With 2016 just around the corner, I’m taking some time to think about what Apple could do in the next year that would bring advancements to their products. Today, let’s talk about some things that are bigger than any individual product line.
Let me say this up front: iCloud is a lot better than MobileMe ever was, and with the switch to CloudKit, storing data in it is more reliable than ever, but there are still issues.
With 2016 just around the corner, I’m taking some time to think about what Apple could do in the next year that would bring advancements to their products. Today, let’s talk about the Apple Watch and Apple TV.
While my opinion of the Apple Watch has cooled over the months, I still think the device has great promise, but in many ways, it’s a very 1.0 product.
I think the time to see new hardware has come. The Watch is slow, even running native software. I hope that Watch 2 can be much faster, but with the same battery life Apple ships now. (I think that battery life is probably the most important metric for this device, actually. A dead watch is useless.)
With 2016 just around the corner, I’m taking some time to think about what Apple could do in the next year that would bring advancements to their products. Today, let’s talk about the iPhone and iPad.
I love Slide Over and Split View on my iPad Pro, but using them can be really frustrating. The drawer that contains all apps that can be used with the new window management is comically bad, only showing a handful of giant icons at a time, making finding the app I want slow and tedious. This could be a lot better.
With 2016 just around the corner, I’m taking some time to think about what Apple could do in the next year that would bring advancements to their products. Today, let’s talk about the Mac.
Despite the technical hurdles in driving such a display over a cable, I really hope 2016 is the year that Apple’s lonely Thunderbolt Display is updated with a Retina screen. Such a screen will require the DisplayPort 1.3 specification to be implemented with Thunderbolt 3, so this may still be a little way off, but I hope that by the time I need to replace my Mid 2015 MacBook Pro, I can buy a 5K display to use with it.
These updates continue to create such a weird situation for customers whose hardware is no longer eligible for repair support by Apple, but is supported by the current version of OS X.
2015 was a busy year for those of us in the Apple ecosystem. In addition to the annual release of new versions of both iOS and OS X and updated hardware across the board, this year marked the release of the Apple Watch, the 12-inch MacBook with Retina display, the new Apple TV and the iPad Pro.
Even before adding the slew of new accessories released, that’s a lot of stuff to keep up with. I feel like most news cycles this year have included something updated or new from Cupertino.
There’s a lot of news this morning about executive shuffles at Apple, but the biggest two stories concern Jeff Williams and Phil Schiller.
Apple has named Jeff Williams its Chief Operating Officer, a position vacant since Tim Cook was named CEO back in 2011. Williams has been overseeing the Apple Watch program, but has served as VP of Operations since 2004, and has more or less been acting as COO since 2010.
Randy Ubillos worked on iMovie, Final Cut and other projects at Apple for two decades. In a great interview with Alex Gollner, he talks about being trusted by Steve Jobs in the wake of the backlash against Final Cut Pro X:
My idea was that Final Cut 7 should stay exactly as it was for about a year, and every time you bought a copy of X you got a copy of 7. They didn’t want to hear it. I knew 16 months before the launch that I was going to have a bunch of arrows in my back. I was going to be blamed for this big transition. It’s the Apple way of doing things: ‘Feet first, jump in!’
I closed my Apple Watch review this way:
As I said over 2,800 words ago, I’m conflicted when it comes to thinking about Apple Watch.
I’d recommend it to anyone who is strongly tied to their iPhone and is looking for something to track their fitness.
That combination is what sets Apple Watch apart from things like the much-cheaper Fitbits of the world. Having one wearable to deal with notifications, fitness and more is great, but by no means necessary.
Well, Fraser Speirs wins our corner of the Internet today.
During the Photos beta, I gave both Photos.app and iCloud Photo Library a run for their money. I imported my photos — which had been living in Dropbox — and uploaded them.
It was a mess, so I decided that Dropbox + Finder was the way forward for me. I removed my files from iCloud after reading this support document.
After 30 days, I checked, and iCloud seemed to have removed my photos. I went back to Dropbox a little annoyed, but happy that I had given Apple’s solution a shot.