Category: Technology

Six Color’s Apple Report Card 2025

Jason Snell released the results from his annual survey of the Apple blogosphere community at Six Colors. I thought it’d be fun to join in the fray and add some of my thoughts, because I’m pretty different from most of those surveyed. For one, my income isn’t at all related to Apple (at work I am required to use a terrible Windows laptop and terrible Microsoft services), and so I really only use these devices in my personal capacity and consequentially really remain on the “happy path” of Apple devices and services.

 

Mac: 4/5

I’m more on the fence about Tahoe compared to most of the respondents. It’s a totally stable OS, I do mostly like how it looks; it’s just a little thoughtless in places and needs to get buttoned up. I regularly use Stage Manager on my laptop, and I think it’s great. In general, the software is good-not-great at the moment, but it is good at the end of the day.

In contrast, Mac hardware is stellar. I bought a Mac Mini this year, and I love it. Its so wonderful having that little guy always ready-to-go on my desk, and regularly running back-ups for me overnight.

 

iPhone: 5/5

The iPhone 17 and iPhone 17 Pro this year is the strongest line-up in ages. The iPhone 17 brought a ton of features down to the primary iPhone line this year, like ProMotion screens. If you’re an update-every-few-years sort of person, this year is the right year to update. The iPhone 17 Pro’s camera is awesome, and the huge plateau is nice to look at. Its great to see more of that wonderful orange sneaking out from my case every day.

I am not nearly as enamored with the iPhone Air compared to many folks, mostly because the camera is such a critical component of the phone for me. It exists. Its fine.

 

iPad: 3/5

I water damaged my third-gen iPad Air over the holidays, and upgraded to a refurbished M1 iPad Air in January. It’s notably faster. My spouse has an M4 iPad Pro. Its super quick.

Even with iPadOS 26, iPadOS still pales in comparison to Mac OS. I think the implementation of the stoplight buttons is just straight-up bad, and everyone being so excited about them is akin to a cold glass of water in hell. Yes, its a huge step forward for the platform, no doubt. But again, the Mac is just so wildly superior.

Still, the iPad is the best tablet on the planet, hands-down. Theres essentially no competition. Theres a few categories like this now, including wearable. Apple just seems to be resting on their laurels a bit, because there is effectively zero competitive pressure from Google or anyone else.

 

Wearables: 3/5

This whole category is buoyed by AirPods Pro 3. They’re great. AirPods Max need some serious love, and are just not taken seriously by the market.

 

Watch: 2/5

I love my Apple Watch Series 9, but has Apple added anything to the last two version to make me upgrade? I usually update on a 3-year cadence, but if Series 12 is as lackluster as 10 or 11, I may not.

The Ultra 3 was a *fine* update, but truly hasn’t added anything compelling since the first Ultra was introduced three years ago. If anything the Series 10/11’s larger screen makes me wonder where Apple wants to take this product.

 

Vision Pro: 1/5

I look at these periodically on eBay, but am consistent dissuaded by how often people with them say they use them.

 

Home: 2/5

The Home app remains usable, but where is the rumored HomePod w/ a touchscreen?

 

Apple TV: 3/5

sigh… Apple TV remains the best TV interface on the market, but similar to the iPad and Apple Water, a lack of serious competition has lead Apple to complacency.

The service, however, is firing on all cylinders.

 

Services: 3/5

Apple News is my primary app for reading the news, and it’s good-to-decent. It would be good if they eliminated low-quality stories, and cleaned up the ads in the articles.

Apple Fitness is good, but I do wish they’d make some generic exercises and you could just listen to your own music, rather than their playlists.

Apple Arcade is nice-to-have, especially when traveling.

Apple Music is great. No complaints.

 

Hardware Reliability: 4/5

Apple OS Quality: 4/5

Apple App Quality: 3/5

Developer Relations: No Opinion

World Impact: 1/5

You know.

Predictions for Apple’s Forthcoming Low-Cost MacBook and Other Announcements

On Monday, Apple is set to begin a string of product announcements culminating in their “Apple Experiences” with press events simultaneously all over the world on Wednesday. Of those announcements, Apple is widely expected to announce a new low-cost MacBook powered by the iPhone 16 Pro’s A18 Pro chip, and will presumably resurrect the “MacBook-no-second-word” brand. Oh, and it’s widely expected to come in Good Colors 🤩.

Theres a lot of speculation regarding how configurable this product will be with respect to chip-binning, RAM, and storage. I don’t think this computer will be any more configurable than the iPhone 16 Pro was: storage options starting at 128 GB and up to 1 TB. I just don’t think Apple can afford to hit a low price, and go about making new configurations of that A18 Pro SoC. That also means it’ll only have a measly 8 GB of RAM, the minimum needed to support Apple Intelligence. This machine may be small and fun, but it may not be a good Mac.

Otherwise, the announcements are expected to be rather milquetoast. Chip-bumps for most products getting an update. There are some on-going rumors that the M5 Pro and Max will have some new-to-Apple 2.5D packaging updates to further separate CPU and GPU thermals and gain performance. This may be interesting considering the gains Apple Silicon had by allowing CPU and GPU to pull from a single pool of RAM. Does one or the other of them slow if the CPU and GPU are no longer on the same die?

Lastly, on a personal note, I am *really* hoping for a new Apple TV. There doesn’t seem to be much enthusiasm for this product, but I have an original Apple TV 4K model that is feeling awfully old now, and I just sent the remote through the wash and killed it. It could use an upgrade, and I think my only chance its updated this week is if it is *such* a small upgrade that its flown under the radar of all the usual leaks in the supply chain.

MacOS Design Misses

This post has been making its rounds throughout the Mac and Apple blogosphere over the last few weeks, and has rallied criticisms of macOS 26 Tahoe. The criticism in the post regarding icons in the menu bar is really quite fair. The examples showing the same icons being used in the same menu for different items is just bad. Along with the all the various corner radii throughout the OS, I think Apple really just needs to focus on standardizing the OS in MacOS 27. They need to take the lead and follow their own examples.

In general though, I like the release; it just needs some standardization and discipline. The icons in the menu are fun – it’s just a little bit of whimsy. I think a lot of the criticism is missing that. Yes, the corner rounding needs to be uniform app-to-app, but in general, I like it. It makes the whole OS feel airy and welcoming. Keep in mind I’m a Windows user at my day job. My Mac really is like a cold glass of water in Hell.

My MacBook Wishlist

I wrote recently about purchasing a M4 Pro Mac mini for my family. Our next computer purchase is very likely to be a new laptop for me. I suspect that Apple will not build my ideal MacBook, but I thought it’d be fun to layout my constraints, and what I’d like in a new MacBook.

I currently have two Macs:

( 1 ) The base M1 Pro MacBook Pro with a binned GPU, 512 GB of storage, and 16 GBs of RAM

( 2 ) a M4 Pro Mac mini with 2 TB of storage and 64 GB of RAM

The MacBook Pro is largely used on the couch or in bed for some writing, reading, and social media. The M1 Pro is plenty fast for 95% of my use cases, however I am a little RAM staved on this device. In contrast, the Mac mini has been used for photo editing, and when I need additional monitors. A future MacBook for me needs to slot in nicely between those two: a clear upgrade over my M1 Pro, but not so performant that it eclipses the Mac mini.

I think it’s very likely that my next MacBook will be a MacBook Air. This will be a first for me. My first Mac was the 2008 Black-Mac when I went off to college, and ever since then I’ve had MacBook Pros. I needed that horsepower in graduate school, but I just don’t need it in a laptop today, especially when I have the Mac mini at my desk. I can afford the luxury of a thin and light laptop, without the penalty of poor and slow performance.

This means I need to consider what things I’d lose in a MacBook Air relative to my MacBook Pro, and if I’m willing to part with those. In my mind, the MacBook Pros have three large advantages over the MacBook Air line: ( 1 ) the ports ( 2 ) the SoC and ( 3 ) the display. 

Ports

The current MacBook Air has two Thunderbolt 4 ports and a MagSafe port for charging, meaning I’d lose the SD card reader of my current laptop, and the HDMI port. Thats fine. I have used those ports maybe less than a dozen times total.

Truthfully, the biggest thing I’ll miss are Thunderbolt ports on either side. Having the ability to change my laptop from either the left or right side has been great. I’ll miss that.

SoC

CleanShot 2025-11-11 at 15.29.30.

According to GeekBench scores, the last-generation M4 MacBooks had reached parity with my M1 Pro, and the M5 has now surpassed the M1 Pro in both Single-Core, Multi-Core, and GPU performance. The most CPU/GPU intensive thing I do is some light photo editing, and even then I’m limited by 16GB of RAM on my MacBook Pro. Any M#-no-adjective laptop I buy from here on out will be an upgrade for me. Excellent.

On the other hand, this presents a timeline in the other direction: if M-series chips continue to progress at this rate, roughly four generations beyond the M4 Pro, the M#-no-adjective line will surpass its performance. Now, that might be okay for my purposes. I’m very unlikely to get a 64 GB of RAM on a laptop, but it does suggest that I should target the M7, M8, or M9 generation.

Display

Below is Apple’s summary of the displays on the current 13-inch MacBook Air versus my 14-inch MacBook Pro. 

CleanShot 2025-11-11 at 12.08.01@2x.

The size change I’m perfectly fine with, I think going slightly smaller (in all dimensions) and losing some weight would be nice. However, the HDR, and ProMotion are features I do not want to lose. I think theres two reasons to be hopeful in this regard:

( 1 ) The recently-released iPhone 17 is the first base-iPhone to have a ProMotion Screen, and the new iPhone Air has it as well. That is, Apple clearly doesn’t see 120 Hz refresh rates as a “Pro” feature any longer.

( 2 ) The current round of rumors regarding Mac laptops are that the M6 MacBook Pros are likely to get an OLED display in late 2026 or 2027. That allows Apple to move the existing displays on the MacBook Pros down to the Air line, and still have some product differentiation against the Pro line.

Let’s hope this pans out, and the MacBook Airs get a significant display upgrade somewhere around the M7 release.

Colors

I would really love to see Apple bring the colors from the existing iMac line-up to the air. Just, please, keep the existing black bezel and keyboard of the existing Air. BasicAppleGuy mocked up some examples for April Fool’s day last year. They look fun! Imagine that – a fun computer.

Cellular

I’ve had a cellular antenna in my iPad since 2020, and I love  it when I’m traveling. I’ve been using my iPad less and less over the last year or so, and I expect that to continue. I would really love this feature to just hop over to the MacBook line-up. The one feature Apple would need to build into macOS is something like TripMode, which I’ve written about before. Similar features have been baked-in to iPhones and iPads since day one – how hard could it be?

Nano-Texture Glass

Apple recently started including Nano-Texture glass for an anti-reflective matte finish on the MacBook Pro line. I’d love this on a future MacBook Air as well.

My Ideal MacBook

As I said from the outset, I think a lot of this is unlikely to happen. However, I think it’s very likely that Apple releases an M8 with performance somewhere between the M1 Pro and the M4 Pro, and thats probably going to be how I identify the right time to upgrade my laptop. Although, the rumor mill will likely guide whether or not I pull the trigger. I’d hate to upgrade only for a cellular or a better display to get released in the year or two after I’ve made the purchase. 

One final unlikely thought: what if the aforementioned MacBook Pro upgrade to OLED display also includes a considerable slimming-down of the device as well? That might be tempting.

David Pierce on the iPad at 10

David Pierce writing at The Verge:

I’ve been using the latest Pro as my go-to laptop for a few weeks now, just to see what all this change adds up to, and I’m shocked at how close this thing is to a truly all-purpose computer. There are the obvious things, like built-in cellular connectivity and the Apple Pencil, that give the Pro powers the Mac doesn’t have. The mix of touch and trackpad is genuinely great, too; I’m constantly back and forth to the screen, scrolling or swiping with the trackpad but doing finer and more complex things with my hands. And there’s just no replacing the fact that you can turn on a movie, pick up the screen, and flop back on the couch. Add in the solid speakers, good camera, and great battery life, and there’s a lot I like about life with the iPad. If you do creative work of any kind — and more and more people do — it’s a uniquely useful device.

Which makes it all the more annoying every time you run into some totally unnecessary system limitation. There are still a lot of those. Apple’s laptops are allowed to run any app, not just the ones in the App Store. They can interact with more accessories. They can access virtually everything about the system through the Terminal. They can run better browsers. Utility apps I rely on to make my computing life easier, like Raycast and Better Touch Tool, just don’t exist the same way on the iPad. There’s almost nothing the Mac straight-up won’t let you do, but the iPad is full of limitations. They’ve been there for so long, and are so glaring, that we’ve been mad about them in reviews since at least 2018. Apple saw them as a feature, not a bug.

Even with iPadOS 26, I still find multitasking with the iPad hugely cumbersome, and I just think to myself “ugh, I should just grab my Mac.” I have a iPad Air with the A14 SoC, the last iPad Air before the transition to M-series chips. 5+ years later, it’s fine. It does the multi-tasking things in iPad OS 26. However, in the last 6 months, I’ve found myself reliably just using my M1 Pro MacBook Pro. Perhaps it’s for the larger real estate; perhaps it’s that the M1 Pro has held up better than the A14 over time. In any case, the I just consistently feel that I’m hitting walls on that iPad.