Andrew Cunningham reports in ars technica:
Apple is worming its way into every crevice in your digital life—your car, your doctor’s office, your wallet, your house. With iOS 8 and OS X Yosemite, it also deepened the links between its different product lines, making it easier to bounce information around among your various Apple devices.
Apple had an extraordinarily busy 2015. Most of its efforts were focused on hardware and software rather than niche initiatives like CarPlay or HomeKit—we got new kinds of Macs, a new kind of iPad, and an iPhone with a couple of twists. And perhaps most importantly, it launched two entirely new platforms with new iOS-derivative OSes, App Stores, and SDKs for developers: the Apple Watch and WatchOS, and the new Apple TV with tvOS.
With those new platforms and the updates to old ones, Apple is building on the platform work it's been doing since it launched iCloud back in 2011. As it broadens and deepens the links between its existing platforms and builds brand-new ones, it makes it more and more appealing for people with Apple products to buy other Apple products. Apple has benefitted from a “halo effect” since the iPod’s heyday, when the popularity of its music players convinced more people to buy Macs. Now the halo has been intentionally baked into all of its products, hardware and software, and the lineup is much larger than it was a decade ago.
Like we did last year, we'll run down Apple's entire lineup product by product, examining where the company went in 2015 and where it's going next year.
The iPhone: Staying the course
The iPhone is Apple’s biggest product and a lot of the time it’s where the company innovates first—looking at this year’s iPhone often gives you a glimpse of what every other Apple product is going to implement next year.
The pressure-sensitive 3D Touch screen technology is the most important new thing that Apple introduced in the iPhone 6S and 6S Plus, though the usual camera and performance improvements were nice too. 3D Touch can subtly alter and speed up a few common smartphone interactions, including moving your cursor around in a field of text, previewing e-mails and links without actually needing to switch away from the app you’re using, and quickly performing specific actions on the Home screen within an app.
Otherwise things were relatively quiet on the phone front, which is typical for an “S” year. The 6S keeps the year-old iPhone 6 design feeling fresh, but nothing could have as big an impact on the day-to-day user experience as those bigger screens did.
On the sales side, those big screens earned Apple some big money. The iPhone has never seen a year-over-year sales dip, but the revenue figures for the early months of Apple’s fiscal 2015 were staggering: $74.5 billion in revenue from iPhones alone in Q1, a 46 percent increase from the year before. Revenue increased 40 percent year-over-year in Q2, 59 percent in Q3, and 22 percent in Q4. We don’t have a full quarter of iPhone 6S sales to compare yet, but it’s safe to say that the performance of the iPhone 6 generation is going to be hard to top.
As for software, this was a relatively quiet year. iOS 9 introduced a handful of features for phone users—a low-power mode, Spotlight improvements, and a revamped Notes app among others—but nothing like the upheaval in iOS 7 and iOS 8. The software’s most interesting feature was that it didn’t drop support for any old iDevices, including stuff as old as 2011’s iPhone 4S and iPad 2. That old hardware struggles with the software a bit, but even so, this is an unprecedented level of software support in the mobile world.
2016 is all but certain to bring us one or more new iPhone designs—it’s safe to assume we’ll see an “iPhone 7” and “iPhone 7 Plus” introduced, though we haven’t heard much about them from sources we’d consider to be reliable. Perhaps more interestingly, rumblings about a new small-screened phone to replace the iPhone 5S have intensified.
Rumors about a new small-screened iPhone have existed basically since the moment Apple introduced the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus, so take them with a grain of salt. But since some users actually prefer the smaller size, it makes perfect sense for Apple to continue serving this portion of the userbase (and if the new phone is faster and supports features like Apple Pay and 3D Touch, so much the better).
The iPad: Going Pro, or trying to
The iPhone had a huge year in 2015, but the iPad had an identity crisis.
Apple still sells millions of tablets every quarter, and makes tens of millions of dollars doing it. Any other company would love to have such a successful tablet division. That said, sales have dropped about 20 percent year-over-year, and they were already starting to fall in 2014. The iPhone 6 and 6 Plus only appear to have accelerated the trend—for many, bigger phone screens obviate the need for tablets. Analysts also blame longer-than-expected replacement cycles that are a bit less iPhone-like and more Mac-like.
Apple stays mostly quiet about this—during earnings calls, CEO Tim Cook routinely swats iPad-related questions away by saying that he still sees a lot of potential in businesses and in emerging markets. But in the education market, once seen as fertile ground for iPad sales, iPads are losing out to Google’s Chromebooks, which are cheaper to buy and easier to manage. And the very big, very public LA Unified School District debacle didn’t exactly help anything.
Apple's response so far has been to put more space between the iPhone and the iPad, as evidenced by both iOS 9 and the iPad Pro. iOS 9 introduced a few new multitasking features, giving users (well, users of newer iPads, anyway) the ability to run more than one iOS app at once for the first time ever. It doesn’t exactly turn your iPad into a Mac or anything, but combined with the improved support for external hardware keyboards it makes the iPad more plausible as a productivity device.
The iPad Pro is a workhorse of a different color, a huge version of the iPad Air 2 packed with a super-fast A9X SoC and 4GB of RAM. It is, in other words, complete overkill for the current crop of iOS productivity apps, but Apple is using the new hardware (and the accessories, most notably the Apple Pencil) to drive the development of more capable, more serious apps. If that happens, it will be one more thing iPads can do well that iPhones can’t.
Expect the iPad in 2016 to continue trying to better define its identity and get away from the “big iPhone” usage model. iOS 10 should add more multitasking and productivity features (support for some kind of mouse pointer would be nice for the use cases where it makes sense) while refining the ones that are already there (Apple’s multitasking app switcher is poor for anything other than light use, for instance). We’ll be keeping an eye on sales over the next couple of quarters to see if that year-over-year slide slows down, stops, or reverses as a result of these efforts.
The Mac: Experimenting a little while playing it safe.
Apple’s most venerable product line continues to do just fine; it’s not a huge driver of growth, but sales continue to climb by a few percentage points year-over-year even though the lineup has changed only slowly and gradually over the last two or three years.Apple’s most popular Macs, those in the MacBook Air and Pro lineups, were all given smallish incremental refreshes this year courtesy of Intel’s oft-delayed Broadwell CPUs (the 15-inch Retina MacBook Pro being the one exception; it kept Haswell). Performance went up a little and there were a couple of other interesting tidbits but nothing about them really stands out.Two members of the family made bigger steps in 2015. The first was the iMac; the 5K Retina iMac got cheaper early in the year and then totally replaced the 27-inch iMac late in the year, and a new 4K Retina model brought that improved display technology to Apple’s smaller Mac. The entry-level 21.5-inch models got a smaller refresh but continue to lack Retina, and we’re still waiting for the entire lineup to get standard SSDs or Fusion Drives, but it’s great to see the whole Mac lineup going Retina one member at a time (the improved color gamut doesn’t hurt anything, either). The new desktop input devices are mostly good, but they cost more than the old ones—this is especially true of the new Magic Trackpad 2, which costs $129 all by itself.
The second is a new arrival with a resurrected name: the just-plain-MacBook is a streamlined, minimalist version of the MacBook Air with a Retina screen, a single USB Type-C port, a new keyboard design with reduced travel, and a Core M processor without a fan. It also introduced the Force Touch trackpad, a pressure-sensitive trackpad that serves as a precursor of sorts to the iPhone’s 3D Touch feature. It uses short vibrations to simulate clicking without actually needing to move enough to click, making it thinner overall and well-suited to thinner and lighter laptops like the MacBook.
This new laptop is a mix of impressive technological achievements and irritating regressions and omissions, a description that more-or-less applied to the original MacBook Air when it launched back in 2008. Its single port might not bother people who never plug anything else into their laptops, but for more “traditional” Mac users it’s definitely limiting, and it doesn’t help that its performance is two or three years behind the current crop of MacBook Airs. But it’s incredibly portable, its screen is worlds better than the Air’s, it’s dead silent, and it manages to deliver solid battery life despite its reduced size and weight.It’s an extreme version of the MacBook Air concept that launched a thousand Ultrabooks, in other words, just with more features sacrificed in the name of thinness.
The Mac roadmap is still largely tied to Intel’s roadmap, and many of the high-end Intel chips that Apple prefers to use (mostly those with Iris-branded integrated GPUs) aren’t due to launch until early 2016. Once that happens, the MacBook family could go one of two ways: it could continue to use its current designs with new chips. Or the old non-Retina MacBook Airs could be discontinued, the MacBook could be made slightly more capable and take their place as Apple’s mainstream notebook, and the 13- and 15-inch Pros could be slimmed down a bit to provide more powerful alternatives that aren’t massively thicker and heavier than current Airs.
I’m inclined to hope for the latter result, since the MacBook Air and Pro designs are all starting to show their age. The MacBook Air hasn’t been redesigned since late 2010, and the MacBook Pros haven’t been rethought since 2012. Tweaking the lineup in this way would simplify Apple’s lineup without upsetting “normal” people or power users too much—the company would still have a more limited but very light system for consumers and beefier, larger, but more capable systems for pros.It may also be time for a new Mac Pro revision, since the current machine is two years old and CPUs and GPUs have advanced far enough that upgrades could give buyers a lot more options (most notably, Intel is offering even more cores in its single-socket Xeon CPUs, so new Pros could finally meet or surpass the core count of the older dual-socket Pros). I wouldn’t expect the Mac Mini or iMac to change much, aside from getting new Skylake CPUs from Intel (the new 5K iMacs are in fact already using them)—for the former I’d like to see the return of quad-core CPU options, and for the latter I’d like to see standard Retina screens and Fusion Drives in all models.
The Apple Watch: Still mostly potential
It’s hard to define what “success” looks like for the Apple Watch because it hasn’t been around for very long, certainly not long enough to say whether it will succeed or fail in the long term. It’s hard to track how well it’s doing relative to any of Apple’s other products, too, since it’s bundled into the “other products” category with Beats headphones, AirPorts, other accessories, and the ever-shrinking iPod (for what it’s worth, “Other Products” revenue has increased, sometimes significantly, since the Apple Watch was introduced).
I see Apple Watches out in the wild with some regularity, more often than I see Android Wear watches or Windows Phones or other relatively niche tech that people routinely have out on the train. But that's pretty much all I can say with any certainty.
What I can say about the Apple Watch after wearing it almost every day for eight months is that it still feels like it’s not living up to its full potential. I use it primarily to tell what time it is, to see whether texts or e-mails that I’m getting are important enough to merit a quick response, and to find where I put my iPhone. I like being able to do that stuff, sure, but this is a wrist-bound computer and “telling the time” doesn’t exactly push up against the boundaries of my imagination.
I use Siri to set kitchen timers when my hands are full and occasionally to send a text message, but too often it misunderstands me or hangs up, so I don’t trust it enough to use it much. I don’t use third-party apps because there aren’t that many great third-party apps, even with the advent of WatchOS 2.0 and the native SDK. It’s probably saved me a little time, or at least alerted me to some messages before I might otherwise have seen them, but it wouldn’t break my heart to have to live without the thing. And it’s annoying to travel with—I’ve forgotten the cable a couple of times and it’s nearly impossible to make the thing last more than a day and a half even with light use.Rumors generally agree that Apple is going to introduce a second-generation model of the Apple Watch in 2016—a yearly cycle is more-or-less normal for most of Apple’s stuff so it makes sense here. Apple tends to change its designs more quickly and dramatically early in their lives and then settling down into a more predictable iterative pattern later, so an Apple Watch 2 could look pretty different from the current model (though it could just as easily be new internals in the same case). In any case, improved performance and improved fitness features are a safe bet.
Apple TV: Your biggest screen belongs to Apple
The Apple TV brand has been around since 2007, but Apple has blown the platform up twice: once when it went from the big, OS X-based Apple TV to the smaller iOS-based versions in 2010, and once again this year when it introduced a more powerful box, tvOS, and a full-on SDK and App Store for developers to use. People are already familiar with then name, but the new Apple TV has the dubious honor of starting from an install base of zero and clawing its way up from there.It’s not a bad place to start from, though. The box has an attractive, smooth interface, its Apple A8 SoC and 2GB of RAM provide plenty of performance headroom for developers to use, the Siri Remote has some good ideas (even if it’s not an amazing game controller), and it’s better tied in to the rest of Apple’s ecosystem than the old Apple TVs were. It’s a little pricey if all you want to do is stream TV, but there’s potential there (even if I still believe that you should generally buy consumer electronics based on what they do now and not what they might one day do).
One of Apple’s ambitions for the new box is apparently going unrealized, though. Rumors of an Apple-provided live TV streaming service have been going around for a couple of years, but were allegedly held up by content deals. Earlier this month, news came down that those plans had been “suspended” in favor of the same kind of one-app-per-service model we already have, proving once again that content providers (and not technology) are the thing that’s holding up a truly great streaming box.
In the absence of a service that will actually provide a solution to the general cruddiness of streaming TV, the Apple TV needs to focus on one thing: apps. Apps were the cornerstone of Tim Cook’s pitch for the new box and a healthy app ecosystem (as well as tight integration with other Apple devices) would help the Apple TV stand out from Roku, Android TV, and Amazon, all of which support apps in one capacity or another but none of which have particularly impressive libraries.
Unfortunately, games (one of the easiest kinds of third-party apps to pitch for the Apple TV) don’t appear to be selling so hot right now. Some of that may correct itself with time; this is an all-new platform and the install base is small. But if the Apple TV picks up a reputation for being a money loser or a niche platform that reputation will be hard to shake. Broad compatibility with the same APIs iOS uses will only help so much.
In 2016, look for Apple to aggressively push the Apple TV’s ecosystem. Hopefully newer versions of tvOS will continue to refine pain points like text input, too.
The iPod, Beats, and Apple Music
2015 is the year that Apple stopped providing iPod sales figures separately from the rest of the “Other products” category. That move was mostly symbolic—iPod sales peaked not long after the iPhone was introduced and have been in freefall for the last couple of years, and iPods aren’t even present on apple.com’s top-level navigation bar anymore. It was just one more small data point in the iPod’s long, slow fade.
The most relevant member of the iPod family did get its first refresh in three years over the summer—the sixth-generation iPod Touch looks a lot like the fifth-generation model but a slightly downclocked Apple A8 chip makes it a good performer. For the things the iPod Touch is good at—mini portable game console, basic point-and-shoot camera, iOS-based pocket computer with no data plan required, developer device—the new iPod is miles ahead of the old one. Otherwise the iPod lineup didn’t change, not even to add compatibility with Apple Music.
Most of Apple’s other hardware (AirPorts, cables and dongles, that sort of thing) are too minor to mention, but it’s worth noting that Apple is slowly consolidating the Beats lineup and making it feel more like part of the company. Rose gold versions of some of its headphones pair well with the rose gold version of the iPhone 6S, the Beats Music service was killed off in favor of Apple Music at the end of November, and the company cut off support for a pile of older, pre-Apple Beats hardware. It’s still not essential to Apple’s bottom line, exactly, but it also doesn’t look like Apple is going to let it shrivel up and die.
Speaking of Apple Music, Apple officially launched its music streaming service and the Beats One radio station in an uncharacteristically long, cringey, and under-rehearsed series of presentations at WWDC in June—it was modeled, more or less, on Steve Jobs’ “three things” iPhone introduction, a reference that seemed lost on presenter Jimmy Iovine (even if the reveal did give us this sublime GIF of Eddy Cue dancing like no one was watching).
It was a bit of catch-up for Apple, a company that pioneered legitimate digital music downloads with the iTunes Store in the ‘00s but fell behind in the face of streaming competitors like Spotify. Apple Music has its problems (integration with users’ existing local music libraries is a commonly cited pain point), but it also seems to be doing well enough. In October, Apple said the service had racked up about 6.5 million paid subscribers compared to 20-or-so million for Spotify. Not bad, given that the service was only four months old at that point and many of its users were still burning through their three-month trial periods.And other footnotes
That’s the high-level overview of Apple’s products, the place where it makes most of its money and expends most of its advertising and PR efforts. But there were a bunch of smaller announcements and trends that characterized
Apple’s 2015, the most significant of which I have outlined below.
The Swift programming language is still young and immature in many ways, but Apple is pushing it aggressively. Swift 2.0 was introduced at WWDC in June and finalized in September when iOS 9 and OS X 10.11 came out. More significantly, the company made Swift open source earlier this month and published a rough roadmap for Swift 3.0. Objective-C isn’t going anywhere, but Apple continues to push developers in the direction of Swift for new products and for new features in existing products.Apple and encryption
Lawmakers and other government officials have spent most of the year pushing companies to provide “encryption backdoors” in their products for purposes of law enforcement and surveillance. This ignores the fact that said backdoors would almost certainly be discovered and abused by others, undermining the privacy and security that encryption is supposed to provide.
Many tech companies, Google, Apple, and Microsoft among them, have spoken out against backdoors even as politicians try to garner support for them by playing on heightened fears of terrorism. Tim Cook has been a particularly vocal opponent of encryption backdoors.
“You can’t have a back door in the software because you can’t have a back door that’s only for the good guys,” he said in October, an assertion that he has made strongly and repeatedly. Apple improved its local device encryption last year in iOS 8, and Apple encourages developers targeting iOS 9 to use HTTPS “exclusively” to encrypt data in transit as well as at rest.
Apple in China
Apple still makes most of its money in the Americas, but its biggest growth market in 2015 by far was China. The country is now Apple’s second-largest moneymaking territory—it displaced Europe back in Q2. Apple laid most of the groundwork for this in 2013 and 2014 as it forged deals with Chinese carriers, and in 2015 it has reaped the benefits. China was even in the first wave of countries to get the iPhone 6S and 6S Plus, something that had never happened before.
The upshot of this is that you should expect Apple to continue subtly tweaking its products to give Chinese customers what they want. Apple isn’t in the business of building different products for different territories, but both the move to bigger screens and the decision to add a gold finish to its products were done with the Chinese market in mind.
A slowing Chinese economy may slow Apple’s growth there in 2016 (Tim Cook doesn’t seem worried, but it’s his job not to seem worried), but in any case you should expect Apple to continue playing to that audience.
Developing for Android, and trying to lure away switchers
2015 brought us our first Apple-developed Android apps, though one of them was developed specifically to help Android users switch to iPhones.The release of an Apple Music app for Android—an app that actually plays nicely with Google’s APIs and design conventions, no less—isn’t quite an iTunes-for-Windows moment for Apple, but symbolically it sort of feels like one. Google maintains iOS apps for most of its major services, an acknowledgement of the fact that iOS is too big to ignore. It’s nice to see Apple making some baby steps in that direction, too, even if neither company has embraced its competitors’ platforms quite as enthusiastically as Satya Nadella’s Microsoft has.
The warm, occasionally smothering embrace of an omnipresent platform
Last year I talked a little about how Apple is worming its way into every crevice in your digital life—your car, your doctor’s office, your wallet, your house. With iOS 8 and OS X Yosemite, it also deepened the links between its different product lines, making it easier to bounce information around among your various Apple devices.
This year has been more of the same. Apple now has full platforms on your wrist and under your TV. Other companies, most notably Google and Microsoft, have answers to most of Apple’s most important products and services. Where Apple has OS X, iOS, WatchOS, and tvOS, Google has Chrome OS, Android, Android Wear, and Android TV; Microsoft similarly has Windows 10 for PCs and phones, the Microsoft Band, and the Xbox One. Google’s and Microsoft’s products products are increasingly adept at talking to one another, giving users benefits in exchange for spelunking deeper into each ecosystem. But Apple continues to have an enviable advantage here: its platforms integrate pretty well together and people actively want to use more than one of these platforms. There are bugs and edge cases, but Apple's stuff is either preferable to the alternatives or the alternatives aren’t better enough to lure me away, not permanently at any rate.
This is to the benefit and detriment of customers, depending on your point of view. Speaking as an Apple user who regularly uses, writes about, and generally enjoys Windows and Android, I can say that the tight integration between Apple products makes Apple’s ecosystem harder than ever to leave, even temporarily. To switch, I would need to replace a million little conveniences that I currently use without really thinking about them—the convenience of having iMessage and (with slowly decreasing regularity) SMS messages on my phone, wrist, and laptop; the convenience of syncing a game save between my phone, tablet, and TV; the convenience of loading up a bunch of browser tabs on my phone and then bouncing them to my desktop later. And all of this has happened despite my general preference for platform-neutral apps and services (Chrome, Word, Dropbox, Spotify, and Slack are available practically everywhere and are always the first things I install on a new device).
This isn't really a good or a bad thing, it's just the direction computing has been moving this decade. Every big company wants to be all things to all people; Apple is just better at it than most companies. Whatever new products and features it introduces next year, expect Apple to keep pushing all of its stuff closer together.
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