Video: Apple News+ (2019) Is Strikingly Similar to Newsstand in 2011

Apple News+ is one of the many services the tech giant premiered this week during its “show time” event at the Steve Jobs Theater in Cupertino, California.

But what I’ve observed is a strictly similar comparison to when Apple announced the Newsstand app at the Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in 2011. Watch the above video and @ me if you don’t think these debuts — more than seven years apart — are similar. The 2011 WDCC keynote announcing Newsstand and the 2019 march announcement of Apple News+ use many of the same talking points and examples.

But first, let me backtrack on how I got here.

On Monday, I watched the keynote address on an iMac Pro at work while I simultaneously refreshed my Twitter app in the hopes would go viral.

As I went to delete another fire-hot take that got no engagement — but 44 impressions in three minutes — I noticed a tirade going on in media Twitter about Apple News+. I wasn’t about to get into that, but what I did remember was that I had an iPad 2 once. I remember watching an old WWDC in the past, where Apple execs hyped how great magazines and newspapers were. They would work great with Apple, too, they said in 2011. They said the same things on Monday.

A quick Google search brought me to Scott Forstall introducing iOS 5 at the WWDC in 2011. One of the big announcements was the introduction of the Newsstand app. This app would be able to store all the magazines and newspapers you subscribe to all in one easy location. The covers of each issue would also adorn the Newsstand in your hand.

This was cute, but once I got down to watching both segments back to back, side by side, it all started to align. There were too many similarities that I couldn’t not notice. So I shut down my Twitter feed, cleared off the iMac Pro, and began to compare a two-and-a-half minute segment from WWDC 2011 to the Apple News+ announcement in 2019.

Enjoy.

Thoughts on the Apple News+ presentation? Message the author on Twitter: @west_on.