At the beginning of last year, I posted a list of things Apple can and should do during 2013. It’s time to settle up. Because I’m feeling scholastic, I’ll give a letter grade to each item.
Ship OS X 10.9 and iOS 7. Done and done, with only a few minor bumps in the road. A-
Diversify the iPhone product line. “There needs to be more than one iPhone,” I wrote. This is a drum I’ve been beating for many years. Apple finally made it happen in 2013 with the cleverly conceived iPhone 5C. I’m disappointed that the 5C doesn’t have more internal changes beyond a slightly larger-capacity battery, and I’m still anxiously awaiting an iPhone with a larger screen, but Apple got the important parts right. The 5C is a good phone, and it’s easily distinguished from the 5S. B+
Keep the iPad on track. The iPad Air is impressive, and the mini finally went Retina. On the downside, the creaky old iPad 2 lives on, the iPad Air really deserves more RAM, and a larger “iPad Pro” is still off in the hazy future. The iPad is “on track,” for sure, but exciting times are still ahead. A-
Introduce more, better Retina Macs. The latest Retina MacBook Pro has Intel’s Iris Pro 5200 graphics, finally giving the integrated GPU enough muscle to handle all those pixels. Apple also kept around an option for a discrete GPU on the high-end model. But the MacBook Air and iMac are still excluded from the Retina club, and even the mighty Mac Pro has extremely limited high-DPI options. We’ll get ’em next year, right Tim? B-
Make Messages work correctly. It’s difficult to measure the scope and frequency of problems in Messages based solely on blog posts and tweets, but I feel safe in saying that weird behavior still exists and is likely to be seen by anyone who uses Messages every day. Hope is fading. D
Make iCloud better. The iCloud Core Data team got a chance to regroup in Mavericks. It may be too little, too late, but at least it’s a step in the right direction. More broadly, iCloud still doesn’t have a good reputation for reliability, and debugging problems related to it remains difficult. If the only user-accessible control for a service is a single checkbox, it had better “just work.” iCloud has yet to earn that label. C
Resurrect iLife and iWork. Be careful what you wish for, I suppose. Apple did finally release new versions of the applications formerly known as the iLife and iWork suites, but the focus on simplicity and feature parity with the web and iOS versions left Mac users wanting more. It does not feel like an upgrade worthy of the years that have passed since the last major revisions of these applications. B-
Reassure Mac Pro lovers. Apple was thoroughly convincing in its rededication to the Mac Pro, presenting a dramatic introduction video at WWDC for its radical new high-performance hardware. It’s not for everyone, but it represents a hell of a turnaround for a once-neglected product. Let’s hope it doesn’t take 18 months for the next revision to appear. A
Do something about TV. Sigh. F
Out of the 10 items on my to-do list, Apple did 8 of them well enough to earn a checkmark. (The TV thing was always a bit of a reach, anyway.) I’d call that a solid year.
