It’s early on Tuesday afternoon, and the crowds of guests and journalists who earlier packed the Flint Center for the Performing Arts, in the California town of Cupertino, have mostly dissipated. A few camera crews linger while TV reporters film their final reports on the morning’s flurry of activity.

This is the aftermath of one of the biggest media events of the year, an Apple product launch, and the place has the air of a raucous party that has come to a sudden, slightly bewildered close.

Just a few people remain in front of the large white-box showroom that was built to allow attendees to play with the company's two new mobile phones, the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus, and demonstration versions of the long-awaited Apple Watch. One of those people looks very pleased indeed: Tim Cook, Apple's chief executive.

Cook is posing for photographs, and the wide beam of his smile befits a man who has just come through the most important few hours of his career.

Ever since the death of Steve Jobs, the company's inspirational founder, in 2011, Apple and, in particular, Cook have had to face the accusation that they have run out of ideas, that the stream of innovation that produced the Macintosh computer, iPod music player, iPhone and iPad has run dry.

Revenue and profits have continued to grow under Cook’s stewardship, but before this week there had been no new product category since Jobs unveiled the iPad, in 2010.

In an industry where the likes of Samsung unveil new smartphones, tablets and smartwatches every few months, Apple’s more controlled release schedule looks ponderous. And with Google’s self-driving cars and other ventures attempting to turn yesterday’s science fiction into tomorrow’s tech reality, the pressure on Cook to prove that Apple’s capacity to innovate hadn’t disappeared must have felt unbearable.

But while Tuesday’s event allowed Apple to reclaim the initiative, it remains to be seen whether it will be as groundbreaking as the launches that Jobs presided over.

The new, larger iPhones are marvels of engineering and design, but they are also following the trend of larger-screened Android devices, particularly the so-called phablets popularised by the Samsung Galaxy Note series.

And it’s not unreasonable to see the unveiling of the Apple Watch as a supreme act of theatrical misdirection: the device won’t be available until some undetermined point next year, and an official statement of battery life – crucial for a device that will be used all day – is conspicuous by its absence.

But Tuesday’s event proved that Apple has no peers in at least one critical area: when it comes to choreographing a spectacle, the company is in a league of its own.

The keynote format that Apple has devised to launch its products is well known at this stage, a finely honed production that builds anticipation and reinforces the company’s self-mythology.

The formula sees the chief executive give an introductory spiel on the state of the company, often followed by a few potshots at rivals whose products aren’t as polished or successful as Apple’s, before a number of software and hardware announcements build towards the big reveal, the keenly awaited new product that everyone has been expecting.

Most observers thought the catchphrase that Jobs often used to tee up that moment – “one more thing” – had been retired on his death, but Cook used it for the first time on Tuesday morning to ramp up audience excitement ahead of the Apple Watch unveiling.

Words and pictures

This week’s edition departed significantly from the usual formula, partly a function of having so much to announce but also partly because the keynote format, as Dan Frommer of the business website Quartz put it last week, should be thought of as “one of Apple’s most successful products, which rarely gets recognised as such . . . made not of aluminum and glass, but of words and pictures”.

Apple’s ability to command such huge amounts of attention, however, goes beyond the theatrical qualities of the keynote. The scale of the media presence in Cupertino this week was unprecedented, with hundreds of journalists from around the world among the 2,400-strong crowd.

Before the event, US technology journalists who regularly attend Apple launches expressed amazement at the extent of the media operation. As Matthew Panzarino of TechCrunch puts it: “Apple doesn’t have to flex its muscles to gain the world’s attention, but this time it’s really flexing its muscles.”

Inviting so many representatives from the world’s media was just one sign that Apple was determined to maximise the event’s impact. Among the crowd are influencers from Rupert Murdoch to will.i.am, Gwen Stefani to Stephen Fry, Lily Cole to Kobe Bryant. A guest list like that is calibrated to signal the breadth of Apple’s cultural influence.

The final part of the Apple playbook is its notorious devotion to secrecy. Given that all the rumours were reliably suggesting that Apple was going to launch two iPhones, a payment system and a wearable device, it’s easy to believe that secrecy policy isn’t exactly paying off.

Certainly, the practicalities of manufacturing millions of iPhones in Chinese factories in time for the holiday season mean there will be leaks, and we will never likely be surprised by a new iPhone again.

But the rising anticipation in the auditorium and the gush of excitement that comes with the first sight of the Apple Watch in the promotional video was a direct result of the fact that no one outside Apple had a clue what it looked like. Given that it has been in development for the past few years, that’s an exceptional achievement – and such secrecy is possible only when a company truly understands that it is necessary in order to generate the curiosity and hype that guarantee all the publicity in the immediate aftermath of the launch.

So Cook had every reason to be pleased on Tuesday. The persistent narrative of Apple’s declining powers of innovation was debunked in the public perception. But changing that narrative took a lot more than just painstakingly working on some new products and revealing them to the world. It involved an almost equal level of precision in choreographing how those products would be revealed to the world.