Yesterday’s keynote speech at WWDC left Apple fans wistful for the Steve Job days and critical of current CEO Tim Cook. That’s according to analysis of nearly 95,000 tweets which mentioned the event. The analysis also showed that the two features social media users talked the most about were Apple Pay and Apple Music.
Sentiment on Apple very high at WWDC
The folks at TheySay released their analysis of 94,528 tweets from between 1:30 and 5 p.m. Eastern on Monday. They found that overall social media sentiment on Apple was very high, with most positive sentiment exceeding 90%.
“It is fair to say that no other company exists whose positive sentiment ratings are constantly so extremely high,” they said.
For example, TheySay reported 98% positive sentiment on Apple Pay and 96% positive sentiment on iOS 9 in the tweets they sampled. On OS X 10.11, they saw 88% positive sentiment, and on Apple Music, sentiment was 85% positive. On the overall topic of WWDC 2015, comments were 93% positive, while on management’s keynote speech, sentiment was 94% positive.
Remembering the good old days
Interestingly, the firm reports that Twitter users talked about late Apple co-founder Steve Jobs more often than they did the company’s HomeKit API, highlighting “a most remarkable undercurrent of sentiment” around him.
“Many tweeters referred to their dear memories of past WWDC events in which the legendary Jobs set standards to new heights,” said analysts at TheySay. “Accordingly, many comparisons between Steve Jobs and Tim Cook were made by tweeters which were anti-Cook in many cases.”
One of Apple’s announcements on Monday was the decision to make its Swift programming language open source. Apparently many Twitter users were confused by this, particularly because the decision was probably not one Jobs would have made.
Although Jobs was mentioned in only about 5% of the WWDC references on Twitter compared to Cook’s 12% of references, tweets mentioning Jobs “expressed more excitement and agitation than those about Cook.”
Positive sentiment on Apple Pay
Apple Pay and Apple Music were the two topics from the WWDC keynote that garnered the most attention. Twitter users were about two times more positive on Apple Pay than they were on Apple Music. Interestingly, Apple Music generated the highest levels of negative sentiment at 4.5 times more than negative sentiment on Apple Pay.
TheySay reported that Apple Music “generated the highest levels of excitement and agitation.” In second place was iOS 9, while Apple Pay was in third place in this category. Further, tweets that mentioned Apple Music included many negative comments about Spotify and other competing streaming music services.
