Since 2019, it has been my recurring pleasure to be invited to Jason Snell‘s Six Colors Apple Report Card. New for this year, I had the presence of mind to retain my original responses; these were submitted on January 15, 2025.
As always, Six Colors edits and publishes their own summaries.
The Mac
| Score | 5 |
| Comment | The M4 generation looks to be one of leveling up across the product line. More like this, please. |
The iPhone
| Score | No response. |
| Comment | This iPhone SE user looks forward to the next iteration of the iPhone’s value entry. |
The iPad
No response.
Wearables (overall)
| Score | 4 |
| Comment | AirPods Pro 2 continues to be my most consistently superlative purchase in some years. |
Apple Watch
| Score | No Response |
| Comment | Might Apple Watch’s greatest impact be a generational change in product naming? Since the Watch, Apple’s wholly new products and services have followed its naming convention of “Apple Product”, with “Product” being a generic category word. Since then, Cisco retired “AnyConnect” for “Cisco Secure Client”; Dell retired years of brand equity for a confusing convention of ”Dell Adjective”. Is “Ford Truck” next? |
Vision Pro
| Score | 2 |
| Comment | Barely one year into the Vision Pro’s product life, I see it like early days of the Watch — also introduced with a set of features that showed a puzzling lack of vision. Over time, the Watch found its market of utility, and apps sprung up around it. We’ll see if the same happens with Vision Pro. Meanwhile… is Vision Pro, like Apple Intelligence, a case of organizational FOMO leaking out to product? I, for one, have zero interest in “strap something to my face” computing. |
Home
| Score | No response. |
| Comment | This technology enthusiast has yet to embrace Home, or any of the “smart” home generations. All I hear about it is janky futzing and interoperability issues. These sound like problems, not solutions. Call me when it achieves the “Spouse acceptance factor” that TiVo had in 2000. |
Apple TV
| Score | 4 |
| Comment | Nearly all our TV viewing goes through our Apple TV 4K. In the “streaming box” category, Apple competes at 5-10x the cost of its popular rivals. As a middle-aged technology nerd, I value its user experience and privacy stance. My college-aged kids are content with the built-in TV apps, or a $25 stick from Roku or Amazon. AppleTV can play more roles than just a streaming box; is the whole in fact greater than the sum of its parts? |
Services
| Score | 5 |
| Comment | In the name of all that is holy, Siri and Apple Music‘s default for “play this song” to be the most recent release version in my library needs to be stopped. If I say “play the song Born to Run”, the original 1975 release is the only correct answer. |
Overall reliability of Apple hardware
| Score | 5 |
| Comment | No response. |
Apple OS quality
| Score | 3 |
| Comment | The Apple Intelligence rollout has been a FOMO-fueled own goal. The aggressive advertising is belied by the incremental feature rollout, the hoisted petard of notification summaries, the doesn’t-pass-the-red-face “beta” excuse, and the unknown timeline of fulfilling the 2024 WWDC announcements. As I type this, the lying eyes of Apple Intelligence news summaries are reaching the mockery strata once held by Newton poetry. |
Apple apps
No response.
Developer relations
No response.
Apple‘s impact in the world
| Score | No response. |
| Comment | In the wake of Tim Cook’s political donation, I expect this category to be spicy. |
Other
| Comment | Apple’s Enterprise Workflow teams continue to do the Lord’s work. They bridge the gap between a remarkably difficult customer base and internal development priorities in which “the enterprise” is likely an afterthought, if it exists at all. We have become accustomed to new features having little to no available controls, and those that appear seemingly hastily bolted together. Apple is a customer-forward company but has yet to embrace the notion that the end user may not be the customer; that the customer may have primacy over the user, and the user is a risk being managed. |