Back in the 1990s, when the late Apple chief executive Steve Jobs returned to the company he co-founded and once again was making its product keynotes, a wildly enthusiastic audience was a guarantee.

The big keynotes typically took place during the Macworld convention in San Francisco in January. Anybody who had paid for convention entry could attend the keynote in one of the vast halls at the Moscone Centre.

Well, almost anybody. The problem was always the limited space.

Despite being able to hold thousands of people, any regular attendee at those events at that time knew that more people would want to see Jobs do his Stevenote than could fit in the auditorium. Hence, queues would start forming the day before.

These were serious Apple addicts and Jobs fans, willing to camp out overnight on the streets of San Francisco in the middle of winter.

Next morning, they’d be clutching their steaming cups of takeaway coffee, tired but excited after a marathon wait. We press hacks would arrive, well rested and breakfasted, to be marched past them into the hall to the reserved press seats up front. The near-to-Jobs seats, the ones they most coveted.

But once inside, they were thrilled to be there, and just about anything Jobs said would be greeted with wild applause. The “one more thing” bit was awaited with the anticipation a child has on Christmas morning. Was he going to say it now? No. Maybe now? Not yet . . .

Keynote complete, most would rise to cheer. That included some of the more fanatical press members as well. But the ovation was always mostly about Jobs, the undeniable rock star of the tech sector.

When Apple announced that Jobs would no longer be doing Macworld keynotes in late 2008, the company faced a problem.

Announcements would now be made at special events before the invited press, or during the company’s annual developer conference.

No more guaranteed cheers

Neither audience could be guaranteed to cheer at every Jobs utterance. Anybody who knows developers knows plenty of them will have a strong and often vocal opinion about what could or should be on offer to them.

And the press are, well, the press. This is a profession (rightly) paid to be cynical. Or at least, was. But I’ll come back to that.

One Apple insider close to Jobs told me that the first of the all-press keynotes was a major worry for the keynote team, for precisely this reason.

Anybody who saw Jobs do a live keynote in the old days will know why. He was a mesmerising presenter, particularly if he had something spicy to unveil, and had an energised audience to play to and feed off.

Some in Apple worried that a press audience might be painfully deflationary for a keynote. So a decision was made to fill some of the seats with Apple staffers, who could be relied on to start the cheers and applause at appropriate moments if the audience didn’t do it themselves.

I was at a few of those press and/or developer Stevenotes, and while they had a different, calmer feel – and could feature some audible grumbles – they were not the feared-for embarrassments.

Not groundbreaking

Fast forward to this week's keynote by Apple chief executive Tim Cook, launching two phones, a payment system and a watch. Nice, but not groundbreaking in the way of, say, the first iMacs. Or the iPod. Or the iPhone. Or iPad.

But the press audience leapt to its feet for a standing ovation for, in the case of the watch, a non-existent product that, for now, remains vapourware.

I doubt Jobs would even have launched the planned product so early in its development timeline, but pressure has been on Apple for a couple of keynotes to announce a watch.

And while Cook is a solid and capable speaker, he is not, it has to be said, a Jobs.

Maybe the press contingent was hyped up after the arrival onstage of U2. Still. The idea of an audience of journalists and analysts giving a standing ovation at a product launch is, frankly, alarming.

Being sceptical

The job of a journalist is not to cheerlead, but to ask hard questions. To be sceptical at product launches. To confirm Apple’s concerns from 2009 that the press might not even clap.

Maybe that final moment, when that press audience surged to its feet, said everything about what is going wrong with technology coverage in an era of barely rewritten press-release “churnalism”, advertiser-subsidised content, and writers that go reliably (G)oogly-eyed over the latest gadgets.

Ovations are for the fanbase. Not those whose job it is to take companies, and their claims and promises, to task.