Ars Technica has the Apple 2015 year in review you’ve book looking for, looking at every product category and summarising the biggest pieces of news. Like they say, Apple’s 2015 was pretty big. Along with the usual iPhone, iPad, and Mac releases, we saw the release of an entirely new product category from Apple in the form of the Apple Watch, and iterative improvements to the Apple TV. Ars also dedicates a number of paragraphs to explaining Apple’s all-encompassing platform strategy at the end, but whether you see that as a benefit or a detriment mostly depends on your disposition to such things.
MacStories has the must-have list of iOS apps for 2015, and since Federico Viticci does pretty much all of his computing from an iPad, you know that all his recommendations are going to be good ones. Breaking the apps down into a number of categories, Viticci’s must-have iOS apps weren’t necessarily all released (or in some cases, even updated) in 2015, but were still good enough to be included, which has to be saying something.
Continuing the theme, Six Colors also had their own list of iOS app recommendations. They covered apps from a wide spectrum, from new entrants like Microsoft’s Outlook app, old favourites such as 1Password, and even Apple’s own Notes app, thanks to improvements in iOS 9.
And let’s not forget Mac apps, while we’re at it. The Mac app landscape may be a thousand times less interesting than iOS is these days, but there’s still a fair few people who prefer working from their Mac instead of an iPad, myself included. Despite the vast majority of my Mac-time being spent in a browser, it’s all the extraneous apps that I’m using that make the Mac the more preferable platform.
A great, if slightly lengthy, editorial from AppleInsider looks for Apple’s next big thing, but only after pointing what an incredible company Apple is. They point out that Apple’s iOS and Mac lineups both bring in comparable revenue to HP’s PC operations, but at 30% profitability compared to HP’s 3%. And that’s not even talking about the iPhone, which despite losing out in terms of smartphone market share, commands an astounding 94% of the profits.
After we finished up last year, CBS aired an Apple-focused special featuring an interview with Apple CEO Tim Cook. Charlie Rose’s interview with the head honcho discussed a number of topics, and while Cook said Apple was still the company of Steve Jobs, Apple’s Chief Design Officer Jony Ive was the other person who shared Jobs’ DNA. The transcript is over at the CBS website, but the video is also worth checking out.
If you needed any more insight into the culture of Apple, the explainer from Kevin Lynch on how the Apple Watch keeps time is an eye-opening look into the attention to detail at Apple.
Fraser Speirs says he’s all-in on the iPad Pro, and to that end, he’s sold off his MacBook Pro. While he’ll still have access to Macs, he won’t be using them for the majority of his day-to-day computing tasks, and it’s all possible thanks to iOS 9 and the incredible hardware of the iPad Pro.
Earlier versions of Spotlight had a more detailed interface than the cut-down version we get with Yosemite and El Capitan. It revealed more detail about your search results, and even though it could be argued that search has improved to the point where those details aren’t required for the majority of searches, it would still be nice to have those options.
A mysterious Apple collector has opened the world’s largest private collection of Apple products in a museum in Prague. It’s a collection of 472 exhibits, covering everything from the evolution of the iPhone to Steve Job’s NeXT business card.
Originally published at: http://appletalk.com.au/2016/01/monday-morning-news040116/
