It’s time for our annual look back on Apple’s performance during the past year, as seen through the eyes of writers, editors, developers, podcasters, and other people who spend an awful lot of time thinking about Apple.

Interesting numbers but nothing too surprising, it’s a long read but very well worth your click.

The most salient categories for me are the iPad, wearables, and HomeKit.

iPad

If the rumours are true, iPad will have a response to the stagnation on the hardware side soon. Although the feeling that the hardware is ahead of the software is still very strong, iPadOS is still the problem)

Wearables

On the wearables side, the consensus seems to be that aside form AirPods Max the line is strong, and the watches are a bit stable but nothing too exciting after the Apple Watch Ultra.

HomeKit

The criticisms of Apple home is also well deserved. We’ve had month long periods where only I could access all the smart devices in the home app, and when they finally came back old Belkin wemo plugs didn’t really work reliably anymore. We switched to Eve energy plugs with Matter and they have been rock solid, which makes me wonder if the Matter unreliability is more vendor specific.

We also have had a lot of trouble with paired HomePod minis going out of sync and becoming completely unresponsive, to the point that I’ve given up on making them work as a stereo pair.