You can always tell one of those last-minute gifts that’s been hastily wrapped and jammed unceremoniously under the tree.
Gizmodo’s Mario Aguilar says that ”Everything Apple Introduced This Year Kinda Sucked.”
Are you guys still mad about that time you stole an iPhone? That was like, a million years ago.
In 2015, Apple made a series of flashy new introductions of both hardware and software. Several seemed amazing at first, but on closer inspection, they were all disappointing.
Who are you going to believe? Your lyin’ eyes or this absurd, link-baiting hit piece from a site with an axe to grind against Apple? Why, the latter, of course.
You’ve always made bad judgment calls, Todd. That’s just who you are. Like that time you went to Bangkok with that Australian rugby team and ended up spending two years in a Laotian labor camp making off-brand rubber chickens. Ha-ha! Classic Todd!
MacBook
Apple’s latest vision for an overhauled laptop is a gorgeous piece of industrial design that borders on unusable.
The Macalope’s not going to argue that the MacBook isn’t a somewhat compromised device. As a lightweight Retina laptop, however, it still got a lot going for it.
Remember the MacBook Air? Remember the MacBook Pro with Retina? Those were good laptops.
That are apparently no longer sold anymore.
The MacBook is not.
The first MacBook Air was also a compromised device, one that turned into possibly the most successful line of laptops Apple’s ever sold. Is the 2015 MacBook perfect? No. But does it suck? No.
The Macalope knows it’s easier to make a hyperbolic list of perceived wrongs than to discuss more nuanced pros and cons, but that doesn’t make it right.
The long-awaited, and ultra-long-rumored Apple Watch finally hit the street this year and… it’s lame.
Ooh, is it lame like the first iPod was lame? Because that worked out pretty well.
And the watch, like most Android Wear watches, doesn’t do enough to justify the inconvenience that comes with a gadget you need to charge daily.
What is it with this collective obsession about having to charge the Apple Watch every night, like it’s some kind of unspeakable burden we’ve never dealt with before? You charge your phone every night if not during the day as well. The Macalope’s Watch almost invariably has at least a 50 percent charge left at the end of the day. The Watch does better than the iPhone. Does the iPhone also suck because you have to charge it every night?
Apple Music is a regurgitation of the passable Beats Music product it was based on, which was released nearly two years ago. Its newest features, Connect and Beats One, both fell flat. When is the last time you used any of them?
You can have this one. The Macalope still subscribes to and uses Music and, now that it’s available in beta on the Sonos, finds it worth the money. But he recognizes that it’s got enough documented problems that it’s not worth defending.
Apple Pencil
Aguilar’s only complaint is that you charge it by sticking it into the iPad’s Lightning port. Which is dumb until you’re out somewhere and your Pencil is dead but your iPad is full.
Not one word, of course, about how the Pencil is universally praised as a drawing implement. Because we’re not doing any real analysis, we’re just building a lazy laundry list of negatives so we can get back to playing Star Wars Battlefront on the PlayStation 4s we got for Christmas.
Which, admittedly, is a noble goal.
iPad Pro
…
The Surface Book is cooler.
And it starts at only $700 more.
Aguilar rounds out the suckiness with Live Photos (which are, you may be shocked to discover, “a nightmare”), 3D Touch (“less useful than we anticipated” but still “admittedly impressive tech”) and transit directions in Apple Maps because… well, because he needed an eighth thing.
But, dude. Dude. Dude. Dude.
Duuuuude.
You forgot the battery case.
Kind of makes the Macalope think you weren’t trying that hard. Well, that and the whole rest of the piece.
Anyway, look out for that TIE fighter.