I find it incredibly awkward when tech presenters do the self-conscious pause and wait for crowd applause. When the applause don't come, or they're not well timed, the whole thing ends up looking contrived and sad.

Elon Musk does this a lot, and I've never seen it work well. It makes me wonder whether Apple had a lot of plants / cheerleaders in their audiences. I mean if you obsess so much about all the other parts of a presentation, would you be above planting cheerleaders?

What would work better, I think, is to just do the presentation, and if you get a big round of spontaneous applause, then pause and acknowledge with a "yeah!". Definitely not the other way around, though.