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.

Apple Watch

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.)

To make my request even more difficult, I’d like the Watch to be thinner. I don’t mind the weight of my stainless steel version, but it constantly gets caught on my jacket sleeves. Something more sleek would be welcomed.

On the software side, I don’t really know where to start. I think the app model just isn’t working the way Apple envisioned it would. The Watch excels at notifications, fitness tracking and providing glanceable information. Part of me thinks that if the company focuses in those areas, maybe the Watch as an app platform won’t be as vital.

Apple TV

If you look at the Watch for a matter of seconds, the Apple TV exists as the far other end of the spectrum.

The new Apple TV is pretty great in places. The UI is fun and fast, and the ability actually choose my apps (as opposed to have them forced onto my device) is pretty awesome. The new Apple TV is the center of our family’s entertainment, and is on all the time, even to just pipe music through the TV.

While the update to support the iOS Remote App was a huge win, there’s still a lot of work to do on the Apple TV. The App Store is a ghost town, and it seems silly that I can’t buy an app or some other content on my iPhone and have it on my TV when I get home.

The elephant in the living room is, of course, the lack of an over-the-top service from Apple. It’s great to have Netflix and Hulu on my Apple TV (come on, Amazon!) but an à la carte system that would allow me to watch content that I currently can’t as a cord cutter would really make the Apple TV shine. If Apple can deliver it in 2016, the Apple TV would really become indispensable for my family.

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.

Split View Management

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.

Likewise, it can be confusing to switch between apps quickly and have the previously-used app on the right stick around. I’d like to be able to tie apps together somehow, like Mission Control allows for on OS X El Capitan.

Lastly, I’d like Apple to work on some way to share text and images between apps that are side-by-side. If I’m working in a text editor, I’d like to send a selected portion right into Slack, without having to worry about a share extension or dropping back to copy and paste to get the job done.

3D Touch on the iPad

I was surprised by how quickly 3D Touch has become part of my workflow on my iPhone 6S Plus. It’s a great — and natural-feeling — addition to iOS.

So much so, that I keep finding myself smashing my fingers into my iPad’s screen, thinking that it a deep press will do something.

Rumor is that 2016’s iPad may not have 3D Touch, but I’d sure love it if they did.

More RAM

The iPad Pro’s a beast, and a lot of that performance stems from the 4GB of RAM onboard. Safari keeps its tabs open longer, app switching is smoother and iOS just feels like it can breathe better. While the 2GB of RAM found in the iPhone 6S and 6S Plus are a welcome improvement over 2014’s phones, it’d be great to see Apple to continue to push this.

Improved Keyboard Support

With iOS 9, keyboard support on iOS saw huge improvements. For the first time, using a Bluetooth keyboard with an iPad doesn’t feel like a hack.

There’s still a lot that could be done here, however. Keyboard shortcuts are still hit or miss across applications, and Apple’s own keyboard offering doesn’t include basic support for things like going Home without invoking a hard-to-remember shortcut. Most importantly, I’d like the ability to tell iOS to disable its in-built predictive text engine when I’m typing on a hardware keyboard.

On the software side, the iPad Pro’s keyboard is still a mess. You can’t change the layout if you are used to a non-American keyboard, and it’s still tricky to start a sentence with certain characters, as silly as that sounds.

Lastly, it’s time we have a way to search emoji. OS X has had this for a while now, and apps like Slack have built their own systems. It’s time to make finding that perfect emoji fast and easy.

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.

Desktop Retina

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.

A Mac mini that make sense

In late 2014 Apple revved the Mac mini, removing the quad-core SKU and making the RAM soldered to the logic board.

W. T. F.

I’d understand this if the company had changed the machine’s enclosure, but the easy-access door remains in place.

I have a couple of Mac minis running around the clock as servers, and I really do love the little machines, but I wouldn’t buy one for normal use anymore. I understand that this is Apple’s cheap desktop machine, but removing options that people want left me disappointed. I hope that either Apple returns the Mac mini to its former glory in 2016, or makes these tradeoffs worth it.

Thunderbolt 3

The I/O found on Macs has changed a lot over the years. I remember being excited when FireWire showed up, then upset that my PowerBook didn’t have a FireWire 800 port on it when that arrived on the scene.

Thunderbolt has eased that pain a little bit. For most people, the differences between Thunderbolt and Thunderbolt 2 simply don’t matter.

However, Thunderbolt isn’t everywhere. The MacBook is living life with a single USB C port, and while that connector may trickle up to other Macs, I’d like to see it and other machines move to the Thunderbolt 3 interface. The connector used by Thunderbolt 3 is the USB-C connector, just as Thunderbolt used the previously-used Mini DisplayPort connector. While the Thunderbolt 3 chipset may be a problem to squeeze into the MacBook, I think that Thunderbolt 3 is a lot more exciting than USB C for power users.

A Change of Pace for OS X

OS X has been around a long time. Over the course of its life, Apple’s been speeding up its release cycles. Starting several years ago, a new version of the operating system has dropped each fall, alongside iOS.

This, of course, is for obvious reasons. As Apple continues to make the experience of moving from one device to another more seamless, OS X releases often include technology to make the Mac play nicer with iOS.

I’m all for that, but it comes with a cost. Any release cycle comes with a round of potential headaches for consumers, IT professionals and developers. If there was a way to add new features in mid-stream — like the company did with Photos.app in OS X Yosemite 10.10.3 — customers may be more at ease, and more likely to enjoy such improvements, as the barrier to entry would be lower.

Apple could then have a bigger marketing release every 18-24 months, giving everyone a little more breathing room between bigger changes. I’m pretty sure this isn’t going to happen, but hey, it’s the holiday season!

Oh, and it’s probably time for a name change.

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.