2015 was a bold year for Apple. The company jumped into new product categories, polished its existing hardware and software lines, and wowed us repeatedly.
Apple also made most of us throw up in our mouths a little bit now and then, due to some questionable (and some undeniably bad) choices.
These are Apple’s biggest wins and most epic fails of the past year, as remembered — fondly and otherwise — by Cult of Mac staffers.
Quarterbacks and running backs will often reward their offensive linemen with gifts, but veteran NFL Baltimore Ravens punter Sam Koch recently gave out a particularly welcome high-tech pressie to his teammates — when he handed out Apple Watches.
When you’re counting down the seconds to New Year’s tomorrow night, make sure you’ve got an Apple Watch nearby.
“As a piece of hardware, [Apple Watch is] far more accurate as a timekeeping device than the iPhone,” Apple VP of Technology Kevin Lynch revealed in a new interview. “With New Year’s coming, those who have the Apple Watch will be the most accurate watch in the room. There will be no question about when New Year’s Eve actually is now.”
We aren’t going to pretend we’re perfect, but that doesn’t mean we have no appreciation for the mistakes of others. They make us feel better about our own glaring flaws, and they also make for some good fodder for “weirdest of 2015” news roundups.
This year, we saw some really impressive corporate blunders as well as some head-slapping moments from Apple fans.
‘Tis the season to be jolly — or, if you’re a tech writer hoping to score enough clicks to help pay off the post-Christmas credit card, ’tis the season to label this the worst year for Apple since records began.
From Gizmodo’s restrained “Everything Apple Introduced This Year Kinda Sucked,” to The Verge calling this the year Apple spent in beta, to Bloomberg banging the “lemon of the year” gong for the Apple Watch, pundits aren’t exactly being kind to Cupertino as 2015 draws to a close.
But, you know what? They’re dead wrong. This was the most important year for Apple since 2007, when Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone.
Although Fitbit may consider the Apple Watch a technical threat, Apple’s smartwatch didn’t seem to hamper Christmas sales any for the company: the market-leading activity tracker seems to have had a huge sales surge thanks to Christmas. Could Fitbit have outsold the Apple Watch this Holiday season?
In addition to rounding up the best stories of the year, we’re also showcasing the weirdest of 2015, and we can’t do that without including the sickest burns people laid down over the past 12 months.
It’s always strange when companies and CEOs snip and snap at each other like annoyed children. We should expect them to be above that sort of behavior, but guess what? They totally aren’t.
Here are some of the most blistering insults of the year.
Apple fans are some of the most dedicated in all of tech (some might even call them a cult), but a few enterprising and/or desperate people really outdid themselves this year.
Not that we can really blame them. Cupertino brought the heat this year with the Apple Watch, a cool new Apple TV, the iPhone 6s and 6s Plus, and the massive iPad Pro. We can forgive the superfans for really going all out to get their hands on the latest iGear. But some of their efforts might have been a bit too enthusiastic.
Here are some times when people’s love of Apple outweighed logic this year.
As an Apple fan, there’s a great gift you can bestow upon your friends and family this holiday season. The amazing part is, it’s free.
I’m not talking about the free tech support you’ll inevitably dole out to befuddled relatives (Cult of Mac’s how-to section can help with that, BTW). I’m talking about evangelizing for two of Apple’s least-loved products — and this gracious act will also goose the greater good.
60 Minutes host Charlie Rose took a deep dive into all things Apple in an episode that aired Sunday.
Featuring interviews with Tim Cook, Jony Ive, Phil Schiller, Angela Ahrendts and others, the show explored everything from the iPhone’s inner workings and Apple’s manufacturing in China to Cook dancing around the question of whether Apple is building a car.
Check out our 10 takeaways below.
For many of us, Christmas is a time for relaxing with family, sitting in front of the TV, overindulging and generally moving as little as possible. In other words, all the things your Apple Watch hates you doing.
So if you have a nice streak going in the Activity app, chances are it is about to come to an abrupt end. And that may not be a bad thing.
The Apple Watch is the hottest smartwatch on the market. And it looks like it is going to stay that way for a while.
A report by International Data Corporation says the Apple Watch will lead a rapidly growing wearables market through at least 2019 as a skeptical public gets won over by more sophisticated second- and third-generation devices.
IDC projects Apple to sell 13 million watches this year for a little more than 61 percent of the market share. The number of Apple Watches sold will reach 45.2 million by 2019, according to IDC’s report.
Poor Jeb Bush. He can’t even discuss the Apple Watch and its shortcomings without coming off as overly exasperated.
“It’s not as intuitive as the other Apple products,” he said in a recent video interview with Business Insider. “The battery gives out too quick,” he continued, exhibiting the kind of head-bobbing body language he usually reserves for queries about his flailing presidential bid or Donald Trump’s oversimplified answers to complex questions.
Unlike any other consumer electronics company, Apple has been nailing product design for decades. Jony Ive and his incredibly talented team have produced countless iconic gadgets that rivals can only dream of, and it’s the biggest reason why the company is so successful today.
But there are suggestions that Apple’s design prowess is beginning to slip away. Under new leadership, Apple has rolled out a number of products — most recently the butt-ugly Smart Battery Case — that have led some fans to question various design decisions.
Are those fans right to be concerned? Is it downhill from here for Apple’s design team, or is this a whole lot of fuss over nothing?
Join us in this week’s Friday Night Fight between Cult of Android and Cult of Mac as we battle it out over those questions and more — and weigh in with your thoughts down in the comments section!
The Apple Watch is the first major product to be launched without any involvement from Steve Jobs, but according to one of his long-time associates, the Apple cofounder was well aware that Jony Ive was working on a timepiece.
On Thursday at Glance Conf in San Francisco — the first Apple Watch conference ever — Tim Bajarin who had an on-and-off relationship with Jobs for over three decades, said Jobs had at least been told about the watch before he passed.
Didn’t think the Apple Watch would catch on? Not everyone agrees, especially analysts who study sales projections.
Cupertino is on track to sell 21 million watches and rake in about $8.4 billion in revenue in the first 12 months of the Apple Watch, according to one of the hottest Apple analysts around. Not bad for a company that entered the wearables game late.
People that throw away money on gold Apple Watches usually don’t need deals, but if you’re looking to get an Apple Watch Edition for the holiday, Best Buy has the biggest deal we’ve ever seen on Jony Ive’s immaculate timepiece.
After the rumblings and grumblings that we’ll get our first look at the Apple Watch 2 in as soon as three months, the Internet is ablaze with all of the great features the update “should” have. But let’s not go overboard, here, because not all of these suggestions would make the new wearable better.
We aren’t talking about Android compatibility, complete independence from its paired phone, or a better battery life; we’d welcome any of those updates in a second. But we couldn’t really see a need or want for a few of the rumored/desired new features, regardless of how crazy awesome they might seem at first.
Best Buy is trying its darnedest to live up to its name with a new $100 discount on every Apple Watch model it sells. The deep discount brings the entry-level cost of a 38mm Apple Watch Sport down to just $250.
Apple Watch owners received a new software update this morning in the form of watchOS 2.1.
The new update comes over a month after watchOS 2.0.1 was made available to the public and contains a number of bug fixes and performance improvements to go with expanded system language support.
Another week, another Cult of Mac Magazine – the best place to get your Apple fix in one place.
This week, we’ve got quick tips to speed up your iPhone and Apple Watch, our take on the stupidity of killing the iPhone’s headphone jack, new how-tos for Apple Music and Apple TV, a hilarious bit of Star Wars fever that Siri’s picked up, and the latest rumors about iPhone 6c and iPhone 7. That not enough? There’s tons more inside.
Here’s the rundown for this week’s cover stories:
There are so many iPhone apps for runners, it’s hard to decide which one to use. Should you go for a familiar brand like Nike, or a specialist like Runkeeper?
Ultimately, all running apps do pretty much the same thing: They use GPS to track how far and how fast you run. But when you take a closer look, their features and prices vary considerably. So I’ve done the leg work for you, to help you find the right running app faster.
The Apple Watch continues to go from strength to strength, while Samsung’s own wearable devices are eclipsed by new arrivals, according to new figures released by International Data Corporation (IDC).
Apple has a range of different Apple Watch straps available — but, aside from letting you pick the perfect strap to suit the rest of your attire, they all serve exactly the same function: keeping Apple’s debut wearable safely strapped to your wrist.
That may change in future iterations of the Apple Watch, with a new patent application published today describing how future Watch straps (or straps for other Apple devices) may include flexible displays woven into the material, offering another way of presenting user messages or notifications.
Apple Watch is becoming second nature to me after several months of owning it. It’s gotten to the point where I feel like something’s missing when I don’t strap it to my wrist in the morning before starting my workday.
Thing is, the Apple Watch has so many animations on it that I sometimes feel like getting things done takes too long. I just want to find and use apps, with a minimum of fuss and bother.
Luckily, you can turn off those animations on Apple Watch to make it all feel a bit snappier.