Craig Federighi Is Dominating Apple Keynotes

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Apple senior vice president of software engineering Craig Federighi talks to Dr. Dre via Mac OS X Yosemite

Image: Jeff Chiu/Associated Press

By Chris Taylor2014-06-03 01:15:01 UTC

"Superman:" that's the word Apple CEO Tim Cook used to welcome his senior VP Craig Federighi back to the stage for the fourth time during what was ostensibly Cook's WWDC keynote.

Mashable has crunched the numbers, and it seems Federighi was on stage for nearly 78 minutes during the 112-minute event, or roughly 70% of the time. By contrast, Cook was on stage for less than 20 minutes, or a mere 17.6% of the time.

Should we even call it Cook's keynote any more?

Granted, it made sense for a software guy like Federighi to hog the stage this year, given that so much of the news focused on Apple's two operating systems, iOS and Mac OS X. But if you look back at WWDC 2013, when the headline product was the Mac Pro desktop, you can still see a similar pattern.

Federighi owned the Moscone stage in 2013 for 55 minutes, or very nearly 50% of the time. Cook was in the spotlight for just half of that time.

And of course, the numbers only tell half the story. Whereas Cook's delivery remains slow, stilted and serious, Federighi is a lively presence with a distinct sense of humor — even if that humor often tends to fall under the category of Dad jokes.

Federighi flashed a "metal" hand sign when introducing Apple's new gaming program system called Metal. He refused a call that was supposedly from his mom, and called "the newest Apple employee" instead — Dr. Dre. And in the most bizarre segment, demonstrating video messages in iMessage backstage, he wore a large wig and had another Apple employee take a chainsaw to it — a joke on Federighi's famous large, gray, Flock of Seagulls-style hair.

Will Federighi's lively delivery propel him to even greater chunks of Apple keynote real estate in future? One thing's for sure — he can't occupy the stage for much more of the time without pushing Cook off it completely.

Alex Magdaleno contributed to this report.