All of Apple’s products this year were just fine. You could settle yourself totally within the Apple ecosystem and use Apple Music and Apple News on your iPhone while taking Live Photos and you would be just fine. You wouldn’t have the best time, but you wouldn’t have the worst one, either. It would just be fine.
And that’s really the issue. We’re not used to Apple being just fine. We’re used to Apple being wildly better than the competition, or sometimes much worse, but always being ahead of the curve on some significant axis. But what we got in 2015 was an Apple that released more products than ever, all of which felt incomplete in extremely meaningful ways – ways that meant that their products were just fine, and often just the same as everyone else’s.
In defense of Apple, the company did put out a significant number of new platforms this year. Let’s see if they manage to improve these clearly beta platforms in 2016.
ICloud Photos is so disappointing. Apple has changed directions on the originally excellent Photostream idea so many times that nobody knows how it works any more. I am a very experienced Apple user and I’m paying $10 a month for the 1TB of iCloud storage, and I can’t get my Macs to sync up consistently with ICloud Photo Library. And don’t even mention the web interface… With a large photo library it simply doesn’t work — thousands upon thousands of blank photo thumbnails loaded in the browser… If it successfully loads at all.
Works great for me. I imported 15,000 old photos in and it works great on the highly storage limited iPhone (16GB) and on the macbook. Web interface is buggy that’s true but I never use it. Sharing photos to my parents is so dead easy, great private social network for the family.
It feels like  is slowly going back to how it was in 1995-1996: releasing tons and tons of products without being able to bake each of them in the oven enough and spreading their resources thin.
Whatever you thought of Steve Jobs(egomaniac, genius, A-hole), it is proven with every year that goes by that he was the heart and soul of the company. Without him, they have lost that edge to their creativity. Without his guidance…well, without his dictatorship, the company feels like it has no direction. They have become just another high-end tech producer. Jobs’ gift was keeping everyone focused on one big idea at a time, one goal at a time, making the finished product a flagship for not just Apple, but for the industry as a whole. Now they are just throwing crap against the wall, hoping something sticks. There is no iPhone, iPod, or iPad waiting in the wings at the company; there’s just the refinement of the same products. That is fine if you’re Toyota; but it’s not god enough for a company that “thinks different”.
Not true. They just launched the Apple Watch: another Next Big Thing. It’s probably as good as it could be at the moment. The problem is, only a few tech journalists believe in it, and although millions buy it, those same people would buy just about anything Apple anyway.
The original iPhone was sorely lacking, and the iPad was just four iPhones glued together. The main difference now is the level of hype: the iPad was supposedly the saviour of paid journalism, and would revolutionise media consumption. And also school textbooks! The Watch, well, it’s going to be awesomely important for medical monitoring in a few generations; right now it’s a more pleasant way to ignore unimportant incoming messages.
Something like that will be important in the future. Nothing guarantee’s its going to be made by Apple.
MS also were first to tablets and really smart phones, a lot of good it did them.
Apple were not first with the Apple Watch by a long shot.
Pebble has been around for years, and several Android Watch models came out before the Apple Watch came to market.
some of those android models were rushed out just so that they could beat the Apple Watch to the market.
Being first is not always a guarantee of success.
Just look at what happened to the first commercial Jet Airliner, the Comet. Several fell out of the sky due to metal fatigue. Boeing learned from those mistakes and the success of the 707 is there for all to see.
Having been working since 1969 I am savvy enough to avoid ‘The first of anything’.
That’s kind of my point. The current product isn’t really all that useful. It’s barely a prototype. So it’s very difficult for it to carry all that hype.
Most of the complaints about Apple products the original Gizmodo article brought can be traced to the lack of apps from developers that take advantage of features all those products have in them. Gizmodo dismissed the iPad Pro only because of what they consider the weird way the Pencil charges with the Pro’s lightning connector. It’s not like that is the ONLY way you can charge the Pencil, the thing comes with an adaptor one can use with any Lightning cable lying around. Gizmodo ignored this fact, which is a little disingenuous. The Gizmodo article did not address the Pencil’s utility or any pro graphics apps that are available for the iPad Pro, which have received many rave reviews. Graphics pros seem to be the primary market Apple intends for the iPad Pro based on ads and copy on the website, Gizmodo ignores all of that.
The Gizmodo article dismissed the Apple Watch but what new apps that take advantage of the on-watch capability have been introduced since WatchOS2 came out? Hardly any. It is up to developers to come out with apps or new versions of existing apps that use the Watch’s capabilities, it’s not totally Apple’s responsibility.
The Gizmodo article dismissed the new AppleTV. Once again, the new AppleTV can have apps installed on it, so it’s up to developers to come up with something for customers to install on the device, it’s not totally up to Apple.
The new Macbook seems to be popular with some people while it is seen as limited by others. Personally I don’t need to have 15 things connected to my laptop all the time. Others use cases may vary, so the device should not be totally dismissed because one group needs more inputs. Apple sells plenty of laptop models with all those capabilities.
Mr Patel does a good job for the most part in this article, whereas Gizmodo was its usual limited whiny self, ignoring the fact that most of their complaints have to do with the lack of apps from developers that take full advantage of all the new capabilities of the new devices that came out this year.
Edited 2015-12-29 17:24 UTC
Yes it is. Just as its Jolla’s responsibility for getting apps on Sailfish, and Microsoft’s responsibility for getting apps on windows phone. They have to convince the third parties that this is a viable platform that will reward their investment in it. Obviously, they’ve failed to do that.
It is hardly as difficult to get developers to write applications for WatchOS as it is to get them to do it for an OS that only a VERY few people use, let alone have even heard about, lets’s be real here. Market size, user base, the state of developer tools, all sorts of reasons could underlie the lack of WatchOS apps, and I don’t presume to know about any of those as I am not a developer. Then there is the matter of getting people to find and to actually install them onto their Apple Watches. Apple can’t make any of this happen, it’s up to the market, including developers to take advantage of the tools available and to market their work to consumers. Economics 101.
For a new platform, I still think Apple bears the brunt of the responsibility. Its a new form factor, it needs Apple to show the way it can be used to benefit app developer customers. They haven’t yet.
Apple hasn’t been innovative for the past decade.
They just make endless variations of the iPod touch (iPhone, iPad, iWatch) and laptops (even the iMacs are basically big laptops on stands) loaded with klutzy outdated software.
I’d agree with everything except calling MacOSX outdated. Maybe the UI is, but underneath its pretty modern, stable, and secure.