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2021 report card


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2021 report card
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chucker
 
Join Date: May 2004
Location: near Bremen, Germany
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2022-02-10, 15:10

I love Jason Snell's annual Apple report card, which he's now published for 2021. It's basically a review of the past year, as perceived by several dozen folks in his cosmos, and curated by him. You can then see how perception has shifted over the years; perhaps most strikingly, the Mac was at a low point of 2.6 in 2016, and is now all the way up to 4.6 for 2021. Which, yup, that checks out.

I thought I'd share my brief perceptions, and maybe we can do a little roundtable of our own?

Mac

4 out of 5

This one’s near and dear to my heart — my first Mac was 30 years ago! Platform-wise, I’m worried. Many of Apple’s own apps such as Mail or Music haven’t seen much love in recent years. Third parties increasingly move to the Web, and Apple needs a good answer for why you, a software engineer, shouldn’t do the same. Apple needs a better story on “what external monitor should I get so macOS looks good?”. However, the hardware introduced in the ARM era has been great.

HW reliability

5 out of 5

I don’t believe there were any stories on this front. Now that the Macs are no longer thinnovating too hard, long-term heat and noise issues could be a thing of the past as well.

iPhone

4 out of 5

An iterative year, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Macro photography made me almost get an iPhone Pro this time — something to look forward to when a future non-Pro inherits the ability. I’ve been hitting some annoyances with iOS; nothing too big, but enough to make me not want to give a perfect rating.

Wearables

4 out of 5

I’m not sure the “one earbud shape fits everyone” strategy is working. It might be time to make that configurable, just like the sizes and style of Apple Watch bands are. Other than that, AirPods are doing great.

iPad

3 out of 5

The hardware is pretty great. The OS is lacking. Twelve years in (1996), Mac OS had evolved a fair bit; twelve years in (2022), iPadOS has not advanced near as much. It needs to. Swift Playgrounds being able to publish to the App Store is a start, but we had GarageBand on the iPad 2, just one year in, and we should’ve had many more Apple signature apps like that since, to set the standard of what the platform should be (see also: Mac).

Watch

4 out of 5

Again, hugely popular. Apple is consistently going for “far from the cheapest fitness tracker, but instead the best out there”. If anything, my quibble here is that watchOS third-party apps still aren’t much of a thing. The interaction methods are too limited, the developer experience is abysmal, and Apple hasn’t done enough advocacy on why a company should bother, to the point where there seem to be as many stories on app removals as on new interesting app additions. Capabilities being far more restrictive for third parties than even on iOS isn’t helping.

Services

3 out of 5

I need to give Fitness+ a shot. TV+ I’m quite happy with. iCloud needs higher bandwidth tiers (it’s been at 5GB free for 11 years), but recent iCloud+ additions are great. Arcade is supposedly fine, and News+ supposedly isn’t; I wouldn’t know. I do know that Apple Music needs a ton of work. It should be great both on Mac and iPhone, and it just isn’t. (I do like the lyrics view.)

SW quality

3 out of 5

Not “bad” per se, but also not great. So many paper cuts.

Environ/Social

3 out of 5

(See dev relations.)

Apple TV

3 out of 5

The remote has been greatly improved, but I’m still not sure what Apple’s story is on why you should buy their much pricier set-top box. Unlike with the Watch, the value proposition just doesn’t seem to be that great when most of their software runs on other devices anyway, especially now that AirPlay on third-party TVs is a thing. Give it a unique “OK, that’s neat” feature — like Universal Control, but for the Apple TV.

Dev relations

2 out of 5

Yikes. From poor documentation via poor issue tracking to, perhaps most importantly, hostile App Review. Not that much has changed for the worse on any of that, but through the lawsuits, we’ve seen various quotes from execs that I really wish I could unread.

HomeKit

3 out of 5

It works OK for me. Still seems more like a gimmick.
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chucker
 
Join Date: May 2004
Location: near Bremen, Germany
Send a message via ICQ to chucker Send a message via AIM to chucker Send a message via MSN to chucker Send a message via Yahoo to chucker Send a message via Skype™ to chucker 
2022-02-10, 15:14

(I've been meaning to do this thread for a while, and this Twitter post, which complains about Music.app on the Mac being, well, not great, reminded me: https://twitter.com/cabel/status/1491525777011085312)
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psmith2.0
Mr. Vieira
 
Join Date: May 2004
Location: Tennessee
 
2022-02-10, 15:35

A lot of the above doesn’t apply to/involve me, but on the stuff that does (Macs, iPhone, etc.) I’m pretty much in agreement.

Nothing is flat-out perfect, but nothing really unbearably sucks either. Some tightening and refining on the software side of things would be my only really want.

But it seems they’re firing on nearly all cylinders and it looks like there are some solid, interesting products on the way this year. I’d give an overall 4.3 on everything. I like/appreciate far, far more than I don’t. I do wish that free tier for iCloud was just a skootch more in 2022, but it’s not a deal-killer in any way. Hard to get too indignant when something is free.

Certainly not looking for anything better or to jump ship.
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Frank777
Veteran Member
 
Join Date: May 2004
Location: Toronto
 
2022-02-12, 18:48

The neglect to Mail is undeniable. It's 2022 and I can't compose an email and order Mail to send it at a specific time.
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kieran
@kk@pennytucker.social
 
Join Date: Jan 2005
 
2022-02-12, 20:07

Mail is the biggest frustration for me on the Mac.

I've given up and switched to Mimestream (awful name, great app) for all of my Google hosted emails. There is no snooze, delayed send, etc... but it just works and the search if years ahead of Apple Mail.

I really really really really want to use Apple Mail, and I did for almost 20 years, but I just couldn't handle it anymore.

No more Twitter. It's Mastodon now.
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drewprops
Space Pirate
 
Join Date: May 2004
Location: Atlanta
 
2022-02-12, 20:17

Apple Music
I just discovered that some of my music didn't seem to make the crossover from iTunes and I'm VERY curious to find out WHAT and WHY and to fix it. The interface is not super good.

MacOS 12.2
Word seems to lose connection with the external drive and without a warning begins saving to a temp file. I blame Apple, because the inability to search Outlook was fixed with the latest update to MacOS.

Siri
There is no excuse.



...
  quote
PB PM
Sneaky Punk
 
Join Date: Oct 2005
Location: Vancouver, BC
Send a message via Skype™ to PB PM 
2022-02-12, 20:47

Quote:
Originally Posted by Frank777 View Post
The neglect to Mail is undeniable. It's 2022 and I can't compose an email and order Mail to send it at a specific time.
It's 2022, why are you still using Mail?
  quote
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