There was a time when everyone thought they knew what an Apple product launch looked like. The archetypal Apple product launch was Steve Jobs standing on a stage in San Francisco in front of a large crowd, announcing another world-changing product. That was never actually true. Even before Jobs’s illness forced other Apple execs into the spotlight, Apple had different levels of product launches. I’ve sat in the front row of a huge crowd of fans at Macworld Expo, way off to the side among raucous Apple developers at the Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC), in the back row behind VIPs at the S…