong.

Excluding references of the keynote and the event itself, Jobs accounted for five percent of the references and was referred to more often than HomeKit.

“Many tweeters referred to their dear memories of past WWDC events in which the legendary Jobs set standards to new heights,” says Moilanen. “Accordingly, many comparisons between Steve Jobs and Tim Cook were made by tweeters which were anti-Cook in many cases”.

One thing that may have driven such mentions was Apple’s decision to make the Swift programming language open source, something many believe Jobs would not have done. Tweets about Jobs expressed more excitement and agitation than those about Cook.

Music and Pay dominate conversation

Unsurprisingly, Apple’s two newest services dominated conversation. Despite Music generating the most conversation, Apple Pay generated far more positive levels of sentiment than Music. In fact, Music generated 4.5 times as many negative tweets as Pay.

Then again, with tweets like this surrounding the music service, that might not be all that surprising:

Guys, I have no idea what Apple Music is and I've been watching this whole keynote. #WWDC15

— Max Eddy (@wmaxeddy) June 8, 2015

iOS 9 gets people speculating

According to TheySay, tweets about iOS 9 contained the most speculation in its sample, even more than Apple Pay and Apple Music. iOS 9 tweets also generated the highest levels of liking emotions, followed by Apple Music and Apple Apple.

It’s unclear why that might be, although it’s possible that it had something to do with the fact that it was one of the most widely expected announcements on the day and therefore generated a lot of speculation in the lead up to the event.