Looking back on Apple’s 2021
As we turn the page over to 2022, let’s look back at the good and the bad for Apple in 2021.
In 2020, Apple made an announcement that will define its decade in many ways: the switch from Intel processors in the Mac, to processors designed by Apple itself. By the end of that year, Apple had already migrated the Mac mini, MacBook Air, and the low-end 13-inch MacBook Pro to Apple silicon. As we entered 2021, all eyes were on how Apple would transition the next crop of Macs, particularly the rest of the MacBook Pro line.
Apple’s earliest product announcement event of 2021 brought us the completely redesigned iMac. It still retained its general design language, but it now came in a stunningly thin chassis, and revived the multicolor look that defined the early generations of the iMac in the late 90’s and early 2000’s. I’ve long thought that Apple was missing the sense of whimsy its Mac products had all those years ago, so I was delighted to see the colors return.
Apple also released a new generation of iPad Pro, and in a bit of a surprise, brought the M1 processor to the iPad. Alongside of that, the 12.9-inch iPad Pro introduced the Liquid Retina XDR Display to the iPad line, perhaps the biggest update to come to the iPad line in years. Apple also introduced the long awaited updated iPad mini, which brought the design language of the iPad Pro and iPad Air to the mini: thin, uniform bezels and slab sides.
We also got a spec bumped Apple TV 4K, bringing HDMI 2.1 to Apple’s home theater device. And to the delight of many, particularly the corporate tech press who never liked the original Siri Remote, Apple introduced a redesigned Apple TV remote. Essentially a union of the pre-tvOS Apple TV’s remote and the original Siri Remote, the new peripheral ameliorated the critics.
The Spring also brought the long-rumored AirTag, expanding the types of devices that could be tracked in Apple’s Find My app. In addition, Apple also opened up the Find My network to third-party products, a move that not only improved the capabilities of the Find My app for Apple users generally, but also likely helped relieve some antitrust pressure that Apple had received in the months leading up to the AirTag’s release when everyone knew the AirTag was coming.
The iPhone and Apple Watch updates we got this year were mostly the kind of more subtle year-over-year changes that we should usually expect. Solid updates, but nothing revolutionary.
Of course, the year’s big Apple hardware update came with the new 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pros and their corresponding M1 Pro and M1 Max chips. Apple delivered a redesign that checked every box that critics of the previous generation had leveled at it: it now had a more diverse array of ports including MacSafe, SDXC, and HDMI. Thinness wasn’t its primary design goal, and the Touch Bar was gone in favor for traditional function keys. The iPad Pro’s Liquid Retina XDR Display had found it’s way to the MacBook Pro, and it pushed the pixels all the way out to the edges of the display, bringing the iPhone’s notch controversially to the laptop line. In terms of performance, the new MacBook Pro has been impressing everyone, even Windows users. They’re fast, they run cool, and they’ll likely never turn on their cooling fans unless you’re seriously pushing them. Apple has now cemented itself as a premiere.
I’d give Apple’s hardware releases in 2021 a solid B+ to A+. If the iPhone, Apple Watch, and Apple TV updates didn’t wow the world, the Mac updates certainly did. In the span of just a year Apple went from a company that bought processors from other companies to power its Macs, to being one of the industry’s leading desktop processor makers. That’s pretty impressive. Pair that with a MacBook Pro release that satisfied all of Apple’s Mac critics of the last five years, and that’s a really good year.
Software, on the other hand, was a bit of a miss. I don’t think that anything has slipped in terms of Apple software quality, and I do think that both macOS Monterey and iOS 15 are solid successors to their 2020 counterparts, but I think it was clear that Apple’s software development suffered from a year of self-imposed COVID isolation. Major new features were (or still are) delayed, most disappointingly Universal Control, a feature which will (someday) allow a Mac and an iPad to be seamlessly controlled by a single shared keyboard/mouse pairing. Most of the other new features Apple announced for 2021 were the kind of things that would have been killer features in May of 2020 when much of the country was still locked down, such as SharePlay for watching a movie or listening to an album over FaceTime with friends and family. I don’t think Apple appreciates the fact that large swathes of the country haven’t been locked down in a long time, and I think it’s also testament to the fact that Apple isn’t a nimble software development company. That’s not a bad or good thing necessarily. In fact, I think it’s good that Apple’s usually pretty deliberate with its product update decisions. But it took Apple over a year to have it’s product updates reflect the changed market brought about by COVID and the various states’s responses thereto. On the other hand, as an Apple software administrator, I do appreciate getting a year where I can take a break from worrying about a new version of macOS causing me major headaches. I’d give Apple a solid C in the software update department.
Coming later this week: what I’m looking forward to seeing from Apple in 2022.