Monday, February 3, 2025

2024 Six Colors Apple Report Card

Jason Snell (complete commentary):

It’s time for our annual look back on Apple’s performance during the past year, as seen through the eyes of writers, editors, developers, podcasters, and other people who spend an awful lot of time thinking about Apple. The whole idea here is to get a broad sense of sentiment—the “vibe in the room”—regarding the past year. (And by looking at previous survey results, we can even see how that sentiment has drifted over the course of an entire decade.)

Here are my responses:

Mac: 3 The M4 Macs have some virtualization, display, and USB issues, but overall the updates seem seem strong. I’m particularly excited about the MacBook Pro’s nanotexture display. The Mac input devices are finally USB-C, but they got the most minimal of updates, not fixing the Magic Mouse’s charging point or modernizing the globe key’s location on the extended keyboard. Unfortunately, the Mac Studio and Mac Pro are still using M2 processors. SSD pricing is still ridiculous, and the software side is still a mess, both in terms of reliability and design. I have not found the Apple Intelligence features very useful. Probably the most exciting things for me in Sequoia are the new Passwords app and the new window management features, though in both cases I prefer third-party solutions.

iPhone: 4 This is one of those years where the new iPhones seem fine, but I feel no urgency to upgrade from the previous model. The most interesting things to me are Photographic Styles and Camera Control. I’m hoping that the former will eventually let me reduce over processing. The latter sounded promising but is now seeming more like the new Touch Bar: over-engineered and less useful than the basic Action button. iOS 18 adds a bunch of useful features.

iPad: 3 This seemed to be the year where a lot of people accepted that the software is what it is. If you love iPadOS, the hardware for running it is now better than ever. If not, no matter how much potential there may be, it’s time to stop waiting for Pro to happen in the way that you want and just use a Mac.

Wearables: 4, Apple Watch: 4, Vision Pro: 1 The AirPods 4 seem good. AirPods Max remains a product in Apple’s lineup. Apple no longer offers software updates for my watch, and I’m waiting for a new Apple Watch SE, which hasn’t been announced yet. Apple Vision Pro is technically impressive, but it increasingly seems like Apple built the wrong thing. Those engineering resources would have been much better spent improving Apple’s other platforms.

Home: 2 My HomePod continues to not work well for Siri or music. This year I dipped my toes into the Matter ecosystem. I was pleased to find that it all “just worked,” though the automation options are a bit limited, and I still don’t like the Home app.

Apple TV: 3 Nothing much happened this year, though I like the new feature of automatically showing subtitles when you rewind a bit. I still don’t like the software or the remote.

Services: 2 iMessage and Siri still work poorly for me. Apple Pay and the rest of iCloud are OK. The other services don’t interest me except in that their existence seems to be warping Apple’s product design decisions.

Hardware Reliability: 4 My most recent hardware has been working well this year. My 2019 Intel MacBook Pro’s internal SSD partially failed. The Mac is out of AppleCare, and the SSD is non-replaceable, so now it can only be used with an external SSD, which is inconvenient for a portable computer and somewhat unreliable (with sleep, etc.). This would be worse with an Apple Silicon–based MacBook Pro because, for security reasons, they no longer support booting from external storage when the internal storage isn’t working. Without being able to replace the SSD, the whole Mac would be dead.

OS Quality: 1, Apple Apps: 3 The software quality slide continues. The same old bugs are still there. Finder views still don’t update or reveal properly, and external drives still don’t mount reliably. macOS Sequoia bought new problems, particularly related to storage. Now, it’s sometimes impossible to unmount drives cleanly. Time Machine deleted lots of my old backups unnecessarily and had trouble completing new backups. Third-party backup utilities are also having trouble, as Sequoia broke ASR’s ability to create bootable backups. Multiple of my Macs now have regular kernel panics, which never happened before. There are a variety of new networking issues. Safari often stops working under heavy load, so, though it’s still my default browser, I’m increasingly incorporating Chrome and Firefox. I wish that, instead of focusing on Apple Intelligence, Apple had focused on improving the quality of the OS and on improving the design of Music and the other media/services apps.

Developer Relations: 2 The same old issues with the App Store, documentation, and bug reporting. Nothing seems to be getting better. This was the second year in a row that Xcode shipped with a showstopper bug for Mac developers. Once again, it was reported during the beta period but there was no urgency to fix it. The Swift toolchain is still crashy and unreliable. Apple continues to write SwiftUI and SwiftData checks that the frameworks can’t cash.

Apple’s Impact in the World: No vote

See also: Nick Heer.

Previously:

2 Comments RSS · Twitter · Mastodon

someone
February 3, 2025 7:22 PM

> […] Unfortunately, the Mac Studio and Mac Pro are still using M2 processors. SSD pricing is still ridiculous […]

The Mac Pro M2 pricing is already way beyond ridiculous in its default configuration.

Bri
February 3, 2025 7:27 PM

Every now and then I think about upgrading my mac from Ventura to Sonoma or Sequoia. But every time I read posts like these I once again become convinced not to do so. It's only a matter of time though before apps start dropping support for it. 😞

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