Six Colors’ Apple in 2024 Report Card

Average scores from the 2024 Six Colors report card. Source: Six Colors.

For the past 10 years, Six Colors’ Jason Snell has put together an “Apple report card” – a survey to assess the current state of Apple “as seen through the eyes of writers, editors, developers, podcasters, and other people who spend an awful lot of time thinking about Apple”.

The 2024 edition of the Six Colors Apple Report Card has been published, and you can find an excellent summary of all the submitted comments along with charts featuring average scores for the different categories here.

I’m grateful that Jason invited me to take part again and share my thoughts on Apple’s 2024. As you’ll see from my comments below, last year represented the end of an interesting transition period for me: after years of experiments, I settled on the iPad Pro as my main computer. Despite my personal enthusiasm, however, the overall iPad story remained frustrating with its peculiar mix of phenomenal M4 hardware and stagnant software. The iPhone lineup impressed me with its hardware (across all models), though I’m still wishing for that elusive foldable form factor. I was very surprised by the AirPods 4, and while Vision Pro initially showed incredible promise, I found myself not using it that much by the end of the year.

I’ve prepared the full text of my responses for the Six Colors report card, which you can find below.

The Mac

4/5

Look, as we’ve established, I can now use my iPad Pro for everything I do and don’t need a Mac in my life. But I think Apple is doing an outstanding job with its Mac lineup, and I’m particularly envious of those who own the new Mac mini, which is small, powerful, and just exceedingly cute. I would give this category 5 stars; I don’t because Apple still insists on not making touchscreen Macs or more interesting and weird form factors.

The iPhone

4/5

It’s been an interesting year in iPhone land for me. After the September event, I purchased an iPhone 16 Pro Max, but my mind kept going to the iPhone 16 Plus. I was fascinated by its color, slimmer form factor, and more affordable overall package. I used the iPhone 16 Plus as my primary phone for two months and loved it, but then something happened: much to my surprise, I realized that I wasn’t taking as many pictures of my dogs, friends, and family as I used to with the iPhone 15 Pro Max.

That’s when it hit me. I thought I wouldn’t need all the features of a “pro” phone – and, honestly, since I’m not a professional cinematographer, I really don’t – but in the end, I was missing the 5x camera too much. In my experience with using a 16 Plus, I was able to confirm that, if I wanted, I could live without a ProMotion display. But it was the lack of a third, zoomed camera on the Plus model that ultimately got me. I rely on the 5x lens to take dozens of pictures of my dogs doing something funny or sleeping in a cute way every day, and its absence on the 16 Plus was preventing me from grabbing my phone out of my pocket to save new memories on a daily basis.

I’m glad I did this experiment because it also left me with a couple of additional thoughts about the iPhone line:

If Apple comes out with a completely redesigned, slimmer “iPhone 17 Air” later this year that doesn’t have a 5x camera, I’ll have to begrudgingly pass on it and stick with the 17 Pro Max instead.

Now more than ever, I truly, fundamentally want Apple to make a foldable phone that expands into a mini-tablet when opened. I don’t care how expensive Apple makes this device. I look at the latest Pixel 9 Pro Fold, and I’m very jealous of its form factor, but I also know that I wouldn’t be able to use Android as the OS for my phone.

If it weren’t for the lack of a foldable form factor in Apple’s iPhone lineup, I would give this category 5 stars. I hope we’ll see some changes on this front within the next couple of years.

The iPad

3/5

What can I say about the iPad that I haven’t already documented extensively? I love the iPad Pro’s hardware, and I find the M4 iPad Pro a miracle of hardware engineering with no equal in other similar products. In 2024, I chose to go all-in on the 11” iPad Pro as my one and only computer; in fact, since the MacPad stopped working a few weeks ago (RIP), I don’t even have a Mac anymore, but I can do everything I need to do on an iPad – that is, after a series of compromises that, unfortunately, continue to be the other side of the coin of the iPad experience.

Going into its 15th year (!), the iPad continues to be incredible hardware let down by a lackluster operating system that is neither as intuitive as iOS nor as advanced or flexible as macOS. The iPad is still stuck in the middle, which is exactly what I – and my fellow iPad users – have been saying for years now. I shouldn’t have to come up with expensive hardware-based workarounds to overcome the limitations of a platform that doesn’t want me to use my computer to its full extent. But, despite everything, I persist because no other tablet even comes close to the performance, thinness, and modularity of an iPad Pro.

Wearables

4/5

I love my new AirPods 4, and I find the combination of no in-ear tips and basic noise cancellation a fantastic balance of trade-offs and comfort. I didn’t rely on AirPods Pro’s advanced noise cancellation and other audio features that much, so switching to the “simpler” AirPods 4 when they were released was a no-brainer for me.

If we’re counting the Vision Pro in wearables, for as flawed as that product can be (it is, after all, a fancy developer kit with an almost non-existent third-party app ecosystem), I also think it’s an impressive showcase of what Apple can do with hardware and miniaturization if money is not a concern and engineers are free to build whatever they want. I don’t use the Vision Pro on a regular basis, but whenever I do, I’m reminded that visionOS is an exciting long-term prospect for what I hope will eventually be shrunk down to glasses.

That is, in fact, the reason why I’m not giving this category 5 stars. I really want to stop using my Meta Ray-Ban glasses, but Apple doesn’t have an alternative that I can purchase today – and worse, it sounds like their version may not be ready for quite some time still. It seems like Apple is, at this point, almost institutionally incapable of releasing a minimum viable product that doesn’t have to be a complete platform with an entire app ecosystem and a major marketing blitz. I just want Apple to make a pair of glasses that combine AirPods, Siri, and a basic camera. I don’t need Apple to make XR glasses that project a computer in front of my eyes today. And I wish the company would understand this – that they would see the interest in “simple” glasses that have speakers, a microphone, and a camera, and release that product this year. I hope they change their minds and can fast-track such a product rather than wait for visionOS to support that kind of form factor years from now.

Apple Watch

5/5

Vision Pro

3/5

Home

2/5

My entire apartment is wired to HomeKit, but I don’t love HomeKit because I’m tired of purchasing third-party hardware that doesn’t have the same degree of quality control that Apple typically brings to the table. I’m intrigued by the idea of Apple finally waking up and making a HomePod with a screen that could potentially serve as a flexible, interactive home hub. That’s a first step, and I hope it won’t disappoint. Seriously, though: I just would love for Apple to make routers again.

Apple TV

3/5

Services

2/5

I switched from Apple Music to Spotify last year, so the only Apple services we use in our household now are iCloud storage with family sharing and Apple TV+. I love Apple TV+, but they should make a native app for Android so that I can watch their TV shows on my Lenovo media tablet. As for iCloud, I use it for Shortcuts, app integrations, and basic iCloud Drive storage, but I don’t trust it for work-related assets because it’s so damn slow. For whatever reason, with Dropbox I can upload heavy video files in seconds thanks to my fiber connection, but with iCloud, I have to wait a full day for those assets to sync across devices. iCloud Drive needs more controls and tools for people who work with files and share them with other people.

Overall Reliability of Apple Hardware

5/5

I have never had an Apple product fail on me, hardware-wise, in the 16 years I’ve been covering the company. If there’s one area where Apple is leagues ahead of its competition, I think it’s hardware manufacturing and overall experience.

Apple OS Quality

4/5

Quality of Apple Apps

3/5

Developer Relations

1/5

Other Comments

I’m genuinely curious about what Apple is going to do with Apple Intelligence this year. Their first wave of previously announced AI features still hasn’t fully rolled out, and it’s fairly clear that the company is more or less two years behind its competitors in this space. While OpenAI is launching Tasks and Google is impressing the industry with their latest Gemini models and promising AI agents living in the browser, Apple is…letting you create cute emoji and terrible images that are so 2022, it hurts.

That being said, I believe that Apple is aware of the fact that they need to catch up – and fast – and I kind of enjoy the fact that we’re witnessing Apple being an underdog again and having to pull out all the stops to show the world that they can still be relevant in a post-AI society. The company, unlike many AI competitors, has a unique advantage: they make the computers we use and the operating systems they run on. I’m convinced that, long term, Apple’s main competitors won’t be OpenAI, Anthropic, or Meta, but Google and Microsoft. The Apple Intelligence features we saw at WWDC last year made for a cute demo; I think 2025 is going to show us a glimpse of what Apple’s true vision for the future of computing and AI is.