By Jason Snell

February 23, 2026 11:22 AM PT

Apple in 2025: The complete commentary

Every year, we ask a collection of writers, editors, developers, podcasters, and other people for their opinions about how Apple fared in the year just gone by. You can read our 2025 report card for the average scores and some juicy quotes. But if you want to read the whole thing—all 32,000 words of it—who are we to stand in your way? They wrote it, you read it. That’s how this works.

Here we go.

Mac

James Thomson: Solid hardware updates, though the full range now has a mix of M3 through M5 chips, which makes decision-making slightly harder. Tahoe is a mess, though, at least visually, with the worst implementation of Liquid Glass.

Andrew Laurence: The Mac is clearly the worst off with Liquid Glass—so much UX chaos with so little benefit.

Shahid Kamal Ahmad: The biggest compliment I can pay my M4 Pro MacBook Pro is that, apart from the unwieldy name, it’s boring. It’s boring that, unlike my high-powered PC laptop, I don’t need to worry about having a charger on hand. It’s boring that I almost never hear obtrusive fan noise. It’s boring that the screen is beautiful, a perfect size, perfect clarity, perfect contrast, perfect colors, perfect brightness and perfect smoothness. It’s boring that the keyboard has no faults. It’s boring that it’s more than powerful enough to handle just about any task I throw at it without fuss or drama. It wasn’t always like this, and for that I’m grateful. I never thought the day would come, but the latest MacBook Pro is a near-perfect laptop, and the only thing that would make it perfect is if Apple’s RAM prices weren’t so exorbitant.

Todd Vaziri: As a nearly four-decade-long Mac user, I love my Mac. The little things still frustrate me, like the bizarro UI decisions made over the last few years. System Settings is still an utter UI mess, with core functionality hidden behind inconsistent buttons. And with multiple Mac computers in the house, simple File Sharing is still buggy and weird.

Joe Macirowski: I’m tired of waiting for OLED MacBooks. I’ve been using USB-C portable 4K OLED monitors for years now as my only Mac displays, despite also having a Studio Display. It’s not like I have to sacrifice Face ID to do so, and with full P3 coverage and trivial calibration, they simply look better than any of Apple’s Mac displays 100% of the time. They even have touch input that macOS kinda knows what to do with sometimes. This is starting to feel as frustrating as waiting for Retina to move beyond just the 15″ MacBook Pro, except perhaps it’s worse because 3rd party retina displays barely existed.

Nick Heer: MacOS Tahoe has some great new features, but it is overall a regression. I am writing this in Notes. The toolbar right above this sentence is so hazy that it makes me think my vision is degenerating, and it is giving me a headache. The metaphor “tip of an iceberg” barely works because icebergs are well-defined objects. A better metaphor is “when there is smoke, there is fire”, and this amorphous interface is evidence of deeper problems. The hardware updates were modest this year, but the MacBook Air is a standout, especially since its price is back down to the magic thousand-dollar-in-the-U.S. mark.

Gabe Weatherhead: Unfortunately, the Mac platform has declined, yet again in 2025, as a result of poor software design. Liquid Glass is bad enough to tank my opinion of the entire platform. It’s quite an achievement for a company that imagines it is a leader in design. Great hardware with bad software still makes for a bad customer experience. I often avoid native macOS apps now because of Liquid Glass, so I can’t think of many reasons to recommend a Mac for most people.

Kirk McElhearn: This should really be separated into hardware and software. Regarding hardware, I updated both my Macs (iMac and MacBook Air) to M4 models this year. I feel that they have become transparent. They work perfectly, do what I need, don’t complain, I rarely hear the fan on my iMac, and they are both sufficient for all the tasks I do. On the software side, macOS 26 is an insult to the history of design and human interface guidelines. From the silly “Liquid Glass” which makes things harder to see (I’ve enabled the incorrectly named Reduce Transparency setting), to the dumb icons in menus, to the placement of things like the play bar in the Music app, this looks like it was designed by the marketing team. It’s obvious that Apple thought they had something brilliant when they first presented this at WWDC, and had to tone it down a lot because of complaints, but this is a stain on the history of Apple’s human-centric operating systems.

Federico Viticci: Fun fact: I now own and regularly use two Macs (a MacBook Pro and M4 Mac mini) as opposed to the one iPad Pro I also use on a daily basis. Beyond hardware (which is excellent), the third-party Mac software ecosystem is living its own renaissance at the moment, thanks to AI. Thanks to the major AI companies continuing to ship Mac-only features for their LLM clients (case in point: the new Claude Cowork for Mac) as well as third-party developers now being able to iterate faster than ever on their Mac apps thanks to AI-assisted coding, the result is a breadth of Mac apps and exclusive Mac app features that are nowhere to be seen on other platforms. One way or another, the Mac keeps going – despite the questionable “improvements” to macOS Tahoe.

Adam Engst: The hardware is great, but macOS 26 Tahoe is dragged down by Liquid Glass. It adds nothing and causes all sorts of visual glitches and slowdowns.

Marco Arment: Mac hardware is better than ever, with nearly every current Mac (except the Mac Pro) being a strong performer with no major drawbacks or compromises. There’s not a single Mac for sale today (except the Mac Pro) that a friend or family member could purchase without asking nerds like us, and we’d think, “Oh no, they bought the wrong one!” But macOS Tahoe’s redesign tore through the Mac’s beloved, considered, evolved UI, hastily slapping flawed concepts from iOS onto a radically different platform without any of the care and craftsmanship that we love about the Mac, to achieve self-imposed unification goals that seem to matter only to Apple.

John Gruber: If there were separate categories for Mac hardware and MacOS, I’d give the hardware a 5 and MacOS 26 Tahoe a 2. The hardware continues to be great — fast, solid, reliable, and Apple Silicon continues to improve year-over-year with such predictability that Apple is making something very difficult look like it must be easy. Tahoe, though, is the worst regression in the entire history of MacOS. There are many reasons to prefer MacOS to any of its competition — Windows or Linux — but the one that has been the most consistent since System 1 in 1984 is the superiority of its user interface. There is nothing about Tahoe’s new UI — the Mac’s implementation of the Liquid Glass concept Apple has applied across all its OSes — that is better than its predecessor, MacOS 15 Sequoia. Nothing. And there is much that is worse. Some of it much worse. Fundamental principles of computer-human interaction — principles that Apple itself forged over decades — have been completely ignored. And a lot of it just looks sloppy and amateur. Simple things like resizing windows, and having application icons that look like they were designed by talented artists.

Charles Arthur: Hardware? Great, steaming ahead. Software? Terrible, steaming pile.

Stephen Robles: Mac hardware by itself would be a 5. I use an M4 Max Mac Studio and an M4 MacBook Air, both of which I love. The Air is especially impressive when I’m on the road. Software is a little more divisive. macOS 26 design leaves a little to be desired, but Shortcuts on Mac have been huge for me. And the ability to customize Control Center with multiple “panes” of Shortcuts is a big improvement. Aside from the Studio Display flickering, which does drive me nuts, it’s also been reliable for me. Live Activities from iPhone continuity is also a big quality-of-life improvement. I don’t use iPhone mirroring often, but the live activities for sure.

David Sparks: This one is difficult to rate. The hardware is superb. Each subsequent “M” makes me love Apple Silicon even more. But the well-documented backslide on macOS is frustrating. I hope next year I can bump this number up if Apple starts taking the wiz-bang out of macOS.

Jeff Carlson: To be honest, I had to go look up what was new in the Mac world last year. Apple seems to be continuing to increment, though the processor numbering is still confusing for people who don’t know the differences (M5 laptops but M3 Max Studio?). At the same time, it’s a testament that there isn’t a “bad” Mac in the lineup… no model that a knowledgeable friend would say, “oh no, don’t get that one”. Hardware design is largely unchanged but still solid.

Christina Warren: It’s truly stunning: For the last five years, Apple has sold some of the most incredible hardware available by any manufacturer. Even this year’s relatively modest list of updates (the glorious M4 MacBook Air, the standard M5 MacBook Pro, the torturously expensive M4 Max Mac Studio or outrageously expensive M3 Ultra Mac Studio) are still either best-in-class machines, almost worth the price (I say almost on the Studio because I do think that for $10,000, recent RAM crisis notwithstanding, there are probably better ways to spend your money for local models or to rent compute space), or only now after half a decade finally getting x86 and ARM competitors that have started to catch-up. Last year’s M4 Mac mini became a phenom at the beginning of 2026, a full 14 months after its release, as a way for people to run OpenClaw — a viral (and frankly expensive) way to abuse a Claude Pro Max or burn hundreds of dollars in AI tokens — to the point people were joking about there being a shortage of minis, only because the $500 price nearly everyone can buy it for is such an amazing deal in computing. Putting the RAM crisis stuff that makes Apple’s upgrades almost look reasonable (but look, Apple gets zero credit on this and a massive supply chain crisis doesn’t make the years and years that Apple has charged outrageous fees for upgrading RAM or storage in any way defensible — also, I fully expect Apple to raise prices this spring to “align” with the supply chain and lock in some extra profits, even though industry experts say Apple already locked in a year of NAND and RAM pricing in advance), the fact that you have been able to get incredibly good deals on Macs (especially base models) for the majority of the year at outlets like Amazon, Best Buy, etc., is yet another thing to celebrate. I got my sister a 16GB/256 M2 Air (thank you, Apple Intelligence, for requiring the base RAM be 16GB) for $599 on a Cyber Monday special — and the M4 Air was available under $800 several times this holiday season. Sure, sub-$500 Chromebooks and Windows laptops are still more plentiful, but the fact that you can get a brand-new MBA for well under $1000 and the $500 Mac mini (no one is paying $600 for that thing) remain some of the best deals in computing. And yet I can’t give any higher than a 3, and honestly, was hesitant on the 3, because macOS has become an abomination of software. I am forced to use macOS Tahoe for work—otherwise, there is no universe in which I would have it running on even one of my machines. I will not install it on any personal devices, and am sadly dreading what this means for the longevity of my long-in-the-tooth but still cooking 2020 iMac, which, thanks to this abortion of software engineering, is the most ignominious way for the Intel Macs to go out. At least the PowerPC Macs got Mac OS X Leopard. Apple has so utterly lost the plot on macOS software — not just from the much-discussed (and rightfully maligned) design (Liquid Ass is the lead of my problems, but let’s start with that), the multiple windows corner radii that are different even amongst Apple-made programs, the fact that there is so much white space that anyone using a 13″ MacBook Air (which is most of Apple’s userbase at this point) has less screen real estate than they did before, to the horrific icon design, and the inconsistent and unfinished styling across the OS. But that’s only part of the horrors. For the same period of time as Apple has been cranking out incredible hardware, the software has become more buggy, less consistent, less thoughtful in its design, and has taken a turn that wasn’t great a decade ago, and only become even worse. The only saving grace Apple has on the software front is that Windows 11 is actually worse to the point that the kids are unironically installing Linux on their machines. And lots of people give Linux a lot of shit (and I’m proudly one of them — as much as I also have probably used Linux more than most of the Linux haters and Linux fanboys). Still, I’m going to be stuck running some half-supported version of Linux on my 2020 iMac pretty soon (half-supported because the driver situation around T2 Macs is complicated and Apple has never so much as pretended to care about things like longevity of hardware or letting people have control of their own hardware). There are days I wish I could run it natively on my Mac (and no, Asahi Linux, as impressive a party trick as it was, doesn’t even come close to counting). But no, Tim Cook’s Apple hates user choice and loves locked-down bootloaders and will never let you run any alternative OS on your Mac. Man, we had it great in the early 2010s. Anyway, the Mac is great hardware plagued by truly deplorable and indefensibly bad software. And Apple gets away with it because we have no alternative. But here is the rub: that will not always be the case. Windows is probably never going to have a comeback moment (as much of a comeback as any dominant OS can have), and ChromeOS will forever be in that spot of OSes your kid is forced to use or your corporation of who hates you has you use — but now that we are in the age of AI, these multi-billion dollar startups are sweeping up the best and brightest talent (both existing talent and also the new grads coming out of school) and if you don’t think Claude and OpenAI aren’t working on their own operating systems, well, I have some land in Florida to sell you. And their OSes don’t have to be perfect, and the hardware doesn’t have to be as polished as Apple’s— it just has to do a few things better. And as the Steam Deck has proven, if things look good enough, people will give it a shot.

Casey Liss: I think I may be the only talking head in our community that isn’t actively repulsed by Liquid Glass on the Mac. I absolutely believe there are missteps, but on the whole, I like that my Mac looks different. It looks new, which is fun! Hardware-wise, the Mac continues to do incredibly well. I have a M3 Max MacBook Pro, and I rarely feel like I’m wanting for more of… well… anything, really. I may upgrade this year, but I surely won’t need to.

John Moltz: The hardware is great. I have a 2025 M5 MacBook Air, and it’s great. But it’s running Sequoia and will be for the foreseeable future. It’s not that Tahoe doesn’t provide some great new features; it’s that, as a long-time Mac user, I can’t bear to look at it.

Gui Rambo: I would’ve given it a lower grade due to the numerous issues with macOS Tahoe, but that wouldn’t be fair to the hardware, which continues to be excellent.

Craig Hockenberry: Mac hardware: stunning in a good way. macOS Tahoe: stunning in a bad way.

Ben Long: Great hardware, hampered by an OS that continues to decline.

Benjamin Mayo: macOS Tahoe is the worst implementation of the Liquid Glass design language, and it makes using a Mac less enjoyable. It’s not unusable, it’s not even bad per se, it’s just not as nice as it used to be. The 2025 Mac hardware was fine, although it is a little sad that Mac Studio fans now have to wait every other year for a new architecture of the ‘Ultra’ chip. And the Mac Pro is still a dead man walking.

Joe Rosensteel: The line-up is messy, storage and RAM prices are painful, and the OS has been visually marred with the kind of care only a black-market plastic surgeon could provide.

Michael Tsai: The M4 MacBook Pro with nanotexture display is one of my favorite Macs ever. The M4 MacBook Air was a great update, with more RAM and a lower price. The Mac Studio finally got an update, though the M3 Ultra chip is now two generations behind the M5 in the baby MacBook Pro released the same year. Nothing seems to be happening with iMac or Mac Pro. Overall, I’m down on macOS Tahoe due to the Liquid Glass design and the large number of bugs. I do like that AutoFill can now work in third-party browsers. The new Spotlight seems like a big improvement, though I continue to prefer LaunchBar.

Brian Mattucci: I’m very happy with the Mac Studio with M4 Max, and I’ve largely enjoyed macOS 26. I’m unbothered by Liquid Glass, though it feels overhyped. It’s fine. The new Spotlight is an improvement, and the iPhone app is neat, though I don’t have a lot of use for it.

Peter Cohen: M5 MacBook Pro performance is impressive. Tahoe, Liquid Glass and Apple Intelligence, less so.

Matt Birchler: There’s a lot to like with the Mac this year. The MacBook Air has finally gotten back to having the latest processor in the $999 model, and for the second year in a row, there isn’t a Mac in the lineup I’d say is a bad machine (besides the Mac Pro, which I don’t even think of as part of the Mac family at this point). On the other hand, we didn’t really get an exciting Mac hardware update this year, and Tahoe was greeted by a mixed reception at best. Some of the features they added were useful, but it seems pretty clear that the always divisive liquid class is least suited to Apple’s oldest platform.

Stephen Hackett: Five years into the Apple silicon era, Apple seems to be firing on all cylinders, with regular releases for most of their products (cough, cough, Mac Pro.) The laptops run cool with amazing battery life, and there’s a desktop Mac for just about everyone. Apple’s external displays continue to age, rather ungracefully. Mac users shopping for a display have more options than ever beyond the Apple Store. The Studio Display is too expensive, and the XDR is just … well, there’s a lot going on there. I hope Apple has some new products ready sooner rather than later. macOS Tahoe is Apple’s weakest implementation of Liquid Glass. Buttons don’t look like buttons, window corners cut off content, and the locking of icons into Squircle Jail is a crime. I like a lot about Liquid Glass on the iPhone, but I fear that Tahoe was either an afterthought or redesigned by folks who don’t know what makes macOS special. I’m running Tahoe, and while it doesn’t get in my way very often, there are little bits of friction everywhere, like grains of sand scratching and pitting the windshield of a passing car.

Howard Oakley: Excellent hardware releases, but Tahoe is a disaster that mars the whole year.

Myke Hurley: I wouldn’t say that 2025 was a particularly exciting year for the Mac, but the product line is on such a great trajectory right now that I have a hard time knocking it.

Chance Miller: Liquid Glass doesn’t shine on the Mac, but there’s more to macOS Tahoe to make it worth the upgrade. Spotlight is a lot more powerful, Live Activities are useful, and Shortcuts are more capable. On the hardware side, Apple continues to release new Apple Silicon-powered Macs whenever they are ready, even if the timing is a bit awkward (M3 Ultra Mac Studio, for example).

Allison Sheridan: The staggered, sort of behind, sort of in front position for the Studio is, at the same time, confusing and disappointing. (M3 Ultra and M4 Max, not M5)

John Siracusa: Mac hardware continues to excel in the realm of battery-constrained performance, which is incredibly important to the Macs that most people buy. But the traditional weaknesses of modern Mac hardware became a bit more glaring in 2025. While the iPhone and iPad have had OLED screens for years, the Mac will have to wait until 2026. Apple’s desktop displays are so outdated that they’re still waiting for features from the laptop line, like higher refresh rates and dynamic backlight improvements, with OLED even farther off in the future. The M3 Ultra is the latest in a long line of failures when it comes to high-end desktop Mac hardware: late, underwhelming, and fully two generations behind the rest of the Mac line. Meanwhile, the Mac Pro, with its M2 Ultra chip that has lower single-core performance than the two-year-old iPhone 15 Pro, seems well and truly dead. On to software. Tahoe is the worst user interface update in the history of the Mac. Every change is either wrongheaded, poorly executed, or both. The Mac remains usable only because of Tahoe’s lack of ambition: it mostly alters the appearance and metrics of interface elements rather than making fundamental changes to the structure of the Mac UI. Thank goodness for that. But Tahoe is a concerning bellwether. The bad ideas embodied in Tahoe reveal an Apple design team that has abandoned the most basic principles of human-computer interaction. Tahoe is not an ambitious update that flew too close to the sun and was burned. It’s a clumsy debasement of surface elements, making basic mistakes that are obvious to anyone skilled in the art of interface design. It breaks things that were not broken while ignoring or exacerbating existing problems. Oh, and I also personally think it’s not very attractive. What a sad year for macOS.

Brent Simmons: Hardware is utterly amazing — but the macOS 26 Liquid Glass UI is shockingly bad.

Jessica Dennis: I was pretty bummed to retire my iMac Pro this year — I replaced it with an enormous Dell monitor that I hook up to my 2023 15″ MacBook Air, which I guess is a testament to how decent the MacBook Air is nowadays.

Shelly Brisbin: 2025 was the year of the solid update. The M-chip stairs the laptops and the Mac Studio have been climbing are sturdy and reliable – no chance you’ll be discomfited by a squeaky step, or slip and fall on a broken one. And Apple kept the MacBook Air at a pleasing $999, with a base config of 16 Gb RAM. All’s right, if not exciting. I’m not a particular fan of the liquid glass changes in Tahoe, but the ones I like least are easy to tame by turning off a few settings.

Lex Friedman: Mac hardware is the best it’s ever been. Liquid Glass really is bad, but less bad on the Mac than on iOS.

Matthew Haughey: The new M chips are always welcome, and the latest MacOS isn’t too terrible compared to mobile.

Dan Moren: My enthusiasm for new models and chips is tainted by macOS 26, which has had some significant and well-documented issues on the platform. The design feels clunky and weird still. Some apps need more love and reliability (Shortcuts!).

Eric Slivka: On the hardware side, things seem to be in a bit of a holding pattern, with minor spec-bump updates for some models and others not receiving updates at all. M5 MacBook Pro without M5 Pro/Max at the same time is understandable, but makes things a bit awkward, as do the M4 Max and M3 Ultra offerings for Mac Studio. Mac Pro looks to be abandoned, iMac is getting long in the tooth, and I would love to see a bigger iMac Pro make an appearance. As far as macOS Tahoe, I don’t hate the Liquid Glass redesign as much as some, but there are definitely some odd design choices that need revisiting.

Quinn Nelson: This was one of the least impressive years for the Mac in the Apple Silicon era. While none of the releases were bad, none of them particularly wowed, and any/all excitement was mired by macOS 26 Tahoe.

David Dozoretz: As is common knowledge, Apple is far behind in A.I. implementation. Hopefully, they can continue their history of doing it best instead of first. Oh, and Tim Cook sucking up to the White House is despicable – regardless of any perceived business issues. I say that as an Apple shareholder since the early ’80’s.

Paul Kafasis: Hardware: Apple’s back to regularly releasing Mac updates, and that’s a very good thing. What’s up with the Mac Pro, though? Approximately no one should buy it. Software: Tahoe is not great. In particular, Liquid Glass on Mac is pretty bad.

iPhone

Carolina Milanesi: It feels like the Pro Max has been such a winner for Apple, and the Air is a key stepping stone to the Fold.

Marco Arment: The iPhone 17 Pro is a radically better phone than its predecessors. iOS 26 has some flawed designs and remains buggy months after its public release.

John Gruber: iPhone 17 Pro and Pro Max are, technically, the best iPhones Apple has ever made. They’re very well designed, too. The change to make the camera plateau span the entire width of the phone is a good one. It looks better, allows a naked iPhone 17 Pro to sit more steadily on a flat surface, and lets one in a case sit on a surface without any wobble at all. Apple even finally added a really fun, bold color — orange — that, surprising no one seems to be incredibly popular with customers. The iPhone Air is, from a design perspective, the best-designed iPhone Apple has ever made. It’s a marvel to hold and carry. One rear-facing camera lens is limiting, but it’s an excellent camera. Not 17 Pro-quality, no, but excellent quality, yes. Battery life is amazing given the physical constraints of the iPhone Air’s thin and lightweight design. The two main dings against the iPhone Air are that (a) Apple didn’t offer it in a fun bold color like the 17 Pro’s orange, and (b) Apple, bafflingly, hasn’t advertised the Air. I’ve seen so little promotion of the Air that I’d wager most iPhone users in the market for a new phone don’t even know it exists until they walk into a store and see it there. iOS 26 is Apple’s best implementation of the Liquid Glass concept, by far. I prefer it, in just about every way, to iOS 18. There are some individual apps from Apple in iOS 26 that have poor implementations of Liquid Glass (Music, I’m looking in your direction), but most of them are decided improvements, with more consistency system-wide improvements (like the placement of search fields).

Steven Aquino: Perfection is seemingly unattainable, but I feel as though the iPhone line is most proximal. I chose an iPhone Air as my new phone for its thinness and lightness, and despite some lingering feelings of missing another camera lens or two, I have no complaints whatsoever.

Jessica Dennis: I’m one of the people who kinda digs liquid glass, so I’m not mad at iOS. I do kinda wish that instead of a phone that’s big but thin (the iPhone Air) we got another small phone — I know my iPhone 13 Mini would be unusable by now, but I still kinda regret trading it in (it was pink! I continue to be annoyed that Pro models don’t come in pink or purple or other “girly” colors). I was also pretty irritated that it seemed like I could only get a launch day iPhone 17 by physically going to the Apple Store to pick it up (which I did), and would have to wait a week or whatever if I opted to have it shipped to me — like Apple RTO’d us! Rude!

John Siracusa: The iPhone 17 line is yet another strong showing from Apple. The vapor chamber in the Pro models addresses one of the few persistent hardware weaknesses of the high-end iPhones. The plain iPhone 17 is one of the best values in years, adopting many formerly Pro-only features. The new front-facing camera is a welcome improvement after many years of stagnation, and it’s shared by both the Pro and non-Pro phones. The iPhone Air is an impressive and interesting new diversification of the iPhone line. Apple is prone to losing faith in iPhone variants that don’t set the world on fire, but I hope it sticks with the idea of a thinner, lighter iPhone for more than a couple of years. iOS 26 manages to dodge some of the worst aspects of the Tahoe redesign, and it includes a few actual improvements as well. But the core values of the 26 OS family are still present, and still damaging: allowing background content to reduce the legibility of foreground elements; using more screen space to show less content; generally making things uglier (in my opinion).

Craig Hockenberry: 2025 was the first year I haven’t didn’t upgrade my phone in September: the year-over-year improvements weren’t important to me. I would like to see Apple lean more into the iPhone Air direction: I don’t need more features, but I would certainly enjoy a device that was easier to carry around.

Stephen Hackett: 2025 brought more iPhones than ever, as Apple leaned into differentiation between models. The iPhone Pro and Pro Max were redesigned to maximize the performance of the camera and the silicon inside. The iPhone 17 gained ProMotion and the always-on display, making it the best base iPhone ever. Then there’s the iPhone Air. Its compromises aren’t for everyone, but if it fits into your life, it’ll slide into your pocket better than any other iPhone. Liquid Glass feels the most complete on iOS 26, but it is far from perfect. The price paid for content reflecting and refracting under UI elements includes legibility issues and performance concerns. I don’t have the hatred for Liquid Glass that some do, but it’s clear that Apple has more work to do to make this interface serve all of its users well.

Shelly Brisbin: By all accounts, iPhone’s generation 17 was a terrific set of upgrades on the hardware front. And the 16e is an excellent platform to allow cutting the kinds of corners that pro users hate, while the value-conscious get a very recommendable device. But the phone’s great hardware year does not overshadow liquid glass – an update that wasn’t as abominable as iOS 7.0, but seems to have been based on similarly clueless assumptions about how users would either “love” or “adjust to” high-flown design ideas. I’ve made peace with it at this point, but changes like floating button bars, the moving ofsearch to the bottom of the screen, and adding low-contrast buttons to many interfaces still rankle. More than that, the summer’s triumphal announcement, followed by a series of user-inspired fixes, did nothing to enhance Apple’s goodwill with those of us who prize usability over design flourishes.

Rosemary Orchard: 8x optical zoom has made a huge difference for me, and I really appreciate it.

Casey Liss: I cannot recall a better time for the iPhone. More exciting, perhaps — 2025 was [mostly] a year of further evolution. Better, though? I don’t think so. This is probably the best year for the iPhone that I can recall. The hardware is basically perfect across the lineup. There are no duds. There are places where there are tradeoffs — I’m particularly looking at you, iPhone Air — but I wouldn’t say there are any bad phones. Perhaps the biggest complaint I have about the hardware lineup is the lack of MagSafe in the 16e? I’d say that’s a pretty good sign things are going well. Software-wise, things are mostly great. I am becoming more and more embittered at the incessant upsells that I’m getting, but the services monster must be fed. Liquid Glass works best on the iPhone by a mile. The pearl-clutching about legibility is justified — most of it anyway — but I do love the way things look, and especially, the way they move.

John Moltz: The iPhone hardware continues to be great, if it has reached a point of stable progression. Maybe next year will be a little more exciting.

Joe Macirowski: The lineup is impossible to explain to anyone, and the constant entry-exit of models like the mini, plus, and presumably air aren’t making it any easier. I will always think back to the iBook G4 era when a simple grid expressed “do you need X PowerBook exclusive feature” and “big one or small one.” The white back to the “Clear” case because the MagSafe replication ring crosses the Apple logo is stupid, and I hate it. I buy the Apple clear cases for two reasons: 1, the lack of a bottom lip, whose presence is a tactile nightmare for me and 2, obviously, they’re supposed to be clear.

Peter Cohen: Apple missed the mark with the iPhone Air – too many compromises at too high a starting price made it easy for people to ignore.

Myke Hurley: I think that the fall 2025 iPhone lineup is the best range of phones the company has to offer. Every product they released was excellent, with very little trade offs among them. Essentially, all you had to do was decide which best fit your life. Overall, I am happy with iOS 26 also. I recognize the rough edges of Liquid Glass, but I am actually a fan overall of the ideas represented in the redesign and have been really pleased to see how some apps have reworked their interfaces to match Apple.

Joe Rosensteel: The part of the year where everyone was still using iOS 18 was pretty because it never lived up to what had been promised, meanwhile iOS 26 provided many obstacles and fresh opportunities for bugs and usability issues that we still haven’t seen resolved, and probably won’t see resolved for years. I know people are attracted to the “fresh” look, but it’s poorly considered and will age like milk.

Christina Warren: So a lot of the same complaints I had about macOS could be applied to iOS for the iPhone — but for me, I hate iOS 26 a lot less than I hate macOS 26. Was I perfectly satisfied with the looks of iOS 18? Yes. Did I get anything of value out of Liquid Ass? Absolutely not? Is the fact that they keep trimming back Liquid Ass an indictment of how much people hate it? Also yes. But there are some things in iOS 26 that are really good. The new call screening feature is excellent, and there are some nice improvements and enhancements with messages that really sing. This was also a really solid year for hardware. The iPhone 17 Pro/Pro Max (orange, natch) is maybe not the most handsome phone Apple has ever released, but it is definitely the way you can show you got the new one. And the new cameras and vapor chamber, coupled with a thicker body, really make this a great phone for the enthusiast or the person who wants the best phone and replaces it every 3 – 4 years. Bummer about the move from titanium and what that means for scratching of the paint, but that’s why we have Apple Care+! That said, the best iPhone for almost anyone this year is the base iPhone — which at $799 (or $829 if you get it carrier unlocked), is an amazing value. I had to buy a new phone just for work and gladly got the iPhone 17. The new selfie-camera — available across the line of phones — is one of the best hardware updates Apple has put out across the board. The dual cameras on the back are great, the colors are fun, and MagSafe can now be faster if you have the right types of chargers. You’re honestly making very few compromises for the cheaper phone — and for a $300 – $400 savings, this is an area where I could see plenty of iPhone 12 or 13 Pro customers saying, “You know what, the base iPhone 17 is good enough for me.” The one bummer is that they didn’t make an iPhone 17 Plus. I fear that the larger screen requiring the 17 Pro Max or the Air was a weird “we will force you to spend more money” thing — and that’s too bad. My dad has an iPhone 14 Plus, and he has no desire to upgrade, but I’d love to get him a new phone. I think he would struggle with the smaller phone. The only two weird phones in the lineup are the iPhone 16e and the iPhone Air. The 16e, I contend, costs too much. If it were $499, I think I would have an easier time defending it. The old SE cost $429 (and it was $399 for the previous two versions — and miss me with the “but inflation” defense bullshit — Apple has margins you know are above 50% on the SE style phones, so stop it.) but at $599, you’re not getting MagSafe, you’re getting a single camera, you’re getting a weaker cellular modem, you’re getting only 128GB of storage — you’re getting a lot of compromises. Especially when cheap iPhone 13 and iPhone 14s can be found in the sub $200 range with prepaid wireless carriers (you’re locked to the carrier and a $60 a month phone plan for 3 months, but if you do the math, you can still come out with phone service and a phone for less than the price of an iPhone 16e). For a 256GB iPhone, you save $100 to get the iPhone 16e vs the iPhone 17. Why would anyone buy this phone? The iPhone Air is also a strange one for me. I did get one for my mom — as she’s close to the target market — price indiscriminate, prioritizes thin/light over features — didn’t use the camera on her iPhone 15 Pro Max much. But we still had to get her the Apple Battery pack, and she kept her old phone around as a sort of iPod and potentially for the camera. But the iPhone Air, for all of its defenders, hasn’t seemed to find a lot of success. Because the trade-offs on battery life and cameras are just too much. To me, it was a phone designed for rich male tech executives (and I say male because no female executive would be OK with the camera trade-off or to be worried about the battery situation — the ladies are getting the iPhone 17 Pro/Pro Max) or rich male YouTubers who want a “weekend phone” (or a “night” phone as Dave Morin once bragged about having in a simpler web 2.0 time). If you are spending $1000 on a phone and you aren’t my 78-year old mother who wants a light and thin phone for her purse and doesn’t care about the rear cameras as much, you’re honestly better off getting the iPhone 17 and saving some money — no matter how beautiful the design is (and it is beautiful).

Gui Rambo: Even though Liquid Glass is controversial and has its issues, iOS is the platform where it works best, and this year’s iPhone lineup is really good, especially the entry-level iPhone 17.

Quinn Nelson: How could we have had a better year? The 16e was solid, the Air was a breath of fresh… air, and the “base” 17 is one of the best mid-ranges phones in the whole market—not typical of Apple.

Nick Heer: For a mature product line in essentially a single form factor for eighteen years, 2025’s iPhone lineup is fairly surprising. The no-suffix 17 seems to be the standout despite its tepid colours, and the Air is an intriguing compromise. The 16E seems very expensive for what you get — not really a budget phone, not a particularly small phone, and far less capable than the still-available 16. Probably great for bulk corporate buyers, though.

Kirk McElhearn: As for the Mac, hardware is fine, software is poor.

Michael Tsai: Processor, battery, camera improvements, and Ceramic Shield 2 in iPhone 17 (and 17 Pro) are nice, but I just find it hard to get excited about iPhone these days. The camera improvement I want to see, reverting to a deeper depth of field, will probably never happen. As with the Mac, the iPhone is let down by the new software. I guess I like the new Camera app, and I like CarPlay widgets (though they need more font controls), but most of the other changes that I notice day-to-day are either neutral or regressions. Liquid Glass is maddening. Apple also set a bad precedent in preventing newer iPhones from updating to iOS 18.7.3, thus forcing them to update to iOS 26 to get security updates.

Benjamin Mayo: I think it was a fantastic year for the iPhone overall. It is rare for Apple to redesign the flagship iPhone, and this year, they essentially did it twice. I don’t love all the choices they made in the new Pro lineup, but I highly appreciate that Apple was confident enough to be opinionated and do something bolder than they have done in a while. The same can be said for the iPhone Air, which I love and is my new daily driver. I consider iOS 26 and Liquid Glass a success. Apple rolled out a dramatic change to the visual appearance of the system, including some navigational changes like new tab bars and moving search bars to the bottom of the screen, and most users seem to have accepted it without issue. Personally, I think they’ve gone too far in places, but I mostly like it. I expect the usage of Liquid Glass material effects will be curtailed over time; they probably went slightly overboard with this first iteration.

Howard Oakley: I have to admit it, although there’s still room for improvement, I like iOS 26.

Brent Simmons: Liquid Glass is not as bad on the iPhone as on the Mac, but it’s still terrible.

Federico Viticci: The iPhone Air, with all its compromises, is the best iPhone I’ve used in a long time. And by “best”, I don’t mean technically the best, because it’s not. I mean it in the sense that the iPhone Air is the sort of futuristic, forward-looking, almost impossible product that elicits the same sense of joy and wonder that the iPhone X made me feel in 2017. Only Apple could put a whole pocket computer in a camera plateau. I’m going to miss the iPhone Air when I eventually upgrade to an iPhone Fold (iPhone Duo?) later this year, but this device showed us that Apple is still capable of pushing the boundaries of what iPhone hardware can be, and I can’t wait to see where they take the lineup next.

Stephen Robles: Again, combining the hardware and software makes the rating a challenge. iOS 26 has been buggy, with my iPhone 17 Pro Max brightness getting stuck at times, keyboard and autocorrect are rough, and random springboard crashes. But iOS 26 also has a lot of great features for Messages, Shortcuts with Apple Intelligence, etc. Hardware-wise, I’ve gotten used to the utilitarian design of the 17 Pro lineup, but still wish I had another color option (I went with silver). Camera-wise, the 17 has been incredible, and it’s what I used almost exclusively at CES.

Lex Friedman: iPhone improvements are small but appreciated. Liquid Glass really is bad.

James Thomson: An additional point for bright and colourful Pro phones, and doing something different with the iPhone Air. Minus a point for Liquid Glass, a design language made by people under thirty (derogatory).

Matt Birchler: Call me boring, but I think 2025 was a great year for the iPhone. No, we didn’t get a folding phone, but we did get the iPhone Air, which, despite my being annoyed with several aspects of it, I’m continually drawn to use it as my daily driver. Meanwhile, the Pros got an opinionated new design that leans into their Pro moniker, the normal iPhone finally got ProMotion, and I’d argue the iPhone 16e is underappreciated.

Brian Mattucci: I think iOS 26 is a really good update in general, and I especially appreciate spam filtering on messages and calls. Liquid Glass is fine for me, though I wish for additional options, such as being able to have clear widgets and colorful dark mode icons at the same time. There has been a major widespread bug with wired CarPlay on the new iPhone, and Apple has stayed disappointingly quiet about it. iPhone Air was an interesting experiment, but I didn’t opt for it because the trade-offs didn’t seem worth it.

Philip Michaels: Apple clearly has a hit with the iPhone 17 Pro models, particularly with the new design that allowed space for improvements like a vapor cooling chamber and a bigger battery. But even the standard iPhone took a big step forward with features that made it feel more premium and the best value in Apple’s lineup. If there was a misstep, it’s that Apple failed to really define a reason for the iPhone Air to exist, though given the similar muted reception for the Galaxy S25 Edge, it’s not like Apple is alone in that regard. Thin phones just need to offer more than thinness. iOS 26 felt like a holding update to me — some good improvements, but until we find out what Siri can do, there are missing details.

Eric Slivka: I’m using an iPhone Air as my main phone, and while I miss having a telephoto camera, it otherwise suits my needs just fine and is a marvelous bit of technology. The Pro models continue to set the standard in performance and features, though the new design is a bit controversial. The sleeper hit is the base iPhone 17, which got some nice feature upgrades to make it a very compelling choice for many users. I’ve gotten Liquid Glass looking reasonably well on my devices and am happy enough with it, and I appreciate some of the minor improvements across the built-in apps.

Chance Miller: The iPhone Air is the most ambitious iPhone redesign since the iPhone X, and it’s what I use every day. But it’s the strength of the base iPhone 17 that allowed Apple to push the iPhone 17 Pro to new heights and to release the iPhone Air. It stands out to me as the best overall iPhone in years, finally with ProMotion and Always-On. I wish the iPhone 16e were $100 cheaper, though. iOS 26 was a big swing, and despite what you might hear inside our tech bubble, I think it’s largely been a success with the broader public. Outside of Liquid Glass, iOS 26 has some really solid quality-of-life improvements to things like Messages, CarPlay, and Maps.

Matt Deatherage: Quiet upgrades like Memory Integrity Enforcement deserve more attention but are hard to sell. The iPhone 17 Pro is solid, but the iPhone Air seems to have blown away, like that grocery bag in “American Beauty.” Apple’s A‑series chips deliver impressive power in a thin package, but when you explicitly position one device as “thin” and another as “powerful,” a screen‑addicted world won’t choose to be left behind. And speaking of past design aesthetics, we have to talk about Liquid Glass. UI designers have coveted transparency since the moment that hardware became fast enough to drag full window content around the screen without lagging. Opacity seems sinful because it blocks the view of what users chose to see. Making the “chrome” more transparent “bring[s] more focus to your content,” says Apple. They seem to forget that users also choose what to look at now by selecting the apps and views to use. It’s more important to see those clearly than to satisfy FOMO by showing what’s underneath. The hard part of something like Liquid Glass is coding it—making all those transformations to each pixel and shape as filtered up through calculated levels of transparency and edge distortions like lenses, all without burning up the processor or draining the battery in 12 minutes. Twenty years ago, it would have been wildly impractical. It’s an impressive feat. But the “can we do it” may have edged out the “should we do it” questions. Far too many individual cases of the hundreds (or thousands) of UI element combinations on a screen lean towards showing off rather than towards the clearest presentation. The fit and finish are not what they should be when replacing something as mature as the iOS 18 UI. As the animated Peter Griffin once said about a movie, “It insists upon itself.” (https://english.stackexchange.com/a/627015) Ambition isn’t enough (ask Tesla’s self-driving engineers). It has to be right, or it fails.

Matthew Haughey: iOS26 feels like a step backward in terms of design and legibility, etc I’m annoyed daily by it still after several months of use

David Sparks: Even though the iPhone Air is not for me. I love that Apple made it. And it looks like they are not done experimenting with the platform. And the iPhone Pro finally got fun colors. Keep it up, Apple.

Jeff Carlson: iPhone 17 Pro really does take better pictures, has a larger battery, and comes in orange. What’s not to like? I’m surprised that the iPhone Air hasn’t been more successful… I’ve yet to see one in the wild, so I think most people understand the limitations of battery life and camera and are getting the 17 or 17 Pro instead. Still, it’s a statement.

Dan Moren: Great year for the iPhone. The 17 Pro and iPhone Air are amazing pieces of hardware. iOS 26 is the best expression of Liquid Glass, even if that is damning with faint praise.

Adam Engst: It’s the same story as with the Mac. The iPhone hardware is top-notch, and it’s particularly impressive that the iPhone 17 has closed the gap on the iPhone 17 Pro for most people. But Liquid Glass in iOS 26 causes nothing but headaches for many people.

Allison Sheridan: I think Apple hit a sweet spot of wonderful this year. Pro phones with spectacular cameras, non-Pro with the camera most people probably want, and then the Air with its elegance and delight. The lineup also feels simpler to me.

Gabe Weatherhead: I have to hard reboot my iPhone at least once a week. My iPhone 16 Pro Max is unreliable, and when it does work, it’s tainted by the Liquid Glass UI. A typical week with an iPhone is a story of stumbling through bad executive endorsements. On a Monday, I will reboot my iPhone so that it will reconnect to my home wifi. On a tuesday I will reboot my iPhone so that the buttons become responsive again. On a Wednesday, I will reboot my iPhone so that the Mail app can find emails again. On a Thursday, I will reboot my iPhone so that my contacts reappear in Apple’s Contacts app. On a Friday, I will reboot my iPhone so that iCloud resumes syncing files. On a Saturday, I will reboot my iPhone so that Apple Photos can find my family memories again. On a Sunday, I will give up and leave my iPhone on my desk and just hope that Wi-Fi works the next day. Personally, I am offended by the high price Apple sets for its iPhone and how little care its executives take in approving their iOS releases. The hardware is only worth as much as the software it will run.

Charles Arthur: Hardware is doing well again, but the software is not.

Ben Long: Apple’s phones are too big, so I’m still on the 13 Mini.

iPad

James Thomson: The chips keep getting faster, and we finally got full windows and menus! Hopefully, we actually do something with it all next year.

Matt Birchler: I’m going right down the middle with this one. The iPad remains unquestionably the best tablet on the market, and the new windowing features introduced in iPadOS 26 have made a lot of people happy. But it must be said that all three new models we got this year were some of the simplest spec bumps we’ve ever gotten in iPad history, and that new windowing system wasn’t exactly universally adored. Personally, I think more than ever the iPad is in an awkward middle ground between the iPhone and Mac experiences. As a pretty simple iPad user myself, I am slightly annoyed by the added complexity in my day-to-day use of the product to enable a windowing system I personally do not use. Meanwhile, as primarily a Mac user, it still lacks countless features and usability niceties that would ever pull me away from doing my work on the Mac.

Stephen Robles: I’ll likely be alone here, but I think the M5 iPad Pro with iPadOS 26 is the top platform/device this year. iPad Pro hardware is incredible and leaves almost nothing to be desired. Software-wise, I actually think iPadOS 26 is great on iPad, and Apple added enough features to please power users while not making it a Mac (which I don’t think is a good idea). After switching to a 13″ iPad, the windowing and stage manager mechanism has become invaluable to me, and it’s now where I build 90% of my Shortcuts. Little things like Mic input choice in Control Center, Apple Intelligence Shortcuts, and bringing back Slide Over and Split View, it’s perfect for my use, which includes editing podcasts daily, researching and writing, building Shortcuts, and entertainment.

Brent Simmons: Hardware’s great, and some nice changes have come to the iPad — it’s more Mac-like in some good ways, ways that benefit the iPad. But the Liquid Glass UI is such an appalling change that it overshadows everything.

Dan Moren: They did it! Multitasking the way it should be! iPadOS is as good as it’s ever been, and the hardware continues to be fantastic. But the main question of the iPad remains existential: what and who is it for? Apple still doesn’t have a great answer to this.

Myke Hurley: iPadOS 26 has brought me back to the iPad in a big way. I feel like Apple has finally taken off the training wheels from the OS and let it be the best that it can be. While I recognise the inherent rigidity of it compared to macOS, I feel like they have now allowed me to do exactly what I would want from this platform. It’s so good that I bought a Magic Keyboard again – something I have not used on my own iPad for many years.

Craig Hockenberry: Windows on iPad still have a lot of rough edges, but it’s a change that I’m so glad Apple made.

Allison Sheridan: While the hardware announcements marched along, the big gain was with iPadOS 26. Windowing on the iPad, but only for those who want it, is a game-changer.

Peter Cohen: From top to bottom, solid improvements across the board and better value throughout the stack. Now if Apple could just get its software act together…

Charles Arthur: Same story as the Mac and iPhone: the hardware is doing great! The software is letting it down.

Brian Mattucci: iPadOS multi-tasking system overhauls have been common over the years, but it finally seems like Apple has landed on something that works. Arranging multiple app windows on an iPad used to be laborious. I won’t say it’s perfect now, but it’s so much better that I’m no longer doubting sticking with iPads going forward. I think Home Screen customization needs some tweaks, though, as the OS tends to want to rearrange your icons or reset the layout when you’re just trying to drag an icon or widget around. There’s a similar issue with Control Center. Also, I’m not a fan of how the app icon spacing changes if you have a widget on the Home Screen – it feels like too large a gap on a 13-inch iPad.

Marco Arment: iPadOS 26 is a leap forward in multitasking, finally delivering what iPad power users have wanted for many years: the radical concept of windows.

Casey Liss: We finally got the multitasking we’ve always wanted. However, it still just doesn’t click with me. It’s like Slack’s basically-but-not-quite Markdown — this is basically-but-not-quite macOS windowing. I’ll take it over any of the godawful attempts they’ve made in the past, but I don’t think it’s quite nailed down. The iPad remains incredible hardware that is still let down by its software. Now, far less egregiously so, but let down nonetheless. Further, despite an M2 iPad Pro being my “downstairs computer”, I just can’t find myself getting excited about iPad hardware anymore. Maybe that says more about me than it does the iPad.

Benjamin Mayo: I’m not a frequent iPad user, but I think Apple has landed in a good spot with the new iPadOS 26 multitasking system. The new system unifies various metaphors of earlier attempts into a single system that is pretty easy to mentally grok; full-screen apps flow naturally into floating windowing and Split View arrangements and vice versa. We also saw the company respond to feedback in a matter of months, quickly addressing user complaints about Split View gestures and missing Slide Over behaviours, all before the end of the calendar year.

John Gruber: iPad hardware continues to be fine, and “fine”, but iPad standards mean “the best tablets in the industry by far.” The lineup is well-differentiated and spans a larger-than-ever gamut from “totally casual user” to “actual pro usage”. iPadOS 26 is the most exciting release of iPadOS ever. I don’t love all of it. I think the biggest problem is that too much complexity is exposed to very casual users, for whom the main appeal of using an iPad as their main “computer” is its rigorous simplicity. But the course reversal Apple has made for advanced users, from eschewing (often to the point of frustration, sometimes to the point of absurdity) the desktop GUI concept of overlapping windows, to embracing regular old-fashioned GUI windows, was the right call, and a welcome sign of humility. It’s a new start for iPadOS, and I look forward to seeing where it goes. It’s been a long time since I’ve thought that about iPadOS.

Steven Aquino: I have a dichotomous relationship with the iPad. On one hand, I applaud Apple for finally making iPadOS more “Mac-like” with the new-is-old windowing paradigm and everything else. From a disability standpoint, there’s a cogent argument for a 13-inch iPad and iPadOS 26 being a more accessible “laptop replacement” for a certain class of people with disabilities. In my case, though, as much as I appreciate my 13″ M4 iPad Pro, my gut keeps saying I’ve left the iPadOS-for-productivity train forever. Give me an OLED iPad mini, and I’ll be ecstatic.

Jessica Dennis: I’m a weirdo who only cares about the iPad Mini — it was updated last year, and I bought one, and it still serves its purpose for me. Next year or the year after, I’m sure I’ll be complaining that a new iPad Mini has not yet been released, though!

John Siracusa: The iPad mostly took the year off, with only minor spec-bump updates. But the new iPad Pro still has the best screen on any Apple device of any size, and the M5 continues Apple’s history of over-delivery on iPad performance.

Matt Deatherage: I’m rarely without my iPad Pro at hand, and while Liquid Glass has more opportunity to work well here (and on Mac) than on smaller screens, it somehow doesn’t. That’s mostly the fault of a woefully unpolished windowing system. Yes, everyone’s wanted windows for years, and some have wanted menu bars also. They can be handy—but we’re used to tapping the top of the screen for a lot of reasons. You have to tap near the top to get Safari’s UI to show, but if you touch too close to the top, you activate the menu bar or take an app out of full-screen view. (Using the old “windowshade” metaphor of double-tapping what’s essentially a window title bar to minimize it is clever, but there are too many actions happening in a small area of the screen.) If I hold down on the “back” button in Safari’s UI but don’t keep my finger (or pointer) perfectly still, I don’t get the list of previous pages; I get a moving window. If I try to pull down from the top to see notifications, I get a menu bar (or control center). Windows shouldn’t be so fragile as to quiver and quake along any edge! Slide over vanished before coming back too strong, where Apple demands that you see part of a slide-over app in Springboard unless you hid it while in another app. And for all the talk of transparency, slide-over apps never fade even slightly above other content, and act weirdly when not sharing another app’s space. It’s just…frustrating. You can’t use iPadOS 26 for more than three minutes without realizing how much better it should have been. As for the hardware, what can you say other than “confusing?” The 2025 iPad Pro is the previous model with an M5 chip and Wi-Fi 7. The iPad uses the A16 chip, but the iPad Mini uses the A17 Pro? iPad Air is on the two-year-old M3 chip, once again seeming to argue that “thinner” means “less powerful.” It’s probably great for Apple’s margins, though.

Eric Slivka: I am not an iPad power user by any means, but the recent multitasking improvements are definitely helpful. iPad hardware didn’t get much of an upgrade this year, though I’m hopeful for some big improvements to the iPad mini that might make me revisit it after many years away.

Philip Michaels: I actually paid for a new iPad with my own money this year, and I’m notoriously tight-fisted. Apple must be doing something right.

Shelly Brisbin: Not exciting, but not bad. The iPad lineup was beefed up most at the Pro level, with the extremely awesome Air getting a little chip bump. And iPadOS 26 brought a long-awaited windowing system, along with the death and rebirth of previous multitasking features. There’s more creative software for the platform, which is also a pretty good calling card.

Carolina Milanesi: The new silicon has helped the Pro a lot, but sadly, I do not think it is moving the needle enough to convert people from the Mac, especially as the MacBook Air got much better this year.

Gui Rambo: iPad hardware is really good, but the software is so bad that I can’t give it a higher grade. Even though multitasking has improved, the app model inherited from iOS is not conducive to power user applications.

Kirk McElhearn: Same comments as for the Mac and iPhone. Regarding hardware, I bought an M4 iPad Pro when it was released in May 2024, and I can’t see that I’ll need to replace it for several years. This is the first time that I feel that an iPad has longevity beyond just a few years. Perhaps because it was the first M4 device, and was, in some ways, ahead of itself, but it feels like the OS won’t hinder it for quite some time.

Chance Miller: iPadOS 26 nails much of what we’ve wanted Apple to do for years, and it did it by embracing the Mac’s proven multitasking model instead of overthinking it again.

Joe Macirowski: SideCar has gained the ability to work while my Mac is connected to a VPN, as long as I reboot the iPad every single time. I tried to use my iPad in clamshell mode to convince various streaming apps to actually fill my connected 16:9 display (a separate issue), but was thwarted by it forgetting my Magic Trackpad existed – an issue that was not afflicting the Magic Keyboard I was also using. All these still not fully baked “pro” features keep the iPad in a weird spot where it’s most useful to me as a 12″ (Concert) sized page of sheet music. iPad Safari and desktop Safari are practically a singular app in this release which is more of a loss to the Mac than gain for the iPad but the reason it’s an iPad criticism is because if you shrink an iPad Safari window enough it will change to the iPhone Safari layout using the choice labeled “Top” in Settings > Safari > Tabs – a setting that is only on iPhones and being the third choice of three implies it might be akin to a “Classic Appearance” option begrudgingly added as a common solution to criticism of a new design and unspecified compatibility issues (hence its use as the only layout for iPad windows that become small enough). Despite this strongly implying that there is more common code than ever before across all three major flavors of Safari the fact that “Top” is not the choice I have for tabs on my iPhone and cannot choose “Compact” or “Bottom” for my iPad makes them feel further apart and in indeed they are because it’s possible whatever code or resources power “Bottom” aren’t even in the iPad build and either way they’re at least never touched. Similarly, as I don’t have “Top” chosen on my iPhone, I would not notice if its code or resources were stripped from the build. It feels sloppy. It feels like iPadOS and iPhoneOS only ever offer anything in lockstep with each other because someone has manually implemented a static copy. There’s no telling when something missing from iPadOS is a pointless but deliberate market segmentation decision, a genuine capability detection system making what is hopefully an accurate call, or a simple oversight because 15 years in Apple’s own code is still riddled with “Is this a hardware iPhone or hardware iPad” that gatekeep not just when someone deliberately chooses but also simply forgets, the QA cycle moves on, and if there were maybe if a post calling out this difference becomes viral it will be addressed, whether or not anything was ever submitted via feedback assistant. Still,e, they’ll only be robots closed on their individual birthdays.

Quinn Nelson: The already remarkable M4 iPad Pro gets even better, the iPad Air inherits the M3, and the entry iPad finds frequent, deep discounts below $275. It’s also the first time in years that iPadOS doesn’t feel like an afterthought.

Matthew Haughey: I got a new M4 iPad Pro this year (on discount after the M5 came out) to replace an iPad Pro from 2018, and with iOS 26, there are so many UI bugs that didn’t happen on the old iPad that it’s shocking to me. There are close buttons on video players that can’t be tapped because they overlap the time and wifi top area of the screen.

Christina Warren: “iPad OS continues to be a thing that exists and a thing that Apple pretends to care about. It’s no macOS, although given the state of macOS, maybe that isn’t as bad as it once was. The more confusing aspect is the hardware. And by that I mean the confusing state of the lineup. I’m probably going to trade my iPad Pro M2 in for the M5 iPad Pro this year — but I won’t get the 5G version, mostly to save money. I’ve put off the change for the last few years, as I haven’t wanted to buy a brand new Apple Pencil and a brand new Magic Keyboard. But this is the last year I’ll be able to get any sort of reasonable trade-in on my M2, so I should bite the bullet. Like the iPhone, I think the base iPad is now the most impressive unit. This is the one I got my mom for Christmas (replacing an iPad from 2017) — there was a special on the 256GB model, and I just couldn’t justify the $300 price difference for a 256GB iPad Air. Now, I can sort of defend the iPad Pro — different class of device, comes 256GB of standard, blah blah blah — but $600 for a 128GB iPad in 2025 (or now 2026), just feels unreasonably high. Especially when the stuff that most people do with an iPad can be found in a package that is $350. If they bothered to do Pro Motion displays in the Air, I could see it. See it as selling the years-old Pro — but we know why Apple doesn’t do this. They don’t do it because then not enough people would contort themselves into thinking they need an iPad Pro. The 13” iPad Air is actually the one I really don’t understand existing as a product. You are much, much, much better off buying a used iPad Pro 13″ and some sort of third-party warranty if you’re that concerned about that sort of thing (Apple Care won’t replace your battery — even if you volunteer to pay — until it shows less than 80% battery capacity anyway, unless you get snippy with them as you explain that 81% is low enough and just please replace my iPad’s battery) than spending $800 on an iPad Air that doesn’t even have a 120hz screen. You can get an M4 MacBook Air for less than a 13″ iPad Air. Let that sink in.

Paul Kafasis: I got a new iPad Mini 7 in 2025. The update to this device was minimal, but my old one (a 2021 iPad Mini 6) was 64 GB, a problem. I wish the update had more advancements.

David Sparks: This is the year that Apple finally called our bluff on making iPadOS more useful. My only concern is whether they waited too long. Are users and developers ready to embrace the iPad for more serious work and software?

Adam Engst: The multitasking changes in iPadOS 26 are undoubtedly welcome by the people who find the iPad makes them more productive. For many others, though, it still doesn’t outcompete a MacBook Air in any way. And, Liquid Glass.

Stephen Hackett: After years of dragging its feet, Apple finally did the thing and gave iPadOS a full-blown windowing system. Split View, Slide Over, and Stage Manager were all attempts that still (mostly) exist, but iPadOS 26 is the real deal. Paired with a keyboard and trackpad, an iPad feels more desktop-like than ever, yet the classic one-app-at-a-time interface is still alive and well for folks who prefer a simpler experience. Hardware-wise, Apple continues to offer a wide range of devices at a wide range of price points. There’s an iPad for everyone, and that’s a good thing.

Gabe Weatherhead: I can wholeheartedly recommend the iPad for anyone who loves Procreate. The Procreate Pad is a joy to use. The Apple Pencil for Procreate is an incredible experience and delivers professional-level capabilities. I’ve been repeatedly impressed with what the Procreate team has done with Apple’s hardware. I’m not even sure what to say about Apple’s contributions in this arrangement. The iPad is a device hampered by a lack of vision and strategy. It’s an expensive device, and I have no real idea why it exists, except, of course, for the Procreate app.

Ben Long: Again, great hardware, but they’re really making a go at ruining the OS.

John Moltz: iPadOS experienced the most substantial improvement in years. Windowing on iPadOS isn’t perfect, but it is a big jump in making the platform more productive for people who want to do more than watch shows, surf the internet and do email.

Federico Viticci: If you told me at the beginning of 2025 that I’d end the year feeling enthusiastic about the future of the iPad’s platform and its operating system…I wouldn’t have believed you, to say the least. It was a relatively quiet year for iPad hardware (unless you really care about running local AI models on an iPad), but, for the first time in a while, it was the iPad’s software team that delivered a stellar year for iPad users. And it’s not just that: after doing so in September, they didn’t stop. After years of minor updates following the confusing and bug-ridden rollout of Stage Manager in iPadOS 16, iPadOS 26 arrived as a massive update featuring Mac-like windowing, support for local audio and video capture, Files enhancements, and lots more. See, Apple could have stopped there, and we – where by “we”, I mean all of us who love the iPad, have been let down by it many times, and yet never fully stopped believing in it – would have praised the company for its return to form. Instead, they persisted: first, they made local capture even better; then, they listened to user feedback and restored Split View and Slide Over functionalities that had been removed from the first version of iPadOS 26. The result of all this is that, now a few months into iPadOS 26, I feel the pull of the iPad platform again, and I want to work from it more and more. It’s good to be home. But: I still can’t shake the feeling that, in spite of the outstanding improvements to the platform, the iPad’s app ecosystem ship has sailed, and it’s not coming back. I want to work from my iPad Pro more and more again, but every day, I have to face a new reality: its multitasking flow is similar to my Mac now, but my Mac has so many more apps available for me to use and tinker with. This is especially true in the age of AI, assistive tools, and work agents: the frontier of productivity and artificial intelligence is very much exclusive to the Mac these days. Brand new iPad-specific app experiences are too few and far between at this point; unless you’re okay with using web apps with a subpar browser (no matter what Apple says, Safari for iPad still isn’t as good as Safari for Mac, let alone Chrome), if you want to work exclusively from an iPad these days, you’ll be looking at your Mac friends with a little bit of envy every single day. Perhaps the solution, then, is not to try to be monogamously computing on an iPad, despite the great steps taken by Apple with iPadOS 26. Maybe Apple executives are right when they say that the best course of action is to have both a Mac and iPad, and take advantage of the strengths of each. And for the past year, I’ve been doing exactly that. But I’m not going to stop wishing for a future where a single, modular computer with a blend of macOS and iPadOS is all I need—some habits never die.

Michael Tsai: Putting Liquid Glass aside—which is admittedly hard to do—iPadOS 26 is the biggest improvement in a long time. Multitasking works much better now. I still do not find it a very compelling platform, though. More than 99% of what I do is better on my Mac, my iPhone, or my Kindle. But if you like the iPad, this was a good year.

Shahid Kamal Ahmad: I love my M4 iPad Pro, but I don’t use it much. I’d likely use it more if the Magic Keyboard didn’t add so much weight to the impossibly thin and light, near-as-damnit magical tablet itself.

Wearables

David Sparks: I like the new Apple Watch Ultra and AirPod Pro updates. I understand that Vision Pro is in the doldrums hardware-wise, and I don’t fault that. I do, however, fault the slow rollout of content for Vision Pro. The pace of content is increasing, but I feel they should have been where they are now on day one.

Dan Moren: Wearables is a category that continues to exist in Apple’s lineup. I like the visionOS 2 improvements, like widgets, and it’s still amazing technology, it’s just not a great product. watchOS didn’t get much love this year—some people don’t like the Workout app redesign; I think it’s fine. But Workout Buddy, watchOS’s marquee feature, is terrible. The category, overall, feels like it is sleepwalking.

Craig Hockenberry: Who doesn’t love their AirPods (except when the case falls on the ground and the buds are inevitably ejected into some impossible-to-reach location)? And it’s a product that Apple continues to improve in meaningful ways. I’ve recently had some major health issues, and the Apple Watch’s sensors have been an essential part of my healing process. There is no Apple product more important to me right now. I’m still wondering what the Vision Pro is for, other than a really great tech demo.

Matt Birchler: I think it’s hard to imagine what a worse year two could have looked like for the Vision Pro. Consumer interest seems as though it’s effectively dropped to zero. Developers are simply not making apps for the device anywhere close to the level that we’ve seen from other Apple platform launches. To Apple’s credit, they have been releasing spatial videos here and there over the course of the year. But this is not how you would want the energy level around your big new platform to be going in its second full year on the market.

Allison Sheridan: I probably shouldn’t upgrade my watch every year, and this is the first year I didn’t (with no regrets).

Charles Arthur: AirPods and Watch: fine, keep going. Vision Pro: Even though it’s obvious to absolutely everyone that live sports are the way to pull in buyers, in 2025, Apple did nothing, said nothing. Anyone would think it had lost interest in the Vision Pro, or pulled everyone off it to work on something else.

Carolina Milanesi: I thought adding a heart rate monitor to AirPods this year was amazing – opening up an opportunity for people to track their fitness without a watch. Vision Pro has seen some improvements that drive engagement for current owners, but not enough to grow the platform.

Matt Deatherage: Apple hasn’t given up on Vision Pro and visionOS. Still, I don’t know how many people know that enterprise developers can get around normal privacy limitations like “no eye tracking” and “see main camera feeds live,” which privacy-invading developers (cough Meta cough) would horribly abuse, but are necessary for lots of industrial work or training. But for almost everyone else, Vision Pro is still an expensive boondoggle with more promise than payoff. Apple Watch seems to be evolving at about the same pace for the past few years; I love my Ultra 3, and almost everyone I know with an older Apple Watch (7 or earlier) wants a new one.

Gabe Weatherhead: I own the Vision Pro and regret the purchase every day. While I’ve had about 45 minutes of breathtaking VR experiences, the overall software availability and media selection are not worth the high price tag. Hell, they can’t even keep the virtual environments refreshed. There is just a leadership vacuum for this device. I imagine a team of engineers grinding their days away while Mike Rockwell doodles on the whiteboard some incoherent product strategy. I’m sure his new efforts in Siri will be much more impressive. The AirPods Pro 3 were fine. They were about as good as version 2. The AirPods continue to dominate the market without innovating in any meaningful way this year. This fits with Apple’s other product strategies, and I expect the future to hold similar disappointments. The Apple Watch is fine. It’s a fine sleep tracker. It tells the time. It usually provides notifications when I want them. It sometimes integrates with Apple’s other services. It wasn’t ruined by Liquid Glass, like the iPhone. But, I use a fairly simple heuristic when rating a device: How likely am I to go buy a replacement if it dies? I would probably wait up to a year to replace my Apple Watch Ultra. I probably wouldn’t miss it much.

Benjamin Mayo: AirPods Pro 3 make the AirPods lineup better than ever, but perhaps slightly more divisive than Apple intended. They feel like a less universal recommendation compared to AirPods Pro 2, whether that be due to weird quality control bugs (like the sporadic-but-ongoing complaints about hissing or strained sound profile) or incompatibilities with the new, more aggressively sealed fit. I appreciated that Apple revved the headband as well as bumping the chip for the Vision Pro, although obviously it doesn’t change much about the appeal of the product line in general. They need a cheaper one. Meanwhile, the Apple Watch product lineup plods along aplomb — nothing revolutionary in terms of the new releases, but it’s difficult to recommend any other smartwatch but Apple’s.

Marco Arment: The Apple Watch had a disappointing year, with almost no hardware changes and significant usability regressions with watchOS 26. The AirPods Pro 3 were a bit of a side-step, with nicer sound and noise cancellation, but significantly worse comfort for many people. The Vision Pro remains an expensive tech demo, with promises of future content and apps that still haven’t materialized, minimal investment from Apple, and virtually nonexistent demand from customers or developers. Imagine if the vast resources Apple spent on the car project and the Vision Pro had instead been spent on Siri and AI.

Gui Rambo: I’m giving a 5 to wearables because AirPods Pro 3 are just amazing. I use them every day for several hours. They’re an accessibility aid for me because I’m hypersensitive to noise, so I need noise cancellation to be able to work with full concentration. AirPods Pro 3 deliver great ANC, comfort, and battery life.

Steven Aquino: I love my Apple Watch and AirPods. They do what I want them to do, reliably and with aplomb. I discovered in the past year that I gravitate towards the AirPods 4 with ANC more than my “old” AirPods Pro 2. I find the fit and audio fidelity of the AirPods 4 to be just as good, and I get wireless charging and a smaller case to boot. As to Vision Pro, my usage ebbed and flowed in 2025. I continue to enjoy it and admire its capabilities, but the app story remains the biggest pain point as players like Netflix, YouTube TV, and Channels (for OTA TV via HDHomeRun) remain absent from visionOS and thus limit the Vision Pro’s appeal as a more accessible entertainment vehicle.

Philip Michaels: I upgraded to the latest AirPods this year, and I think Apple’s taking steps back in terms of design. The earbuds regularly fall out of my ears. Performance-wise, they’re fine, but it’s just not the level of fit or finish I expect from Apple. Maybe we’ll look back on the Vision Pro as the necessary first step for Apple Glasses or whatever other product Apple comes up with in this space (though I have my doubts about the prospects for that device). But I continue to think the Vision Pro is a device in search of a purpose, and Apple seems to be coming to that conclusion, too.

Paul Kafasis: AirPods: Just moved from AirPods Pro 1 to AirPods Pro 3 – it’s a great upgrade (USB-C, wireless charging case, ANC updates). Apple Watch: Incremental improvements are just fine by me. I update my Apple Watch every 2-3 years now. AVP: Every so often, I remember the Apple Vision Pro exists, and still sells for $3500+. Then I forget about it for weeks on end. Apple having only one gear when it comes to marketing (“X is the most amazing thing ever!”) really hurt the AVP, which could have been pitched as an experimental device not expected to sell huge.

John Gruber: AirPods Pro 3 are frigging amazing. AirPods, overall, continue to exemplify Apple at its best. Apple Watch Series 11 and Ultra 3 are great year-over-year improvements from the Department of If the Design Ain’t Broke, Don’t Fix It. Battery life improvements, in particular, are impressive. No one comes close to Apple at making very small, powerful computers that don’t really seem like computers at all. And the best Apple Watch news of the year, by far in my opinion, is the SE 3. The SE 3 is simply an outstanding Apple Watch at very low prices ($249 for 40mm, $279 for 44mm). That’s the price range a lot of people are looking at if they’re thinking about getting themselves a good watch, smart or not. An M5 speed-bump update to the Vision Pro was nice to see, but only as a sign that Apple is still committed to this new platform. And they’re actually starting to build a nice little library of immersive content that is extremely compelling — including baby steps toward immersive live sports with a limited slate of games, albeit just from one single NBA team (the Lakers). The new version of Personas in VisionOS 26 is amazing and strikingly improved from the first implementation. That’s another sign that Apple is doing amazing things with this new platform and the concept of spatial computing. But in terms of VisionOS being a productivity platform on its own right (not counting the excellent Mac Virtual Display app), I didn’t see any progress at all. Nor any outreach at all to third-party developers to make VisionOS into a serious productivity platform. Frankly, it’s weird — perhaps even alarming — that some of Apple’s own core apps like Calendar and Reminders are still iPad apps running in compatibility mode, not native VisionOS apps.

Eric Slivka: Shockingly few improvements in Apple Watch and Apple Watch Ultra this year, and in fact losing the original blood oxygen capabilities from my Ultra 2 made the 3 a bit of a downgrade. (It’s unbelievable to me that Apple hasn’t been able to resolve that patent dispute, given the significant impact it’s had on functionality.) Apple Watch SE did get some nice improvements, like always-on display, so it’s probably now the one most buyers should look at first. I haven’t tried the M5 Vision Pro, but while it sounds like it offers some minor performance improvements, the platform continues to be a flop. My M2 model mostly gathers dust, although I do really like the new headband, and it’s the design that should have shipped with the first model.

Casey Liss: The AirPods Pro 3 are phenomenal, however, that’s an opinion that I know is not shared. If you can fit them in your ears, they’re great. If not, well, tough noogies. How have we not had a meaningful update of the AirPods Max yet?? The Apple Watch is still great, but it’s getting very long in the tooth now. Additionally, the changes made to the Workout app are an abomination. Which isn’t a big deal, since that’s ONE OF THE ONLY WAYS I DIRECTLY TRY TO GET THINGS DONE ON MY WATCH. Sigh. I am, perhaps more than most of my peers, a Vision Pro apologist. Every time I strap the face computer to my head, I’m absolutely godsmacked at how cool it is. Still, almost two years on. While Apple has started to advance the rate at which they release content for the platform, it’s still nowhere near fast enough. Hopefully, with Blackmagic’s camera becoming more available and toolchains getting better, we’ll see some more from third parties. But we’ll see. I’m pleased with the M5 Vision Pro, but it’s not a particularly compelling release. Not even for M2 owners — it’s not compelling in general. I actually gave a bonus star for the Dual Knit Strap, however. It’s that good, and priced very reasonably, compared to everything else on the platform. It’s not surprising it’s backwards-compatible — since the M5 AVP basically is the OG AVP — but I’m still glad that it is.

Rosemary Orchard: The Vision Pro is still far too expensive for the vast majority of people, which is a shame. It has the chicken and the egg problem of fewer use cases because there are so few users.

John Moltz: AirPods remain great. Apple might want to spend more time making sure it has the rights to sell the features it advertises and intends to include.

Brian Mattucci: The Apple Watch was barely updated this year. Their headlining claims – hypertension monitoring and battery life – were not what they seemed, as older watches also got hypertension monitoring, and the increase in battery life was largely due to a change in how they calculated it. Vision Pro continues to exist, and for that I’m happy. I assume the chip upgrade just makes things easier for them more than anything, as I have never felt like my first-generation Vision Pro needed to be faster. What it needs is more software and games. It’s interesting that Apple would work to get PSVR2 controller support for Vision Pro, but that they wouldn’t also try to get any big games that might showcase it. Games with VR versions like Resident Evil 4, 7 and 8 and also Hitman are available on Apple devices, but without VR mode. It would also be good to see support for running these sorts of games on a powerful Mac and streaming VR mode to the Vision Pro. It’s also frustrating as a PSVR2 owner that I have to re-pair the controllers when I want to use them (Sony offers a nice multi-system pairing feature for their normal PS5 controllers, but not these).

John Siracusa: The Vision Pro remains a product in Apple’s lineup. Unlike the Mac Pro, it even got a new chip this year. But Apple’s apparent indecision about how to advance this new platform is allowing the rest of the industry to race ahead with new products and new ideas. Any time Apple changes the size and shape of an AirPods product, it’s bound to reshuffle the deck when it comes to customer comfort. Congratulations to all the people who find the AirPods Pro 3 more comfortable than earlier models, and commiserations to those who don’t. Like the iPad, the Apple Watch seemed to mostly take the year off, with limited, mostly internal changes. Unlike the iPad, the Watch could use a good kick in the pants. It’s become stagnant.

Quinn Nelson: Apple’s burgeoning category feels a bit stalled this year with only the AirPods Pro 3 grabbing headlines (while failing to capture universal praise).

Stephen Robles: Ultra 3 and Series 11 are great, but I was not compelled to upgrade. I had an Ultra 3 review unit and literally saw zero difference from my Ultra 2. Back on my 2, it’s still great. I also have an M5 Vision Pro review unit, and while it’s certainly faster on startup and connecting to Wi-Fi, after that, it’s in no way a big enough improvement to upgrade from my personal M2. Good for those buying their first Vision Pro, though. AirPods Pro 3 I actually prefer to 2, and think the noise cancellation and tips are significantly improved. If AirPods were their own category, I’d give it a 5.

Michael Tsai: Live Translation seems magical, though I’ve not used it myself yet. I’m concerned that AirPods Pro 3 seems to have issues with fit and static. I really like the Apple Watch SE 3. Vision Pro made few visible advancements this year and seems like it needs to be rethought or cancelled.

Matthew Haughey: The Apple Watch is getting less exciting each year, but it kind of mirrors how the iPhone got a big stagnant period after 7 or 8 years of massive strides to incremental updates

Adam Engst: The AirPods remain top-notch, the Apple Watch is still very good (if largely mature—most users I know upgrade only when battery life becomes problematic), and the Vision Pro is still exorbitant and irrelevant.

Christina Warren: The Apple Watch continues to be great, but Apple continues to offer very few reasons for anyone to upgrade any more frequently than they have to. I was worried that my Hermes Apple Watch Series 10 would be usurped this year (especially after I spent over $1000 on the Grand H band last December), but I was pleased that, aside from a bigger battery (which, sure, would be nice) and a 5G connection (who cares on the watch), nothing changed. And that’s sort of the problem with getting to the “finished” state of a product. It’s all up to software, which, like the rest of the ecosystem, is lacking. Now for visionOS. The Apple Vision Pro will go down in history as one of Apple’s biggest misses and most expensive flops. And Apple deserves every drop of criticism for this thing. As I said last year — the Vision Pro is an incredible tech demo — there is zero reason to buy one unless you are doing it for the tax write-off or you’re so wealthy that dropping $5000 for something that will sit on your shelf won’t bother you. And if that is you, I congratulate you. I can piss away money with the best of them. I would feel physically sick to see my unused and unloved, and uncomfortable AVP sitting collecting dust. AirPods Pro 3 are the rare misstep. On the one hand, I love the better battery life and the new fit. On the other hand, they do sound demonstrably worse than the AirPods Pro 2s. And that sucks.

Stephen Hackett: “WATCH: After skipping the Apple Watch Ultra 2, I upgraded my original Ultra to the 3 this time around … but I’m not sure I could tell you the differences between this Watch and my old one, other than battery life. This has been the story of Apple Watch hardware basically forever. Every few years, a new feature or design comes along, but otherwise, things are pretty sleepy. I’m actually okay with that strategy, as no one other than the people reading this article upgrades their Apple Watch each year. However, this slow pace has kept the product line fairly narrow. The SE and Series Watches are indistinguishable from each other by the consumer, and even the Ultra isn’t a massive departure from the original recipe. Like the iPhone before it, it’s time for Apple to branch out. After years of upheaval, watchOS has settled into a good place, but some of its old woes are still around. Apps will fail to update. Complications will become stale. Media handoff can be slow. And that’s all with an iPhone present. Flipping on the cellular radio and taking the Watch out alone can still be a frustratingly limited experience. VISION PRO: I honestly think my headset is still running an early beta of visionOS 26, but I’d have to charge it up to know for sure.

Myke Hurley: I enjoy the noise-cancelling capabilities of the new AirPods Pro, but this was the first model that felt physically uncomfortable to me for the first week or two of using. I feel like Apple has taken a step back here. The Apple Watch has become very boring to me as a product line. I am desperately hoping for them to do something new. I was very surprised that they revised the Vision Pro hardware this year, and I am a fan of the new strap option. While this platform really had not gotten to where I was hoping it would, I respect Apple keeping on with content and updates to the OS.

Kirk McElhearn: I bought an Apple Watch Ultra this year, after ten years of the same boring squircle design. I like the bigger display, but I would love to see Apple actually innovate in this space with, perhaps, a round watch. It seems like they consider the watch to be like a laptop or iPad, with one shape that never changes.

Peter Cohen: Vision Pro continues to be a solution in search of a problem. As a Series 10 user, I’m jealous of the 11’s battery life. The SE (3rd Gen) is the value winner for older model upgraders.

Joe Rosensteel: Innovation in Apple’s wearables has plateaued. There are no must-have upgrades, and the most compelling reason to update Apple wearables is that the battery life on the previous, nearly identical, Apple wearable has degraded. WatchOS 26 received a glossy coat of Liquid Glass, but fundamental design issues with Apple Watch faces, and the rigidity of the form factor mean nothing has really changed in many years.

Jeff Carlson: It’s nice to see the Ultra 3 now with technologies that really should have arrived the year before, and the SE 3 was a nice surprise. WatchOS 26 seems to be pretty solid with an assortment of quirks — in other words, a typical watchOS release — and the Liquid Glass annoys me only sometimes.

Federico Viticci: Apple seems pretty content with the state of their Apple Watch and AirPods lines of wearables, and that’s fine – but I wonder if the company could innovate more in this field at this point. The Apple Watch is more than a decade old, and save for the new design of the Ultra and a few new sensors over the years, it still pretty much does the same things that it did at launch. Which is, again, fine – but I’d love to see the company take more risks with design, customization, watch band design, and AI features. The new AirPods Pro 3 are great, but in the age of wearables that can proactively assist you with cameras, microphones, and AI, I wonder if there would be room for Apple to flex some new muscles in this area, too. And the Vision Pro? I basically never use it, and that’s a shame, because visionOS rocks. But until that operating system gets somehow miniaturized into glasses that I can wear without feeling neck pain, I don’t feel the urge to use it on a daily basis.

Lex Friedman: I can’t imagine spending more than $500 for a Vision Pro.

Joe Macirowski: Each subsequent edition of AirPods Pro is even more “I literally forget these are even in my ears” while in transparency than the last – at least they are when they’re new. I have taken every pair I’ve ever owned in for full replacement because cleaning and tip replacement are insufficient to restore active noise modes. I still don’t appreciate the red “Night Mode” being exclusive not only to the Ultra but also to only a handful of faces. Further, it could be offered as an accessibility color filter, but “red” simply isn’t among the choices.

Nick Heer: Here is a little observation about the lineups of Apple Watch models and Mac models: the Watch is updated annually regardless of substance or impact, while the Mac has no discernible pattern despite significant architecture changes generation-to-generation. The Mac line is a bit messy, with products on sale today from — if you include the Walmart-exclusive MacBook Air — every generation of M-chip. This year’s Apple Watch models, meanwhile, are barely upgraded with slightly better displays and, if you opt for the cellular version, better connectivity. The best update is to the SE, which is almost a great fitness-only companion. The Vision Pro remains a tech demo in the company’s lineup, now with newer tech.

Jessica Dennis: Did I need a new Apple Watch this year to get all the cool new features? No, I did not. Did I buy one anyway, to get the cool titanium case after 10 years of only getting aluminum watches? Yes, I did (though I was very fond of my jet black aluminum Series 10). I’ve actually switched to using only a single Apple Watch, instead of using my newer model during the day and an older one at night, and it’s been working out better than I expected. The battery life and fast charging really are plenty good enough. I did buy the AirPods Pro 3, even though I had relatively recently replaced my AirPods Pro 2 (for battery life reasons); the only actual hardware feature specific to the newer model that I’ve used is the XXS tips (which I definitely do appreciate). I’m sure the noise cancellation really is appreciably better, because that would surely be a very silly reason to have spent a couple of hundred bucks on new AirPods when my previous AirPods were still fine…

Chance Miller: Apple Watch hardware is rather stagnant right now, but the Apple Watch SE 3 is a solid upgrade. The redesigned Workout app is a lot better. I still want Apple to do more and be more proactive with all of the health data it has on me, though. Apple showed it’s listening to at least some of the Vision Pro feedback with the Dual Knit Band and support for PlayStation VR 2 controllers. The pace of Immersive Video seems to be gaining momentum. I’m glad they stuck the M5 chip inside instead of letting the M2 model linger for years. AirPods Pro 3 are fantastic. I think they are the best value product Apple sells right now, given how much I use and rely on them.

Home

Stephen Hackett: If you had told me five years ago that HomeKit would serve as the spiritual father of a smart home platform that tears down the old walls built around Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant, I would not have believed you. Yet here we are, with Matter continuing to grow in both capability and availability. Having moved in 2025, I’ve been slowly building a new HomeKit setup, and it’s been very, very smooth. Things aren’t perfect, but putting something together with products from various vendors is way easier than it used to be.

James Thomson: I’m sure the massive end-scene-of-Raiders warehouse filled with all the new Home products that didn’t actually ship is really impressive.

Rosemary Orchard: We finally got robot vacuum support!

John Siracusa: Apple Intelligence famously failed to fulfill its promise in 2024, and it turns out that 2025 wasn’t its year either. Rumor has it that there are several new Apple home products that are blocked by this long software delay, and every existing Apple home product seems to be in a holding pattern.

Stephen Robles: Really disappointed in Apple Home, which basically did nothing in 2025. No new Apple TV or HomePod, or the rumored HomePod with a screen. HomeKit features are still years behind, like HSV only being 1080p, no pan-and-tilt to other controls available for cameras, no improvement to automations (you need workarounds or third-party apps to get a notification if a door is left opened), it’s all way behind. Thankfully, they’re supporting Matter, so third-party device makers are still making products, but Apple needs to focus on Home in 2026. The smart home ecosystem is going to get more proprietary, with brands like Aqara building features exclusive to their app and not for universal access across ecosystems.

Joe Rosensteel: I have serious doubts that the protracted delays of the Apple Home update tied to Siri and app intents are going to actually be any good at the kind of pain points people have been asking Apple to address for years. It seems absolutely implausible that we’ll have a thoughtful UI, a competent and complete voice assistant, and simpler support for device automation and individualized preferences in multi-user households. None of the groundwork is there now, so dropping Gemini on top of a tablet on a speaker is unlikely to yield anything of consequence.

John Gruber: Why isn’t this platform improving, in drastic, groundbreaking ways, with any urgency? I really thought 2025 might be the year, but nope. I can’t think of any area where Apple’s attitude more clearly seems to be that “good enough” is good enough.

Paul Kafasis: Home/HomeKit is nowhere near as reliable as it should be. Things fail randomly, or require multiple identical requests. When I say “Turn off the lights”, and the Watch shows what I said, then spins, then says “Sorry, could you say that again?” (presumably because the request timed out on the server side), I want to scream. But it’s just good enough to keep using it, and keep hoping it will get better. On Matter: My old 2012-era Nest 2nd Gen got deprecated, and despite being annoyed with Google, I went with Nest 4th gens. They’re Matter-compatible, which means I no longer need a HomeControl server to make them work with the Apple Home app. Hooray! The future of cross-compatibility is finally here, a little bit.

Quinn Nelson: Somebody should inform Apple that Home devices and software “remain a product in their lineup.”

Steven Aquino: I’m completing my part of the survey while listening to music on my OG HomePod, which still works perfectly. I use it every day in my office for podcasts and music. The HomePod minis strewn about the house are great for timers and controlling lamps. I’m not really longing for more from them, however old they may be. HomeKit makes my house more accessible, with my only want being the mythical smart display that’s purported to come.

Casey Liss: Has Apple done anything meaningful here in a long time? It’s preposterous to me how little Apple seems to care about this. Or, if they have done things, how uninteresting they are, since I can’t think of them. It’s awful how little one can do with automations in HomeKit; Home Assistant has shown me how powerful automations could be. Not only is it a nightmare to use Shortcuts for this, but it’s nowhere near robust enough.

Federico Viticci: Is Apple still working on HomeKit? The past few years would suggest otherwise. I like my HomeKit setup…which I configured years ago, and it’s mostly stayed the same since. I’d like to see Apple make some new home-related hardware, but I’m not holding my breath.

Chance Miller: HomeKit is the best smart home ecosystem, but that’s not saying much. Apple’s hardware plans in the smart home, like the rumored smart display, continue to be held back by Apple Intelligence delays.

Jeff Carlson: Is this thing still on? Doesn’t seem like anything has changed.

David Dozoretz: Obviously, lack of updates and AI implementation are a problem. Siri is just terrible.

Adam Engst: Siri continues to decline and has become the albatross around the neck of a largely stagnant Home system. And I say that as someone who uses Siri to control HomeKit light switches, outlets, and shades multiple times every day.

Benjamin Mayo: They basically did nothing at all across the entire year for their Home line. Both sizes of HomePods are getting long in the tooth and would highly benefit from new hardware and more software attention. Hopefully, the upcoming smart display is the start of a renewed smart home initiative.

Matt Birchler: This is the category that often makes me wonder if I’m living in a different universe than everybody else. I have a smart lock on my front door, about a dozen smart lights, and automation set up for a lot of these, and they all just work. And the move to Matter has been pretty seamless for me. It hasn’t introduced any new issues in my setup that I can notice, and I’m able to control my Nest thermostat from the Home app, and it works great. I honestly have no complaints.

Marco Arment: Does Apple know they make HomeKit?

Allison Sheridan: I can’t give Apple high marks for Home until they rewrite the Home app entirely. I’m pretty clever, and I’m continually baffled by it. And I’m talking about automations I’ve created that actually function. It’s needlessly complex, impossible to search for a specific device, and the weird half implementation of Shortcuts is just plain mean.

Michael Tsai: My HomePod continues to not work well for Siri or music. The smart outlet that I installed last year no longer works reliably. The Home app is still frustrating.

Charles Arthur: The Home app is still frustrating. You have to go to Shortcuts to make things that will properly control it, and the lack of IF statements and proper logic within the app makes it frustrating if you have bigger visions than turning lights on and off. It has been this way for years. Has Apple decided that the Home app is perfect as it is? Because it isn’t.

Matthew Haughey: My complex HomeKit setup is still working ok, but I have to use HomeAssistant as a backend to bridge over to HomeKit via plugin since still not everything supports Apple Home. So far, I have only two Matter devices, and they work ok.

Gabe Weatherhead: HomeKit is similar to what it was in 2024, and 2023, and 2022, and… well, you get the idea. It never changes because Apple executives lack vision. I doubt they even use HomeKit, but maybe that saved it from the Liquid Glass treatment. Pray that they don’t alter the deal further.

Matt Deatherage: Can you name anything new in Home for [device]OS 26? I can’t. At least nothing got worse. And from Glenn’s article, I dug around and learned that there’s no API to turn off a scene, something the UI has allowed since the start! Geez Louise.

Eric Slivka: Everything seems to be a waiting game until the new Siri is ready and Apple can launch its full smart home experience. Looking forward to seeing how that goes, but in the meantime, 2025 was a giant snooze.

Shelly Brisbin: The Home experience feels just a bit more stable than in the past, though the Home app is still a source of aggravation.

Christina Warren: Home Assistant FTW. There is nothing Apple offers in Apple Home that is compelling to me. I do have a funny story: In August, I was staying with a girlfriend in New York City and trying to turn on the lights in her Apple Home setup apartment. Siri and Apple Home, predictably, could not turn on the lights, turn off the lights, or control anything I needed them to. So it was 3 a.m., and three people (and a dog) were all yelling at the Apple TV and Siri to try to get things to settle themselves. That sums up the Apple Home experience. And also reinforces why I use Home Assistant and a Raspberry Pi.

Todd Vaziri: I have a few smart home products that interact with Apple Home, but I’ve not hooked them entirely into Apple Home for fear of screwing up the current functionality. It all currently works, so I hesitate to integrate it into Home for fear of breaking it. Which is a big problem, it would seem! If a long-time Apple customer like me is hesitant to use a core Apple feature, that’s bad for the company and illustrates a deep lack of trust in the feature.

Carolina Milanesi: I am honestly not sure what they have even done here, and I fear part of it is that they need Siri to be much better to drive more ambient computing

Myke Hurley: This should have been the year for the HomePod with a display. Holding patterns continue.

Dan Moren: The Home app is still unreliable at times (looking at you, “Not Responding”). The design is cluttered and confusing. We still can’t temporarily disable devices in the year 2025. Home badly feels like it needs an injection of attention and interest.

Joe Macirowski: Maybe it’s just hardware catching up with heavy-weight software design, creating this illusion for me, but Home.app feels more reasonable in terms of behavior when it comes to things like my air conditioner being unplugged during winter or still letting me control the remaining lamps in a group when I’ve accidentally unplugged one member while vacuuming. Trying to add my Eero to HomeKit (as suggested by the Eero app) timed out and errored, and it feels like that’s an omen not to try again.

Apple TV

Marco Arment: The Apple TV continues to be the best product in its category, but mostly because everything else is so awful. It could be so much more with even a modicum of effort.

Steven Aquino: I always say, with some jest, the Apple TV 4K is laughably over-engineered for its primary purpose: streaming video. I appreciate the horsepower for its performance, but the box’s problem isn’t hardware (twinsies, iPad!)—tvOS could be so much more robust than a static grid of icons. I keep waiting, with unbated breath, for the platform to receive its iOS 7-like glow-up. Amazon and Google have implemented good ideas that Apple should steal for itself.

Stephen Hackett: “For the 2023 Report Card, I wrote, “The Apple TV hardware has been so overpriced and overpowered for so long, it feels like I’m wasting everyone’s time by mentioning it again.” I also said, “tvOS continues to feel trapped between Apple’s vision for the platform and what it can work out with streaming giants like Netflix.” That’s still all true, and I bet I can copy and paste it again in a year.

Adam Engst: Did anything change?

Todd Vaziri: I use my Apple TV to consume 100% of my TV content. I love it, but I still think it could be much better, starting with the Remote, which is begging for variation in button size, shape and placement, rather than a grid of buttons all the same size and shape. One large Play/Pause button, please!

Myke Hurley: Another product that feels a little stagnant. But to be honest, from a hardware perceptive I am not sure there’s much more I would realistically want them to do.

Craig Hockenberry: We were one of the lucky ones that didn’t get the Liquid Glass update in tvOS 26: another reason to hang onto our first-generation Apple TV 4K.

David Dozoretz: Obviously, lack of updates and AI implementation are a problem.

Jessica Dennis: I continue to sell my privacy to Roku for the sake of a user interface that makes more sense to me and a $30-50 price difference. Plus, I really enjoy the Roku fish screensaver. Maybe if Apple TV had a fish screensaver, I’d consider switching.

Matt Birchler: I feel that for a few years in a row, Apple has made the Apple TV interface more heavily promote Apple TV content, which has annoyed me. While they haven’t undone any of those changes, they also haven’t made it worse this year. I also think tvOS gets the award for Least Impacted by Liquid Glass. After I installed the update, I had to double-check to make sure it actually installed because the differences were so subtle.

Paul Kafasis: I greatly appreciate the Apple TV box. I updated my TV last year and just kept it completely offline, letting the Apple TV be the brains. But the hardware should have received an update or a price cut by now – they’re still selling 2022 HW for the same price.

Christina Warren: Apple TV continues to be a product in Apple’s ecosystem.

Gabe Weatherhead: It’s hard to complement a device that consistently delivers the same mediocre experience and bad UI but still beats most competing devices. The Apple TV works, but it does not bring me any joy to use. The UI is inconsistent (still), and the services do not integrate in a meaningful way. I still have no idea how to find content on the AppleTV. Every bit of content I want to use on the AppleTV requires additional purchases. And yet, the AppleTV still costs up to $150 (which does include the $60 remote control).

Federico Viticci: I don’t particularly care about my Apple TV. I don’t think about my Apple TV and tvOS much. If you ask me about it, though, I’ll say that I really like my Apple TV when I use it: tvOS is the most pleasant and nicest TV software platform I’ve tested in recent years, and that’s because Apple is the only company with a modicum of taste making software for TV-connected devices these days. Nothing else comes close to just how “nice” tvOS feels, even if Apple doesn’t seem to put much effort into it.

John Moltz: The Apple TV remains a product in Apple’s lineup? I think?

Andrew Laurence: “Meh”, but arguably the best in the category? The hardware is long in the tooth, tvOS seems to be in compatibility mode with new OSes, and no streamers use the tvOS profiles.

Benjamin Mayo: No new Apple TV hardware debut in 2025, but it still stands strong as capable hardware. tvOS got some niceties this year, like the refreshed design for the TV app and new tricks for Apple Music Sing, but core software features remain unattended for: multi-user support needs to be overhauled, and the unified Up Next queue of content should be exposed on the home screen itself (how rivals like Google TV already do) rather than just a grid of app icons.

John Siracusa: It’s getting to be about time for another Apple TV hardware update, but we didn’t get one in 2025. Maybe next year. tvOS 26 is perhaps the least damaged by Liquid Glass, but it also didn’t get many improvements this year. All my comments from last year still apply, so I am including them here as well: I continue to be frustrated with the poor quality of many of the streaming video apps I use on Apple TV, both in terms of bugs and interface design. Is that Apple’s fault? Maybe only to the extent that these apps are using standard Apple frameworks for things like video playback. But Apple also isn’t exactly leading by example when it comes to user-centric design. TV apps everywhere continue to prioritize the needs of the streaming service over my needs as a viewer. I want to continue watching my show. They want to shove a bunch of new content in my face while making the show I was just watching as difficult as possible to find. And they don’t seem to care if they lose my place or fail to track my progress. And heaven forbid I go back to refresh my memory by watching a scene from an earlier episode. Now my current place in the series is apparently impossible for modern technology to discern. Also, I still think the Apple TV remote could use further improvements.

Allison Sheridan: Hardware still works great, but nothing new in so very long…

Chance Miller: The Apple TV does exactly what I want it to do. tvOS and the TV app could use a rethink, but it’s still the best set-top box experience out there. Perhaps that’s more of an indictment of the competition than praise for Apple.

John Gruber: Apple TV is so much better than the competition that I fear complacency has set in. It really is so much better than any competing set-top box (or built-in smart TV system), but it also still falls so far short of “insanely great”.

Eric Slivka: I don’t really have complaints about tvOS, as it does what it needs to do with a simple interface. Similarly, the hardware continues to perform well despite getting up there in age. Feels like it’s time for at least a spec bump there, though, and hopefully the upcoming smart home push yields some good improvements and integrations for Apple TV.

Charles Arthur: It’s fine. The tvOS update was the least offensive of those across all the platforms.

Joe Rosensteel: Apple TV development continues to concentrate on areas of development that are pragmatic, like live/linear video streams, universal content guides, etc. The focus on user switching has been comical because it isn’t implemented by service providers. The TV app is a mess, and the home screen is still just a bunch of app tiles.

Peter Cohen: I’m still waiting for Apple TV to become a viable gaming console option, but Apple is Lucy holding the football, and I’m Charlie Brown, every year.

James Thomson: The Apple TV trudges along like an old, reliable, yet strangely expensive, horse.

Stephen Robles: tvOS 26 was a solid upgrade, but, unfortunately, we didn’t get new hardware. Still wouldn’t use anything else.

Carolina Milanesi: Not much happened on the software side.

Casey Liss: The only way I watch media is through an Apple TV. Either using Plex, Channels, Disney+, F1TV, or something else. I love my Apple TV. Apple pays nowhere near enough attention to this. The last new hardware was October 2022 for Chrissakes! My older hardware is getting very long in the tooth, and I’d love to replace my main Apple TV and then start a trickle down, replacing the one I use for tailgates and when traveling. But I can’t do that if Apple won’t 🤬 release a new one!

Michael Tsai: It continues to work OK, but I don’t think any of the changes this year really improved my experience. I’m still not very happy with the software or the remote.

Dan Moren: Did anything happen? It did not. tvOS’s big feature was tied to profiles, which still feel half-baked and badly executed. Otherwise, it’s been a big nothing of a year for Apple TV.

Matthew Haughey: The new TV OS updates were fine and mostly cosmetic, but it would be nice to get updated AppleTV hardware someday

Matt Deatherage: Do we need new Apple TV hardware? I can’t point out why we would, so it’s hard to ding Apple for not providing any. Siri on tvOS could use some Apple Intelligence, in terms of processing what you say and finding the media you want. It’s not good enough for 2026 at the moment. Liquid Glass is…OK on tvOS. The UI in general continues to suffer as TV, the main app, continues to be more of a promotion vehicle for Apple TV (the subscription) and less the central hub for all your content. The TV app won’t let you see what you might like until Apple has shoved what it wants you to see down your eyeballs first, a dark pattern of the first order,

Services

Matt Deatherage: The same things we used to get cost more; we get no new benefits for the higher prices.

John Siracusa: I wish Apple would refocus its services strategy on serving customer needs rather than increasing revenue and profit margins.

Federico Viticci: I love Apple TV the service, I think Apple Music is fine, iCloud Drive is passable these days, and I don’t use Apple Fitness, Apple News, Apple Arcade, or Apple Podcasts. I honestly think that Apple’s services are okay for most people (and the numbers seem to prove it). However, I think that they could be so much more with a healthy dose of AI integrations, especially when it comes to news summarization, music discovery and playlist creation, or an AI-based health coach. It sounds like the company is indeed exploring these areas, and I’m looking forward to that.

Quinn Nelson: The rollout of AppleCare One was one heck of a mess.

Christina Warren: So I have finally found a use case for the Apple Arcade+: people with small children. My older sister has a son (he’s 4), and although she limits screen time, when Auntie Nina is spending 12+ hours a day with him while also battling a herniated disc in her cervical spine (just got surgery for it, thank you), sometimes the stand-in parent needs to allow the child to play on the iPad. And man, the state of children’s iPad content is fucking bleak. Tim Cook, Eddy Cue and every other Apple executive who talks about why the App Store can’t be opened up to protect the sanctity of the experience should be kicked firmly in the teeth, with how predatory and terrible the games situation is for children’s content. I know others have lamented this for years and years, but having seen it first hand in some Paw Patrol games (don’t start, I don’t like cop propaganda either, but it makes the child happy) and some other properties, good God! But you know what a nice surprise was? Apple Arcade. First, there was a more educational Paw Patrol game that, while poorly coded, at least was IAP-free. But the real surprise was this very fun and very educational Play-Doh game. It was cute and kept little C-Mac entertained and excited while Auntie Nina helped mommy with some things and packed her bags. So I finally found a use case for Arcade+ — protecting children from predatory games. Unsurprisingly, you have to pay for this privilege. As for the other services, as I’ve always argued, none of Apple’s services are best in class. There are better cloud storages services, better music subscription services, better video subscription services (though this was a decent year for ATV originals, but not an HBO Max year), better photo services, better game subscriptions (albeit not for iOS, but if you’re serious about games you aren’t playing on iOS or a Mac), ways to spend $120 on news. But the sum of the parts, if you pay Apple $38 or whatever they charge now for Apple One Premier, is worthwhile, and the seamlessness of the ecosystem makes it worth it even if this is very much a scenario where nothing is best-in-class.

Peter Cohen: Record performance quarter to quarter, and I’m roped in with monthly payments for AppleCare +, the full suite of Apple One services, and recurring payments to App Store vendors – but the only Apple hardware I bought last year was a Watch.

Brent Simmons: I’ve really liked some of the TV shows! I’d like to see Apple Music get a lot better.

Andrew Laurence: Apple’s services earn the highest compliment: they execute their remit so well I don’t notice them.

Kirk McElhearn: It’s disturbing that Apple is increasing its ads in the App Store and in Apple News. Regarding Apple News in particular, the ads I see should make Apple embarrassed. Choosing Taboola to serve ads was a mistake, but I think that Apple just doesn’t give a damn. It’s not just that the ads are bad, but that they show up, in some stories, every couple of paragraphs. I would consider Apple News+ to access some of the publications, but would not pay what they want, and since there are still ads, I would feel insulted to be paying to see this dross.

Stephen Hackett: “I use a bunch of Apple Services on a regular basis, and they’re all solid. My photos and other data sync quickly and smoothly. Apple Music is great, and Apple TV (no +) continues to pump out bangers. Some issues persist, however. Apple News+ is still filled with low-quality ads. The App Store continues to become splintered as Apple tangles with various governments around the world. Apple’s retail and support infrastructure can still feel creaky, providing uneven experiences at times.

Charles Arthur: Services was actually fine. Fitness+ is being expanded – great! Apple TV had some absolutely brilliant hits – Pluribus deserves all the awards it is winning. Who would have thought we’d reach a time when we were happy with Apple services?

Joe Rosensteel: Apple’s focus on subscription revenue has led to many nagging pleas to subscribe and spend money with Apple. The “One” bundle isn’t one bundle for all their services, but merely one of many. Acquired companies with subscriptions have unclear development roadmaps, so you’re not even sure what the money you’re paying for does. It isn’t connected to doing any work.

Craig Hockenberry: “I’d really like someone who loves music to design the Apple Music apps (especially on the Mac). I’d really like Apple Fitness+ to stop constantly trying to upsell me in the Workouts app. I’d really like Apple New+ to stop constantly trying to upsell me in the Stocks app. I’d really like iCloud and AppleCare to stop constantly trying to upsell me in the Settings app. I’d really like whoever’s picking the shows for Apple TV to keep doing what they’re doing: it’s a great collection, and keeps getting better.

Shelly Brisbin: The Apple services I use continue to be reliable and actually worth the money I pay for them. Apple Music “gets” me. iCloud has kept my files safe, and I still find new places that let me use Apple Pay (Apple may not get direct credit for that, but it helps with my personal consumer satisfaction.

Ben Long: I’m generally pleased with the reliability and pricing of the services I use. Where I get frustrated is the lousy UI in News+, and the always-trying-to-sell-you-on-a-service layer in so many apps and parts of the OS.

Steven Aquino: iCloud, Apple TV, Apple Pay, and Apple Music all work great for me. Apple TV’s new intro logo is delightful. I love it so much that I’ll occasionally rewind a show just to see it again.

Matt Birchler: Apple TV has really grown since its pretty low-key launch years ago. I think 2025 was the year it finally had not just one mainstream hit, but a few. Severance season 2, The Studio, and Pluribus were all genuine cultural events this year.

Paul Kafasis: iCloud syncing is good. Apple Pay is nice. Apple has far too many services for my taste. I don’t need them doing TV, or News, or Fitness. But I ignore the things I don’t use.

Dan Moren: Very much “fine.” I’d love to see more attention paid to Apple Fitness+. Apple TV has put out a lot of bangers. Apple Pay continues to be the default way I pay for most things. So many services I simply use only rarely or don’t care about (News/Arcade/AppleCare).

Myke Hurley: For me, Apple TV+ props up this entire category. Everything else I use and am happy enough with, but the level of content that they are producing is frankly astounding. The majority of my favourite TV shows in 2025 came from Apple, and they had a veritable hit with F1.

Nick Heer: The services I use continue to be fine — nothing less, nothing more, and not spectacular enough to justify this category being a quarter of Apple’s overall revenue. Serious business people who talk about stocks and stuff are probably thrilled Google is allowed to keep giving Apple tens of billions of dollars annually for being the default search engine in Safari. I was glad to see cycling routes expand nationwide in Canada this year. The biggest news was when Paris Buttfield-Addison was locked out of his entire Apple account toward the end of the year. Without insinuating blame on Buttfield-Addison, who did nothing wrong, it was a sobering reminder about the risks of entrusting our valuable data to a single company. Apple launched a browsing-only App Store on the web. Google and Sony have figured out how to send a digital download from one device to another, but not Apple.

Gabe Weatherhead: It’s difficult to separate Apple Services from Apple’s poor software. I guess the fact that I still use iCloud, Apple Card, Apple Pay, and Apple TV means that it’s all fine. It’s not a reason to buy Apple hardware, but if you do, the other services integrate like nothing else.

” Howard Oakley: Apple is still failing to curate its App Stores.

Eric Slivka: Most of these services are fairly mature and stable at this point, and the user experience

Carolina Milanesi: Services growth was great, and from Apple TV content to Apple subscriptions shows Apple growing engagement. I look forward to seeing the impact AI will have on more personalized recommendations in the future.

Chance Miller: I don’t think renaming Apple TV+ to just Apple TV has done anything to clean up confusion. As a service, though, Apple TV is on a roll. Excellent TV shows, a theatrical win with F1, and huge value-adds with F1 and MLS Season Pass. Apple Arcade is a surprising hit inside my house. I enjoy Apple Music’s AutoMix feature. The puzzles in Apple News+ have become part of my morning routine.

Joe Macirowski: I haven’t had any weirdness with a 2TB iCloud plan and gigabit fibre for a couple of years now, and iCloud as my means of setting up a new iPhone was boring and stable. I’d love to give this category a 5 but the nags for upsells and the stack of “do you want to turn on this service you’re paying for and had enabled on the device you’re replacing?” screens feels so personally disrespectful and infuriating to someone who so passionately evangelized (including with my wallet) the little fruit company from its pre-iPod days because they unapologetically different.

John Moltz: Most of Apple’s services continued apace this year, which is a bit of a blessing and a curse because the company makes it so easy and compelling to enter into a tithing relationship. The company continues to hit it out of the park with shows on the artist formerly known as TV+, with “Pluribus” being a standout hit.

Jessica Dennis: Apple TV+ has really put out some bangers this year — Pluribus was just phenomenal, Slow Horses continues to be great, Severance pretty much lived up to its first season, and The Studio was really enjoyable. I really wonder if Apple is losing money hand-over-fist on this content, because I really hope they continue to do so. As for Apple Music, I’m trying to switch back after using Spotify for a few years — the process to transfer my playlists was pretty seamless, and I was able to set up TikTok (shut up) to send songs to it pretty easily (shut up! that’s where I discover a lot of new music!). Apple Fitness+ has a lot of neat things that, uh, I really should take advantage of… And when I remember to look at Apple News+, I appreciate that it’s there.

Benjamin Mayo: I love that Apple Music Replay finally got an (overdue) update, now featuring a truly integrated native experience inside the Music app. The rebrand from Apple TV+ to Apple TV was a good decision. 2025 saw a strong slate of new originals, and the F1 deal is an exciting prospect for Apple’s commitment to streaming sports. AppleCare One is a nice bundle offer and represents good value for people who previously paid separately for AppleCare for a Mac, iPhone and iPad.

Allison Sheridan: Apple TV is killing it with new shows. Pluribus … amiright? I also see iCloud syncing for apps to be an unsung hero. We complained about it for so long, we’ve forgotten to herald the fact that it works superbly now. Apple Card makes me happy – the interface on iPhone, the feeling of security, and the simplicity of the card itself. I had THREE AppleCare stories that had happy endings — I think that’s a world record.

” David Sparks: Once again, the free tier of iCloud storage remains at 5GB. It has been so since 2011, when announced by Steve Jobs. It’s been 14 years. The Apollo moon program, the Beatles, and the entire run of Friends were all shorter than the amount of time Apple has kept the free iCloud tier at 5GB. Ridiculous.

Casey Liss: Apple One is nearly forty dollars a month. That’s A LOT of money. I do not feel like it’s a good value, despite getting basically all Apple has to offer. Apple TV continues to be — as many have said — the new HBO. Basically, everything I’ve watched on it — film or TV — has been at least enjoyable. Many things are legitimately good or even great. I loved the F1 movie. More discerning fans of the sport than I will pick it apart, but I thought it was fun, while also accurate enough to prevent me from scoffing repeatedly. The shows we’ve watched are good, with Severance and Shrinking both being particularly great this year. I’d also like to call out the Apple News puzzles. I only have a couple of friends who play them, but they’re really fun. I particularly like Emoji Game, in part because it’s unlike anything else I’ve seen. Two terabytes of iCloud storage is not enough for those with a family and a penchant for taking photos or — God help them — videos. Five gigabytes of storage for free is — to use a dysphemism — criminal. Also, holy fucking shit, enough with the upsells. My God.

James Thomson: Apple TV continues to be a source of top tier tv shows, but everything else feels quite stagnant.

John Gruber: Quality is high, value is fair (except, still, for iCloud storage), and it’s getting to the point where it’s hard to keep up with all the great series on Apple TV.

Brett Terpstra: I think Apple TV+ is pumping out some good content, but I’m not certain it’s enough that I would pay for it outside of a One subscription.

Michael Tsai: iMessage and Siri still work poorly for me. Apple Pay and the rest of iCloud are OK, with most apps that sync having occasional hiccups. The other services don’t interest me except in that their existence seems to be warping Apple’s product design decisions.

Hardware reliability

Chance Miller: Apple made the thinnest iPhone ever and dared us to bend it. We couldn’t.

Ben Long: I hear about troubles with high-end displays, but all my Apple hardware stays bulletproof.

David Dozoretz: Phones and Macs are good, home and TV are not.

Steven Aquino: Put it this way: I just decommissioned my 7-year-old Retina 4K iMac because I wanted to go Apple silicon on macOS full-time, and Tahoe isn’t supported. But the hardware—especially the panel—remains exquisite for its age. I expect my new Pro Display XDR to age just as well, if not even better. The thing is built almost like a literal tank.

Paul Kafasis: No complaints here.

Kirk McElhearn: I can’t remember the last time I’ve had a hardware issue with an Apple device. A few years ago, I had to switch the external power supply on my M1 iMac, but that’s the last time. It is making me rethink whether I should continue to pay for AppleCare.

Federico Viticci: 17 years into writing for MacStories, and I still haven’t had any major issues with Apple hardware in my life. They should promote the guy in charge. Oh.

Shelly Brisbin: All of my Apple devices are solid. They perform well, and I have confidence they will for several years to come. I don’t *have to buy new hardware nearly as often as I might have, several years ago. But if I do buy something, I’m confident it will be a joyful experience.

Stephen Robles: The reliability of hardware has been top-notch for me.

John Gruber: No news remains great news in this category.

Michael Tsai: My family’s hardware has been solid this year (not counting the ever-present USB problems), and I don’t recall any major issues reported elsewhere. I remain a bit on edge because if a Mac’s SSD fails, the Mac can no longer even be used with external storage, and my experience with AppleCare has not been great.

Allison Sheridan: While I did suffer one hardware problem (misbehaving Touch ID on a MacBook Air), overall, everything else was quite stable.

Benjamin Mayo: Hard to think of anything bad to say, which is a good thing.

Stephen Hackett: “I bet the guy in charge of hardware would be a great CEO in the future.

Andrew Laurence: Apple’s hardware is the best it’s ever been.

Matt Birchler: I continue to be amazed at the reliability of these products that are sold to hundreds of millions of people every year.

Marco Arment: Apple’s hardware is rock-solid. Maybe their hardware chief deserves a promotion.

Jessica Dennis: I can’t remember the last time I had a problem with my Apple hardware — well, aside from my 2017 MacBook Pro that refused to die (it had The Bad Keyboard, but it was exactly as bad when I finally retired it in 2023 as it was on day 1). I even, er, spilled a bunch of Liquid IV into a backpack, soaking my work MacBook Pro, and it was totally fine, once the Thunderbolt ports were de-gunked. I thought for sure it was toast when the ports failed one after another, but apparently AppleCare just cleaned it out and sent it back.

Nick Heer: If 5 is a perfect score, I guess I have to give a 4 because Apple launched a service program in June for Mac Minis made last year.

Brent Simmons: Apple is on an epic run of great hardware.

Dan Moren: One of Apple’s biggest bright spots right now. Apple’s hardware has avoided any major issues in the past year, with no really major controversies. My new iPhone 17 Pro and M4 MacBook Air are rock solid, while my M1 iPad Pro and M2 Pro Mac mini keep cooking along, perfectly fine.

Adam Engst: Apple hardware remains impressive on all metrics, reliability included.

Quinn Nelson: Unless we consider the cosmetic scratches of the again-aluminum Pro phones a reliability issue—rather than added character—hardware dependability is better than ever.

Charles Arthur: This stuff is nailed on now that the keyboard and TouchBar nonsense is gone. One could argue that the phone is getting overcomplicated – more buttons? – but at least one gets to choose functionality.

Eric Slivka: No recent issues for me (knock on wood), and overall things seem to be in pretty solid shape.

Casey Liss: I can’t remember the last time one of my Apple products broke that wasn’t my fault.

Gabe Weatherhead: Tim Cook’s legacy will be unbeatable hardware anchored by mediocre software and design. Every piece of Apple hardware feels like it’s from the future. Just hold an iPad, and you can imagine you are on the Enterprise. Look at a MacBook Pro screen, and it feels otherworldly.

Christina Warren: I had to fight to get my iPad Pro replaced with a bum battery, and then the one I got still has lousy battery capacity. But that aside, Apple continues to really do great stuff with hardware.

Apple software

Nick Heer: The most charitable thing I can say about Apple’s software quality after a full cross-platform redesign is that it has fewer bugs than I had expected. But I do not grade on a curve. Even leaving aside the visual assault that is Liquid Glass, the current state of Apple’s operating systems remains disappointingly buggy and unreliable.

John Moltz: There’s not a lot left to say about Liquid Glass and the degradation of the usability of Apple’s operating systems that hasn’t already been said. Sure, they’re still usable and sure Apple shipped some great new features with all of them (particularly iPadOS), but the fit and finish of the company’s operating systems have long been one of its crowning achievements, and they really clowned them up.

Benjamin Mayo: The OS 26 releases are controversial due to the design changes, but I don’t think they represent a step back in terms of reliability. Reliability feels about the same as their 2024 counterparts.

Philip Michaels: New interfaces are always hard, but Liquid Glass’ debut went about as well as can be expected. At the very least, I’m used to it by now.

Eric Slivka: The Liquid Glass transition has caused some issues with features and apps, but hopefully Apple will continue to refine things.

Jeff Carlson: I’ve gotten more unsolicited negative comments and queries about the *26 releases from friends and family than any other OS release in recent memory, and that’s almost all Liquid Glass complaints.

Federico Viticci: I don’t hate Liquid Glass as much as others in our community do, but let’s face it: it hasn’t been a smooth rollout, especially on macOS. The thing that concerns me about Apple software and quality, though, is that I fear the company is falling behind other Silicon Valley giants in terms of reimagining the role of an operating system and apps in the age of AI. I also take another stance from most of my peers here: like it or not, generative AI and LLMs aren’t going away. Even if the “AI bubble” bursts, the technology will remain, and – guess what – people truly like that technology. So far, Apple has been incapable of delivering on its promise of a new kind of operating system, one where AI is woven through every interaction with apps and which can proactively assist us in our work, communications, and information recall. Will Google help? Let’s check back in a year.

Brent Simmons: Liquid Glass is so bad that it makes everything else look bad.

Dan Moren: Despite not being as down on Liquid Glass as many of my colleagues, it is still hard to argue that it doesn’t feel like a step backward in many places. Chronicles of usability issues persist, and there are plenty of places (especially on the Mac) where the design feels ill-considered. Meanwhile, many apps feel broken or incomplete (Shortcuts, looking at you), and others still haven’t been updated with compatibility for the latest OS releases. That includes all of iWork, which lacks the new look and feel (perhaps not a huge disaster in terms of usability, but an editorial on just how essential Apple views them), Final Cut on iPad still doesn’t support the background process feature that was designed for it, and the company continues to spend its time rolling out unnecessary ventures like Invite.

Shelly Brisbin: I’ll take one more swipe at liquid glass, especially on iOS. It has brought no productivity boost to my life, nor is it “delightful.” iOS and macOS themselves are, well, fine. Long before Apple released new versions of pro creative apps, I would have complained about the quality of many basic apps and suggested that Apple devote more resources to modernizing them. “Plumbing” apps like Contacts, Calendar and Music have serious performance issues on macOS, and have for years.

Steven Aquino: Apple’s platforms and apps have always been perfectly fine for me. I know there was a lot of consternation for Liquid Glass, but I like it and haven’t encountered any egregious usability problems. I think the fact that Apple added some customization options for appearance was tacit recognition that the Liquid Glass demoed at WWDC went too far in places, so the options are a sign of correction. From an accessibility point of view, Apple’s stated goal of Liquid Glass bringing “coherence” and “consistency” to its panoply of platforms is a worthy, righteous goal. The community has, and does, bemoan certain elements of the design—but just because Apple failed in certain respects doesn’t mean the overarching idea is bad.

Howard Oakley: Apple has turned a deaf ear to the obvious problems with Tahoe’s macOS interface for 13 months now. While it has never found it easy to admit it has been wrong, this is one time when it needs to do that to restore confidence. The strange thing is that I actually like iOS 26, and quite like iPadOS 26, but macOS 26 is catastrophically bad to use. Given that this is the last version for Intel Mac users, that’s a tragedy for those who will now be stuck on Sequoia for the next few years before they replace their Intel Macs. There have been other less visible bad decisions, particularly with respect to XProtect updates in Sequoia and Tahoe. Instead of making them more reliable, there are now many who are one or two versions behind because Apple’s new iCloud-based update mechanism has let their Macs down. That’s another case of not listening to users.

Myke Hurley: While I am a fan of the redesign that Liquid Glass has brought, it is not perfect. I hope for a year of ironing out some of the irregularities. Otherwise, though, I do not have any glaring issues with how the systems are operating right now. I feel like I should mention here that they have absolutely dropped the ball on Apple Intelligence in 2025 – but I am not sure yet if the features they say the devices can do will realistically help my computing life, so it feels hard to ding them in the report card.

Joe Macirowski: Aqua looked a little too weird and too strong and committed to visual ideas at the expense of being good at being a GUI in OS X 10.0 but by the 10.4 Tiger days I intentionally would use Safari to screenshot webforms when writing tutorials simply because it used the aqua native form elements instead of sterile boxes you couldn’t even always tell were interactable elements. Liquid Glass feels like timeline wise it’s still more like the Mac OS X betas, but underneath it all, I still have faith it can indeed follow the same history of too-literal concept to the eventual de facto singular “correct” way to handle GUI. But this isn’t rating my hopes, dreams, and/or faith. It’s not broken, it’s not unusable, and at least in my experience never compromised stability even in beta, but it’s still in its weird and awkward era and most noticeably so on macOS where it causes usability reductions and whether or not Liquid Glass is the cause this release also decreased the common ground (visually) between “big” (macOS, iPadOS) and “little” (iPhone) Safari.

Christina Warren: I already answered this ad nauseam in the macOS section.

Stephen Robles: Creator Studio announced today would raise this score, but if we’re only looking at 2025, most of the Pro apps, and iWork, etc., have been pretty static.

Charles Arthur: We are all deeply grateful to Mark Zuckerberg for his charitable work in hiring away Alan Dye and his closest allies. We eagerly look forward to a time when all the mistakes that he inflicted on a generation of phone and computer users can be undone and made better. Because seriously, the class of 26 was not classy. Specialists could poke many, many holes in the UI and UX of the ’26 OSs. People who found their phones updated were not always pleased. iOS 7 at least had some reasoning behind it and left the Mac alone. Thinking that desktop computers and handheld smartphones should have the same essential interface is the mistake that Microsoft made, years ago, with its very earliest Windows designs for the phone. Those were terrible in the opposite direction from Liquid Glass on the Mac.

Quinn Nelson: I truly don’t know if anybody within Apple has used macOS 26 Tahoe. It’s the worst Mac release we’ve had in well over a decade. Any neat new features (Spotlight, Universal Clipboard, Live Activities) have been completely overshadowed by poorly applied Liquid Glass and more bugs than I can recall since OS X Leopard.

Adam Engst: iOS 26 and macOS 26 have been funkier and glitchier than any Apple operating systems in years. I suspect it’s almost entirely due to Liquid Glass. There aren’t any deal-breakers—the basics still work fine—but there are too many lags and oddities.

James Thomson: Did I mention that I do not care for Liquid Glass?

Todd Vaziri: Certain features like Screen Time, touted as a very important feature when it debuted, just withers on the vine without any updates or bug fixes. And it’s now 2026, and there’s still no iCloud full-disk Mac backup.

Stephen Hackett: “It’s been years since I’ve had to reinstall an OS to fix an issue or spend time digging around in some Library folder, which is great. However, because Apple keeps quoting Steve Jobs’ axiom of “Design is how it works, the issues created by Liquid Glass cannot be ignored. There are good ideas in there, and I like a lot of the visuals, but the new UI introduced bugs and challenges for developers and users alike. I spend a lot of time in Apple’s first-party apps, including Safari, Notes, Reminders, Calendar, Photos, Music, Logic, Terminal, and more. Some of them are great, while others need work, but my primary reflection on them is that these apps can be incredibly inconsistent. Lists in Reminders and folders in Notes should have the same options when being named and labeled. Keyboard shortcuts should be more predictable. Safari should be far less ugly. My personal pet peeve fits in here as well: apps should have access to the entire SF Symbols library. Why am I forced to choose from a subset of them for an icon for a Reminders list or when naming a Shortcut? Emoji can partially solve these issues, but the SF Symbols library is great. It’s time Apple unlocks them.

Matt Birchler: Usually, big design trends last for five to 10 years. But after just a couple of months of using liquid glass, I’m already craving the next trend. It undoubtedly has moments where it looks really cool, but in general, I think it’s relatively garish.

Andrew Laurence: Liquid Glass makes this a rough year. I know many who now use accessibility affordances just to make it more tolerable. Whatever benefit it wanted to achieve, it missed the mark.

John Siracusa: Liquid Glass really drags down the average this year. It also completely wiped out Apple’s ability to make improvements to existing features, which is at the core of Apple’s longstanding software quality crisis. Apple really needs to shift the balance between new features, bug fixes, and performance improvements. The process of polishing existing features is vastly undervalued by today’s Apple.

Gabe Weatherhead: Today, I opened the Apple Phone app, and all of my favorites were gone. Last week, I opened the Apple Contacts app, and all of my contacts were missing. In both cases, I was not surprised, and in both cases, I had no options other than to restart the device. This is my lived experience with iOS and macOS. It has been a supreme disappointment to watch Apple bumble the Shortcuts app. This is an app that felt like it was designed by true Apple fans, back when Apple acquired it. But in the years since then, Apple has abdicated its responsibility to us, and Shortcuts is now too unreliable to invest our attention and time any further. I complain that there are many sharp edges to Apple’s OS, but Shortcuts is just a sack of broken glass.

Michael Tsai: Most of the old bugs are still there, and the new OS releases brought new ones. Will this ever get better? Apple just seems lost. This year, I want to highlight how unreliable Screen Time is. I also experienced new issues where the “d” key sometimes doesn’t work on my Mac (with any keyboard), and my Apple Watch wouldn’t charge with third-party chargers. Nearly all of Apple’s Mac apps feel like they need attention, but I don’t really wish for that because recent revisions—like the Contacts app in Tahoe—tend to be regressions. I keep being tempted to switch away from Safari—the reliability, performance, and compatibility are subpar—but am sticking with it for now because I prefer its user interface.

Peter Cohen: I’d love to see a Snow Leopard-style shift focusing on ironing out what went wrong with this 26 strategy.

Paul Kafasis: Liquid Glass is bad. Apple’s design chops are way down. Quality overall is lacking.

Craig Hockenberry: Whether or not you think Liquid Glass is a good change for the user experience, it has had a disruptive effect on the quality of the OS and apps that Apple provides. Things are janky and glitchy all over, and the root cause always seems to be a failure to get the glassy effects. I’d love to see Apple take a release cycle to focus on quality, but with the catch-up they’re currently doing for Apple Intelligence, that seems unlikely.

Carolina Milanesi: The OS releases have been very stable in 2025. Some improvements on Apps with Apple Intelligence, but expect much more to come this year.

Ben Long: Not sure where to start. I find some of their apps, such as Music, to be almost unusable, while software features like AirDrop are spectacular. So, very uneven except for UI, which is universally approaching bad.

Casey Liss: Sometimes you need to take a moment to reset and to clean up around the house. Apple needs that.

Joe Rosensteel: The OS updates have had many issues with quality, not just with taste. None of Apple’s apps have had satisfying or noteworthy updates, with many not receiving updates to even match the new look and style of the OS and those that have suffered for it. Impossible to see this as a successful year for Apple software.

Allison Sheridan: I know it will be obvious why I gave it a lower rating than previous years, but I’ll go ahead and say it, Liquid Glass! I don’t hate it, but I sure don’t favor it. I’ll say one nice thing — I like the bigger, rounded corners on windows. The apps are fine, except for their drippy liquid elements.

Lex Friedman: Everyone talking about your crappy design is a bad thing. I don’t use many of Apple’s pre-installed apps. But the pro apps — particularly Logic — keep getting better. And wow, Notes is really a little engine that could that powers big parts of my business.

John Gruber: For two straight years, I’ve written the same comment for this category: “I have concerns and complaints about aspects of the direction Apple’s software design is headed (or in some ways, has been now for years), but their software reliability has been very good for me. The reliability and technical quality remain excellent. While writing this report card, I checked, and my uptime on MacOS 15.7.2 got to 91 days before I got around to restarting, which I only did to upgrade to 15.7.3. At one point, I literally had over 1,000 tabs open in Safari, spread across over 50 windows. (I have a problem with tab hoarding.) That is technical excellence. But yearslong growing concerns over the direction of Apple’s software design reached a breaking point with MacOS 26 Tahoe. It’s so bad — or at least, so much worse than MacOS 15 Sequoia — that I’m refusing to install it. That makes it hard to assign a single grade for “OS Quality”.

Matt Deatherage: If you want to move the liquid glass stuff here, I’ll understand.

Aleen Simms: Liquid Glass, especially on iPhone, is a frustrating-to-use hot mess.

Jessica Dennis: Apple’s apps and operating systems seem fine; they generally mostly work, but I don’t think there’s really anything super exciting about Apple-developed software these days.

Developer relations

Nick Heer: Between strategies for bare-minimum regulatory compliance that vary around the world, and implying a necessary ground-up redesign on all platforms, third-party developers are not Apple’s priority.

Marco Arment: Apple gave developers great new APIs to use in the 26 OSes, but burdened them with half-baked redesigns that make it extremely challenging to create good UIs and reliable apps.

Craig Hockenberry: If Apple were looking for ways to make developers even less enthusiastic about their platforms, they found several: doubling down on the App Store monopoly, shipping an unfinished user interface design on all platforms, and tacit support of fascists who are in the process of destroying American democracy.

James Thomson: Everything we’ve said before about fighting a war on all fronts with every single regulatory body around the world is still true from last year. The quote “it’s our FUCKING STORE”, from Marni Goldberg that came out during the Epic vs Apple trial, is permanently burned into my mind as the perfect encapsulation of Apple’s attitude towards developers.

John Gruber: Fifth year in a row with basically the same comment: Resentment over App Store policies continues to build. Frustrations with the App Store review process seem unresolved. Apple’s goal should be for developer relations to be so good that developers look for excuses to create software exclusively for Apple’s platforms. The opposite is happening.

Dan Moren: Business as usual. But business is not good. The company keeps fighting to control the App Store as it has, without ever stopping to ask whether or not it actually needs to. Some of its arguments against legislation like the DMA might be well-founded, but much of it just seems spiteful and petty. While it has adhered to laws in other parts of the world, it does so mostly when it can continue charging the fees to which it has become accustomed. The App Store might still be the place you need to be to sell your app, but it has never felt less vital—these days it seems like little more than a digital version of Walmart.

Stephen Robles: Not involved personally enough to say.

Andrew Laurence: The US injunction against payment systems and commissions was well-earned. Apple needs to remove its head from its posterior.

Brent Simmons: Apple is burning developer goodwill by shipping this terrible UI update, by continuing their astonishingly greedy defense of the monopolistic App Store, and, worst of all, by supplying gold statues and flattery to the fascists in the White House.

Charles Arthur: Apple’s relations with developers continue to be that of an abusive spouse who knows there’s no chance of their partner divorcing them. Might a chance of leadership at the top shift this?

Michael Tsai: The same old issues with the App Store, documentation, the schedule, and bug reporting. Apple needs a turnaround. Swift has not taken over the world. It continues to get new features without really feeling mature. Swift Concurrency is now officially approachable, but the complexity remains, and Apple has not convinced the community that this approach is actually an improvement. Flagship frameworks like SwiftUI and SwiftData continue to disappoint. On the plus side, there is finally a roadmap for improving the type checker.

Christina Warren: Standard disclosure: For most of 2025, I worked in developer relations at Google DeepMind, and then for the last 6 weeks of the year, I was at GitHub, which Microsoft owns. Apple really loves to shoot itself in the foot with developers, and the continued fight over App Store DCA rules shows this. The fact that Patreon can’t drop the IAP option from its app at all, and instead its users have to choose to either raise prices in-app or take a loss so that the greedy fucks at Apple can claim 30% on content they aren’t responsible for and sign-ups they didn’t facilitate is but just one example of how out of touch Apple continues to be with developers. The utter failure of Apple Intelligence and the fact that Apple has had to partner with Google of all people because Siri is such a shit show, I think, should be a pogrom against those at Apple. Because mark my words: alternative OSes are going to come. And they won’t be from the big players, but from the upstarts. And those are the ones you need to worry about. And when everyone can vibe code, your lock-in isn’t as deep or as strong as you think it is. Also, the ICE Block stuff was cowardice, pure and simple. Apple allowed (and continues to allow) apps from the Saudi government that allow men to track the location of their wives (their property in that country), on the basis that it’s legal in those jurisdictions. But somehow, the legal tracking of thugs with badges is a human rights risk. OK.

John Siracusa: I feel like I could copy and paste my comments from several past years on the topic of developer relations. We are not making progress. It seems like new leadership at Apple is our only hope.

Howard Oakley: Apple remains far too detached, rather than a partner. There are some salient exceptions in some teams, though.

Eric Slivka: The hodgepodge of regulations around the world is only getting more complicated for both Apple and developers. Apple might have been able to head this off by making some voluntary changes sooner, which could have been on a worldwide basis, but ultimately opted not to.

Lex Friedman: I publish two apps. The process of getting new releases approved is still too painful. The tools Apple offers developers are great. The lawsuits Apple fights to avoid giving developers (and their users) what they should… are not great.

Casey Liss: Apple consistently and regularly shows developers that it does not care about them. It does not care about playing fair. We are but cogs in the machine that prints Apple money, and the squeaky cogs do not, in this case, get the oil. Apple’s consistent and petulant insistence that we exist by their grace is obnoxious and simply untrue. Without developers, Apple wouldn’t have an ecosystem. They’d have an iPhone. One that nobody would buy, because it’d be damned near useless. Apple’s consistent and petulant insistence that all regulation is bad, and that the only way to have a safe device is if Apple builds a wall around it, is patently untrue. As I write this, Grok is enabling the creation of CSAM and other deeply objectionable media, and Apple does not care. It’s all bullshit, and we can see it for what it is now better than ever.

Myke Hurley: The longer we continue to see arguments in courts, and with governments around the world over Alternative App Marketplaces, the clearer and clearer Apple’s stance becomes.

Paul Kafasis: Apple touts it, but the App Store continues to be awful for developers. Apple refuses to stop trying to squeeze every unearned cent out of developers. The greed is astounding, and compromise is absent. To top it off, we all have to tread water to figure out how to handle their poor design changes.

Matt Birchler: I started doing real developer work in the App Store this year, and it’s made me appreciate some of the things that are nice about that system. On the other hand, it’s frustrating to wait days to weeks for app review to let your updates be released to users, as is the company’s inflexibility in giving up an ounce of control of the store.

Joe Macirowski: Reddit is the only place Google can find actual Safari documentation for developers (like how to tint the window because the meta tag theme color is just ignored in this release) because the link someone might have included “for more information see: ” points to a page that now says “yes, the URL used to contain an article. I don’t know what it said, but this isn’t a 404 page. Nor do I know where it went, so this isn’t a 301 either. Here’s a link to a different permutation of the documentation landing page that will also not help, as it’s still not the current one, though you won’t find much help there, because Google would’ve found what you’re looking for there instead of Reddit if that were the case.

World impact

Casey Liss: They’re consistently bending the knee and kissing Trump’s ring. They’re all but eliminating Lisa Jackson’s role. Just gross.

Lex Friedman: Tim Cook makes a choice every day to suck up to Donald Trump and fascism. I will never forgive him.

Steven Aquino: As a lifelong disabled person who copes with multiple conditions, I will stump up and down for Apple’s staunch commitment to serving my community vis-a-vis accessibility. The company isn’t perfect here either, but it makes the most effort of anyone in the industry to make people like me feel seen and valued. That isn’t trivial, and it’s something Apple should be lauded for more often. The iPadOS power users would do well to remember that the pointer feature has origins in the AssistiveTouch suite. Apple has innovated to empower people, then went on to take those ideas and build on them for the mainstream.

Ben Long: I’ve been buying Apple products since my first Apple II in 1979. This is the year they lost me. Giving in to Trump’s demand for a monetary tribute has left me unwilling to buy any new Apple products until I’m assured that they will not be donating to the executive branch, regardless of who’s sitting in the Oval Office. And I don’t buy that they had to do this to protect the company. Helping to normalize this kind of corruption is not good for Apple, the industry, or the world. For this reason alone, I’m thrilled that Tim Cook is leaving. Hopefully, they’ll find an actual vertebrate to replace him. And I’m fed up with their disposable watches and AirPods that make any claims of environmental stewardship completely laughable.

Matthew Haughey: Watching Tim Cook bend a knee to Trump for the past year has been downright embarrassing

John Moltz: Apple’s cozying up to the Trump administration and its cronies is widely excused as regrettable, but what’s right to do for business. The problem with this argument is that you could say policies protecting the environment and promoting accessibility are not “good for business”, many companies do, and yet Apple has long prioritized both despite not being able to directly tie them to the bottom line. Cooperating isn’t the only way to look at what’s good for the business. Other companies like Costco have taken a different approach by suing the administration in order to protect their bottom line. Apple has chosen collaboration despite having massive consumer goodwill and one of the strongest corporate positions imaginable. They are choosing to protect themselves at our expense.

Federico Viticci: How’s a gold statue for impact?

Shelly Brisbin: Apple has been in the news because of Tim Cook’s relationship with Donald Trump. Given the potential for arbitrary regulations coming from the administration, this has been a basically sound strategy. Don’t antagonize an unpredictable actor. But even if maintaining good relationships with the government is critical to Apple’s business, the public, and the obsequious nature of some of those contacts has severely impacted Apple’s ability to occupy space on a socially-conscious high road of its own making. If one lesson of 2025 is not to expect a profit-making company or its charismatic CEO to embody the same values you do, another – this one for Apple itself – would be not to count on the staying power of a cult of corporate personality.

Marco Arment: Tim Cook’s actions supporting Trump and China betray Apple, democracy, and human rights to ensure favorable treatment, reduced competition, and minimal judicial and regulatory interference. He has shown us exactly who he is and what’s important to him, and it’s time for us to start believing it.

Charles Arthur: It seems pretty clear that Apple is going to abandon its environmental goals in favour of Chatbots Everywhere (which, to be fair, means a long-overdue overhaul of Siri). In 2025, Tim Cook’s obeisance to the Trump regime in the US was at odds with Apple’s usual stances. Having seen how often Trump chickens out of initially robust stances, you’d think he might learn to ignore him. The fact that he doesn’t reflects badly on him and on the company.

Jeff Carlson: Oh Tim.

Paul Kafasis: Apple isn’t as bad as some other companies, but nowadays, that’s about the highest praise they can receive. They no longer set a positive example. At best, they’re slightly less bad than a company like Meta. What an accomplishment.

Carolina Milanesi: Sustainability remained a core focus for Apple, and inclusive hardware and software were strong, as was community impact.

David Dozoretz: Come on Tim. You know better.

Brent Simmons: Apple once had a reputation as an ethical and humane big tech company — and that reputation helped the world by showing that it was possible to be that and to be successful. That reputation is gone, and that example is now gone too. See the malicious defense of the App Store. See how it puts its arms around Trump. And see how Lisa Jackson, head of Apple’s environment efforts (among other things), is leaving, while Jennifer Newstead, formerly of Meta, formerly a Trump appointment to the State Department, and a co-author of the Patriot Act, is coming to presumably double down on Apple’s legal defense of its monopoly.

Todd Vaziri: As someone smart once said, “If you have FU money, you gotta use it when it matters.” Apple has previously been a champion of human rights and environmental policy, so it’s deeply concerning to see the CEO giving the President of the United States an Apple trophy. I completely understand the “gotta protect the shareholders/politics” of the situation, but it’s so gross and betrays some of the company’s corporate values.

James Thomson: Given what they had to work with in terms of the current political landscape of the US, maybe Apple did the best they could over the last year (at least, the best they could for shareholders). But they sure lost a lot of my respect along the way, with that gold and glass trophy just perfectly setting the tone for the year.

Peter Cohen: That the company and its CEO are actively supporting a criminal fascist regime is repugnant. That it’s par for the course throughout much of the tech industry is a disgrace.

Chance Miller: I’m no longer surprised by Apple’s political decision-making and maneuvering. A multi-trillion-dollar company is going to prioritize capitalism every time, even if it means cozying up to the worst people. Apple did, however, resist outside pressure to abandon its DEI policies. It continues to put an admirable focus on Accessibility. Apple 2030 is still a goal on Apple’s roadmap.

Craig Hockenberry: We used to believe “Think different.” Now, it’s more like “Think whatever is needed to maintain our profit margins”. How can a company tout its own diversity while at the same time handing out golden awards to a person who is trying to destroy our country’s diversity? You either believe in it, or you don’t: there’s no gray area here.

Dan Moren: I’m not sure I’ve ever given this such a low score. But it is what it is. We often talk about Apple’s social impact being a litmus test, and while I’m sure the company is still doing some good, it has increasingly been offset by its ills. Supporting the current administration not just willingly but seemingly enthusiastically, burying its social/environmental impact so as to not attract scrutiny, removing apps like ICEBlock, even (as of this writing) not suspending X/Grok from the App Store all make Apple seem less like a company composed of people you can root for and more like another giant monolithic entity concerned with its own profit above all else. In a word: disappointing.

Matt Birchler: I don’t have a lot of patience for the “what are they going to do, stand up to the bad guys?” arguments defending the company’s fawning over everything the new US President says and does.

John Siracusa: Apple has abdicated much of its power to improve the world in exchange for improving its short-term financial results. As has often been said this year, what good is having fuck-you money if you never say fuck you?

Joe Rosensteel: Apple’s commitment to environmental and social issues is at an all-time low. Tim Cook, specifically, has debased and collaborated with an administration that has harmed and continues to harm the American people and the world. Even issues like the App Store are just about securing rent and nothing else. I don’t care what Tim’s personal feelings on the matter are, and I don’t care what his fiduciary responsibility is; Apple simply can not claim they are serving the greater good in any way, shape, or form.

Jessica Dennis: So, it would be pretty cool if the CEO weren’t kowtowing to the current administration in that frankly embarrassing fashion, you know? In years past, I’ve complained that Apple seems to be engaging in a good deal of greenwashing and only playing lip service to diversity, but 2025 was just so much worse. I guess on the plus side, there are a bunch of features built into iOS that make it a little safer to resist fascism, but it would also be really nice if Tim Cook seemed even remotely interested in resisting fascism.

Kirk McElhearn: They stopped Product (RED) products, though there was a promotion for Apple Card users, I think, this year. They don’t even pretend anymore to be environmentally positive, other than when they present new products. It seems like either they think they don’t need to communicate about it, or they don’t care. And Tim Cook fluffing Trump was a very, very bad look.

Stephen Robles: Haven’t thought about this a lot.

John Gruber: Tim Cook is in an excruciatingly difficult position regarding the Trump 2.0 administration. But that’s his job. He’s clearly attempting to take the same tack he took with the Trump 1.0 administration from 2017–2020, which, in hindsight, he navigated with aplomb. To wit: staying above the fray, keeping Apple true to its institutional values while keeping it out of President Trump’s wrath. But the Trump 2.0 administration isn’t anything like the 1.0 administration. Cook, addressing employee concerns back in 2016 regarding his participation in then-President-elect Trump’s “tech summit”, said, “There’s a large number of those issues, and the way that you advance them is to engage. Personally, I’ve never found being on the sideline a successful place to be.” “Awarding” Donald Trump a 24-karat gold trophy emblazoned with the Apple logo in August 2025 — after seeing eight months of Trump 2.0 in action — wasn’t “engagement” or “getting off the sideline.” It was obsequious complicity with a regime that is clearly destined for historical infamy. Cook’s continued strategy of “engagement” risks not only his personal legacy, but the reputation of the company itself.

Quinn Nelson: Tim Cook is effectively handling the current administration, which has managed to displease everyone but shareholders.

Nick Heer: Tim, I am willing to reconsider my low score. I hear you give bribes in gold bars. I am only human.

Howard Oakley: A nightmare year in the US. Whatever Apple chose, it wasn’t going to come out as well as it deserved. On balance, I think it steered clear of becoming a target of wrath without becoming too sycophantic, but we’re going to need hindsight to be the judge of that.

Joe Macirowski: The University is currently in talks with the state government and local power utilities to figure out how to power university-controlled instances of the major models so that, quite frankly, suicides can be prevented (and everything else on the spectrum of AI harm). These talks have to occur because the power required just to run the models exceeds the university’s total – not just IT – TOTAL power consumption by an order of magnitude. This is not speculative demand but a need to insource what is already filled via api calls to data centers that are stressing their own grids to the extreme. That much green energy simply isn’t available. Nuclear timelines aren’t feasible either. This will likely end up being natural gas, as it is among the types of power generation that can most easily respond to random demand, as combustion powers turbines directly. However, during startup, they emit multiple times more pollutants – especially those causing smog, a summer-wide problem for much of the state – than they do in their steady state, and that amount will likely also have immediate and noticeable effects. This is the impact just running LLMs has on power. Someone’s air quality is going to be decimated, and even if somehow everyone’s backyard could be isolated from local effects, the contribution to global emissions remains a concern. When Apple needs to increase on-device RAM so a large language model can sort your email worse than a surprisingly few very well-written regular expressions, it’s not because this is an extremely efficient use of computing resources and therefore power. When you distribute that power utilization to local devices instead of data centers, you’re still adding that much power usage SOMEWHERE – and in the US, there’s a good chance it’s coal. And the more widely you distribute this the more power stations are reaching tipping points where units that used to spend time completely off and cold are graduating to full time service where the new cycle is running at reduced efficiency during the day because demand is too high and everything is running hot and running at reduced efficiency during the night because demand is below the minimum to keep a unit idling but not low enough that the cost of turning back on doesn’t outspend the savings from turning it off. This is why rates can be lower overnight and why your phone begs you to let it wait until these periods to delay charging. Either every iPhone waiting to do heavy (>5Watt) charging until their local utility’s daily demand minimum is a completely pointless self-congratulatory feature, or iPhones charging at 25-95W is already enough of a problem for the daytime grid that shifting it to when local grid demand is lowest would have an appreciable effect. I want to believe it’s the former, just another greenwashing gesture two orders of magnitude too small to matter, but considering AI data centers are already looking into methods such as charging batteries overnight to supplement peak daytime hours just to have enough power at all makes me believe it’s not as far from the latter as I would’ve assumed even 5 years ago.

Christina Warren: Look, no tech leader or major tech company looked particularly good this year, with all of them lining up to kiss the ring of the King in exchange for insulating themselves from his whims. And it’s shameful for every single one of those companies. But most of the other companies didn’t sell themselves as making the world a better place or put themselves on a moral high ground. And you know what, I don’t expect Apple to act any better than any other soulless, feckless corporation. Sure, good people work there (good people work at all of these places), but that doesn’t change the fact that it is abundantly clear that all of this talk about “making the world a better place” was marketing spin. And I personally never want to hear another word from Apple or their defenders about how they are better than any other soulless, feckless company out there. It’s fine that Apple is just the same as every other company. But Apple nor its leaders ever get to pretend they are better.

Philip Michaels: It’s tough to be a CEO right now, and you could make the case that Apple is doing what it has to do to preserve its interests as a company. But people are going to remember who did what during these times, and I think that’s going to have a lasting impact on Apple’s public standing, long after the current occupant of the White House is just a horrible memory.

Allison Sheridan: I’m incredibly disappointed by the kowtowing to the administration. I used to be proud of Apple and its stance on most societal issues, but that was erased this year entirely for me.

Gabe Weatherhead: This is the year that Apple decided how much CSAM is the right amount of CSAM on the AppStore. The decision turned out to be a lot harder than any decent person would think it should be. Every single executive on the Apple team should be disgusted and embarrassed by the knots they had to twist to allow the Twitter app to continue to generate child pornography on iPhones. But Phil Schiller, to name one, demonstrated his personal value system by his silence. CSAM is now just a part of his bottom line. What a legacy.

Matt Deatherage: Apple’s CEO took a lot of the company’s “improve the world” credibility and set it on fire in 2025. Everyone knows how.

Michael Tsai: We tend to focus on hardware and software, and sometimes Apple’s interactions with various governments, but its customer account policies are an increasingly important area. These days, much of our devices’ functionality relies on services tied to your Apple Account. The account holds your purchases, your data (cloud storage and backups), and it’s the key to even being able to use certain features. It’s incredibly important, yet as we saw this year with the story of Paris Buttfield-Addison, your account can be taken away through no fault of your own and with no recourse save from running to the press. This is completely unacceptable. Apple should revise its procedures so that this sort of thing can never happen again, and it should audit its software to make sure that as much of it as possible does not require an account. One particular area of concern is passkeys. Years after their introduction, Apple finally shipped credential exchange, but it turns out that users still don’t have control over their data. You can’t export your passkeys for offline storage and later reimport into the Passwords app. Even if you have a full backup of your Mac, you can’t restore it and access your passkeys unless you have access to your Apple Account. If your Apple Account is working, your data is stored in iCloud, but it’s not really backed up because you can’t access historical versions. A sync bug will just wipe it out everywhere. If, as Apple says, passkeys are the future, they need to be implemented in a way that serves and protects users, rather than locking their data into a cloud of questionable reliability, which they could lose access to at any moment simply for trying to redeem a gift card.

Aleen Simms: I don’t pretend to be an enthusiastic historian, but it is not hard to see the signs pointing to the United States’s fall into authoritarianism. Tim Cook has been bending over backwards to try to please a man aspiring to autocracy. By donating a million dollars to Trump’s inaugural committee, presenting Trump with a plaque with a gold base, attending movie premieres at the White House, and even dining with Trump at Mar-a-Lago, Cook has been communicating his, and therefore Apple’s, support of the current presidency. I can come up with a great number of reasons why Cook may have taken these actions. Maybe it’s at the behest of the board of directors. Maybe he’s trying to protect as many of his employees as he can. Maybe he’s just trying to protect Apple’s bottom line. Perhaps he grits his teeth every time Trump’s name appears on his Caller ID. Perhaps he agrees with everything Trump is attempting to do and is glad to offer his support. I don’t know where the truth lies, but ultimately, it doesn’t matter. They say that actions speak louder than words, and Cook’s actions are in support of a corrupt administration that is running roughshod over the U.S. Constitution. I also don’t know what the solution is here. Tim Cook is the face of Apple; however, he’s presumably been doing this with the approval of the majority of Apple’s board of directors and other members of the leadership team. Does Cook need to go? I think so, but so does everyone there in a position of authority who is more concerned with appeasing Trump than doing the right thing.

Adam Engst: Can we give Apple a gold-plated award for obsequiousness?

Anything else to say?

Gabe Weatherhead: This has been a pretty bleak year for Apple as a company and for Tim Cook, Phil Schiller, and Craig Federighi personally. In my opinion, their legacy fell off a cliff in 2025, and not just because they no longer use their own products. They bent their knees and broke their backbones, and it only took 12 months to convert some of us from being fans to being former Apple customers. Ostensibly, this is a technical review of one of the world’s biggest corporations, but I live in a world of multitudes. Corporations don’t exist; people do, and their personal decisions are not hidden by shiny branding. The current state of Apple represents a series of human decisions and opinions that feel too expensive for me to continue to support.

Charles Arthur: A year ago in this space, I asked: how would we know if Apple has become sclerotic? A year on, the departures (Dye et al) and rumours of changes to come at the top (Cook to be replaced by Ternus) offer some hope that an organisation which has absolutely become too slow to react (see: chatbots) and neglected products (see: content for Vision Pro) and too rigid in response to governments (see: fights with Europe over DMA) is seeing a shift in tectonic plates. This is long overdue. Apple used to be a nimble company: the iPod went from concept to launch in a single year, back in 2001. That was 25 years ago, and the company’s scale is bigger, but being nimble for an organisation is about reducing the weight on teams – fewer upward management checks and meetings, fewer people with the power to say no (just the right ones). I’m optimistic about the replacement of Tim Cook. It’s time. Apple needs to move into the next generation of its existence. But a necessary part of that is for old parts to die off. I’m agog for 2026.

Joe Macirowski: As discussions of Tim Cook’s stepping down become serious I’m left with the opposing images of a gay man in the early 2010s telling shareholders he doesn’t care about the bloody ROI of environmental issues to handing Trump a 24k gold “commemorative” plaque while his legacy of ‘textbook’ union busting transitions from a turn-of-phrase to literally becoming curricula in labor relations textbooks

Casey Liss: This year, perhaps more than any other in the nearly 20 years I’ve been following Apple, I’ve had to reckon with the fact that Apple is a money-making machine. They’re a money-making machine that is incredibly efficient, but often at the cost of the things I consider important or valuable. That’s fine, but it’s too bad. I miss being able to root for Apple, without disclaimers.

Lex Friedman: I love Jason Snell.

Nick Heer: At best — and I really hope this is the case — 2025 looks like an off year. If my scores seem low, it is because Apple can and should be doing better. But it seems like the most important thing remains adhering to an annual schedule.

Jessica Dennis: 2025 was Not Great, Bob [insert Mad Men gif here]! It’s kind of nice to spend a little time reflecting on technology instead of the advance of fascism.

Andrew Laurence: From the perspective of an enterprise IT admin, the 26 cycle has been — compared to recent prior years — relatively uneventful. Pity it was paired with the UX chaos of Liquid Glass.

Paul Kafasis: Tim Cook presenting an award to Donald Trump is one of the single most awful things Apple has ever done.

Ben Long: There’s still so much great design and engineering left in Apple’s products. This is why it’s frustrating to see that great stuff getting chipped away at and hollowed out. There are always ups and downs, but it feels like they’ve been on a downward trajectory for quite a while.

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