Even to an introvert like me, the cheesiness and being corny is part of what makes karaoke so good, it has an automatic atmosphere where you are allowed to do badly because we can all laugh at ourselves.

Polish and perfection makes this less appealing to me. Makes it feel up-tight and a bit snobby.

for me, I can't sing along if it's not close to the original because my brain remembers every tick of the original and wants to match the key of the original as well.

Also, I had a friend who got addicted to Smule which is an online sing duets with random strangers. It uses auto-tune so that anyone can enjoy themselves. I never tried it but he said it was amazing and he got a ton of joy from it.

Me, I like the idea that I can show off my amazing singing skills so if this auto-tunes everyone then that will go away. On the other hand, it's always been frustrating that box style karaoke places rarely have a large selection of western music (most of them are targeting the subset of their local market that would actually to got a box style karaoke place). My hope is that with this more of them will support just using the room as a place to use this service and then my friends and I can sing from a larger variety of songs.

> I can't sing along if it's not close to the original because my brain remembers every tick of the original and wants to match the key of the original as well.

I don't know if this helps at all, but you probably want to learn to sing in a different octave, not a different key. This means shifting your voice up and down from the original in multiples of eight notes. You can sing in a different octave without changing the background music and it'll sound completely normal, and have the same feel as the original song.

Interestingly they don't even use the word カラオケ even in the Japanese press release, even though karaoke is massively popular in Japan.

https://www.apple.com/jp/newsroom/2022/12/apple-introduces-a...

It's probably if they use the word カラオケ, that might cause inherent expectation of what services would feature, like mic echo, scoring, ranking, etc., that's most of major karaoke apps, even on mobile platform would feature.

> And if Apple knows anything is how to market / rebrand the same old shit and sell it to the masses at really marked up prices for profit.

They're also pretty good at taking a product that is about 75% of the way to being great, and pushing it that last bit. Hell, that's arguably why they are so successful. They're not really inventors, they are perfectors.

They're adding it to Apple Music for no extra cost this time though.

Apple literally owns a show called Carpool Karaoke

what do you expect from a company that invented the pencil?

Disagree. The reason is that they would get laughed out of court if they tried to trademark karaoke, whereas now they own one of the most common words in the English language. If you had or were planning to make an app called 'Sing along' or 'Sing with me' or suchlike, get ready for a scary legal letter from Apple's trademark lawyers.