Jason Snell:
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. The whole idea here is to get a broad
sense of sentiment — the “vibe in the room” — regarding the past
year. (And by looking at previous survey results, we can even see
how that sentiment has drifted over the course of an entire
decade.)This is the eleventh year that I’ve presented this survey to my
hand-selected group. They were prompted with 14 different
Apple-related subjects, and asked to rate them on a scale from 1
(worst) to 5 (best) and optionally provide text commentary per
category.
I still need to polish it up a bit, but per tradition, I’ll publish my own report card shortly. In the meantime, it’s always edifying to read Snell’s summary and the average grades. You’ll never guess which category Apple flunked for 2025. (Spoiler: World Impact.)
Regarding MacOS 26 Tahoe, here are the comments from two Johns:
“Tahoe is the worst user interface update in the history of the
Mac. Every change is either wrongheaded, poorly executed, or both.
The Mac remains usable only because of Tahoe’s lack of ambition:
it mostly alters the appearance and metrics of interface elements
rather than making fundamental changes to the structure of the Mac
UI. Thank goodness for that. The bad ideas embodied in Tahoe
reveal an Apple design team that has abandoned the most basic
principles of human-computer interaction.” —John Siracusa“Tahoe is the worst regression in the entire history of MacOS.
There are many reasons to prefer MacOS to any of its competition,
but the one that has been the most consistent since System 1 in
1984 is the superiority of its user interface. There is nothing
about Tahoe’s new UI that is better than its predecessor….
Fundamental principles of computer-human interaction — principles
that Apple itself forged over decades — have been completely
ignored.” —John Gruber
Siracusa and I didn’t say a word to each other while writing those comments. (If we had, I’d have switched to “human-computer interaction” from “computer-human interaction”.)
