By Jason Snell

February 9, 2023 8:52 AM PT

Fun With Charts: A 2022 Report Card breakdown

As I did last year, I turned to Six Colors member, Duke University professor, and data visualization expert Kieran Healy to take the initial Report Card scores and slice them in a few interesting ways.

First up is a chart that drills down into the vote distributions across all the categories, so you can see which categories gathered a variety of votes and which ones were a bit more consistent across all 55 voters.

Next is a chart comparing those distributions to the overall distribution (shown in gray). This one lets you compare how people think Apple is doing on each particular topic with their sense of how Apple is doing overall.

Here’s a plot of all the participants in the survey, ranked from most positive to least positive. I’ve removed the names from this because I didn’t clear such detailed analysis with the panelists in advance, so you’ll never know who our sunniest panelists were, nor the identities of our grouches. I will say that my pal Myke Hurley was dead center.

The next chart is a list of what categories were not answered by respondents. As you can see, most non-developers opted not to answer the developer relations question. Many people also opted out of HomeKit, AppleTV, and the iPad. Everyone had an opinion about the Mac.

As Kieran points out, it’s important to note the non-responses:

To a first approximation, every pundit surveyed has an opinion on Reliability, the Mac, the iPhone, Wearables, the Watch, Software, Services, and the iPad. Opinions on those topics run, in the order I just listed, from overwhelmingly positive to somewhat divided or negative. By contrast, Societal issues, the TV, Homekit, and especially (by far) Developer Relations have both more negative sentiment and more non-response. The respondents to those questions—especially the people with views on Developer Relations—are more like specialists, niche-dwellers in the Apple ecosystem. Their views are more negative. The things they are interested in are not really amongst Apple’s high priorities right now. And this is underscored by the fact that even people who are professional Apple pundits often don’t have any view about those things one way or another, or don’t feel they know enough to give an answer.

Finally, here’s a Bertin Matrix:

As Kieran says:

Again we try our best to cluster the rows and columns so that we jointly see the pattern of responses amongst the respondents and the topic areas. And then we draw little bars indicating the answers. Height corresponds to the score. I think you can really see the overall structure here quite nicely.

Thanks to Kieran for his pretty and interesting charts!

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