Apple’s incremental 2013—and what to expect in 2014

The trouble with the Apple beat is that everyone wants it to be as exciting and newsworthy as it was in 2007 when Apple announced the iPhone, or in 2010 when the original iPad dropped. Among both the tech press and enthusiasts, Apple is a victim of its own success—every year that the company doesn’t redefine a product category, the pundits get a bit more bored.

In 2013, almost every one of Apple’s new hardware and software releases refined something that came before. While that might seem boring to early adopters, Apple continues to be a master of iteration, improving its products in noticeable and useful ways every single year. Here, we’ll look back at everything Apple has put out this year—and what we might expect in 2014.

The iPhone

Apple put a whole lot of marketing muscle behind the iPhone 5C, which is essentially a year-old phone.

Credit: Andrew Cunningham

In the strictest sense, Apple actually delivered two new iPhones this year: the iPhone 5S and the iPhone 5C. The 5S was the only truly new one, though—it delivered the expected improvements to the SoC and the camera while introducing a new hardware feature in the form of the TouchID fingerprint sensor. In contrast, the 5C is just an iPhone 5 with slightly upgraded cellular hardware and some colorful plastic.

I bring up the 5C’s similarity to the iPhone 5 not because it’s a bad thing, but because it shouldn’t really alter Apple’s iPhone refresh schedule for 2014. If Apple holds to its normal new-design-every-other-year cadence, we’ll get a redesigned iPhone 6 in 2014, which will probably push the iPhone 5S down to the $99 price point and the 5C to the free-with-contract slot.

When Apple introduces a redesigned phone, it also usually takes the opportunity to change the screen. The iPhone 4 got a Retina display, and the 5 moved from a 3.5-inch screen to a 4-inch one. Rumors about a larger screen have been all over the place—some say that the screen could be anywhere from 4.8 to 6 inches, or that Apple could release two versions of the phone with different screen sizes. We don’t doubt that Apple is testing a lot of different things, but the iPhone lineup has stayed pretty simple up to this point; we’d bet on a single model with a faster chip, a better camera, and a larger, possibly higher-resolution, screen.

The iPad

Apple put out a great pair of tablets this year.

Credit: Andrew Cunningham

Apple totally overhauled the iPad lineup in 2013. The iPad Air made the big iPad much easier to hold, and the Retina iPad mini made the small iPad much faster and nicer to look at. Last year’s low-hanging fruit has been harvested, and the result is a pair of excellent tablets.

We wouldn’t expect either the iPad Air or the Retina iPad mini to change much on the outside in 2014. There are some small things we’d like to see in next year’s tablets—1GB of RAM is already a little restrictive for a 64-bit operating system and apps, 802.11n can be switched out for 802.11ac, the air gap between the tablets’ front glass and LCD panels can be eliminated to improve color and contrast, and the Retina iPad mini’s color gamut isn’t all it could be. The iPads are also likely candidates for the TouchID feature, when (or if) Apple decides to free it from its current iPhone 5S exclusivity.

Even if next year’s iPads pick up all that stuff and more, they’ll only be incremental upgrades to this year’s models. What we don’t know is what Apple plans to do about the original iPad mini and the iPad 2, which occupy the $299 and $399 price points in Apple’s lineup. Their non-Retina displays and aging Apple A5 chips are making the $100 savings harder and harder to justify, and it’s here (rather than at the top end) that we’d like to see Apple make some progress in 2014.

The iMac

The 2013 iMac looks like the 2012 iMac, and we wouldn’t expect the 2014 iMac to change much either.

Credit: Andrew Cunningham

2013 didn’t bring us a bunch of fancy new Mac designs—the 2013 iMac, the 2013 MacBook Air, and the 15-inch and 13-inch Retina MacBook Pros look mostly like their counterparts from last year. All of their new stuff is on the inside, and the two biggest upgrades of note were probably Intel’s Haswell CPU architecture and 802.11ac Wi-Fi. The former boosted battery life significantly in all of Apple’s laptops, while the latter can provide much faster wireless throughput if you’ve got a compatible router (that is, once Apple worked all of the bugs out of OS X).

The one Mac that got a visual overhaul in 2013 was the new Mac Pro, which finally got some attention after three long, hard, (practically) refresh-free years. Apple is packing a surprising amount of performance into the new Mac Pro’s substantially smaller, cylindrical chassis, which trades the old Mac Pro’s internal bays and slots for more high-speed Thunderbolt 2.0 ports than you can shake an iPhone at. It’s possible that these Thunderbolt ports will prompt the development of more, cheaper, and better external Thunderbolt accessories. Pros had better hope this is true, because as of this writing Thunderbolt is looking a lot like a spiritual successor to FireWire—faster than contemporaneous USB solutions, but used much less widely.

Apple’s Mac roadmap tends to be tied closely to Intel’s CPU roadmap, so that much about 2014’s Mac lineup is easy to guess: the consumer machines will jump to Intel’s Broadwell CPUs, while the Mac Pro will probably pick up “Haswell-E” Xeons late in the year. Broadwell is only slowly coming into focus, but expect power consumption to be reduced further compared to Haswell thanks to a new 14nm manufacturing process. GPU performance will also continue to increase, which is good news for the increasing number of Macs that rely on Intel’s integrated GPUs. Both the entry-level iMac and Retina MacBook Pro switched from dedicated to integrated graphics this year, and the 13-inch Pro and both Airs have relied on Intel’s graphics for several generations now.

Guessing about the Macs’ designs puts us on shakier ground, but the Retina MacBook Pro, the iMac, and the Mac Pro were all redesigned recently enough that the 2014 models will probably see only cosmetic tweaks, not overhauls. The current MacBook Air and Mac Mini designs will turn four years old in 2014, however, making them ripe for new designs. Rumors of a redesigned 12-inch Retina MacBook Air have been floating around for a couple of months now, though as with any analyst-sourced rumors they should be taken with a fist-sized grain of salt. Retina displays have yet to show up in anything other than the Retina MacBook Pros, and it’s not clear whether all Macs will eventually go Retina one day or whether Apple will use resolution to differentiate its professional laptops from the cheaper, less powerful Airs.

The Mac Mini was the only one of Apple’s Macs not to get a refresh in 2013; whether it will make the jump to Haswell in 2014 or skip straight to Broadwell is anyone’s guess, but it wouldn’t be the first time the Mini was skipped over (there was no Mac Mini refresh in 2008, either).

Software

2013 was a huge year for Apple’s software, even if reviews have been mixed. iOS 7 was the mobile operating system’s first truly all-encompassing facelift. The application suites formerly known as iLife and iWork were overhauled for the first time in several years. On the desktop, Apple delivered a major OS X update for the third time in as many years.

This was also the year most of Apple’s software became free (in the “doesn’t cost money” sense). The OS X and iOS versions of the iLife and iWork software don’t cost money to new Mac and iDevice buyers, and OS X 10.9 is free to anyone with a Mac that will run it. Most of Apple’s “professional” software still costs money—including OS X Server, Aperture, Final Cut Pro, and Logic Pro, among others—but even that is drastically cheaper than it was a few years ago.

A look at any of Apple’s recent earnings releases shows that this isn’t a particularly risky move for the company. The money Apple makes from software and services is dwarfed by the amount it brings in from hardware sales. This is simply the latest step down a path Apple has been walking since it released OS X 10.6 for $29 back in 2009.

Following this year’s excitement, 2014 is likely to be relatively quiet from a software perspective. Look for the iWork and iLife software to get small, continuous updates that add new features and restore old ones. iOS 8 will doubtlessly smooth over some of iOS 7’s rougher corners without reversing course. The next version of OS X will likely be another incremental upgrade and will perhaps pick up a few more iOS-inspired design touches. After a busy 2013, 2014 should be a year for Snow Leopard-style bug fixing and refinement.

Where Apple most needs to improve in 2014 isn’t its software but the services that its software uses. Apple Maps has gotten better since its laughable beginnings, but lack of public transit directions means that it’s not a realistic option for city dwellers. Siri is still prone to lag and inconsistency, and the things it can do pale in comparison to Google Now (even if I have my own reservations about the amount of your data Google Now needs to really function as designed). Some kind of collaborative editing support for the iOS iWork apps would be welcome, too (at present, only the iCloud for iWork versions of the apps support collaborative editing, and they’re designed for desktop browsers, not mobile ones). Apple’s hardware is great and its software is good, but its services are where it’s really starting to feel behind.

The iPod

The fifth-generation iPod Touch didn’t get an update in 2013.

Credit: Andrew Cunningham

Nothing happened to the iPod in 2013.

Apple refreshed its iPods in 2010, then again in 2012. If that schedule holds, we should see modest improvements to the lineup (perhaps with an iPhone 6-like iPod touch) in late 2014. The iPod becomes a smaller and smaller chunk of Apple’s profit pie every year (it brought in $573,000,000 in revenue in Q4 of 2013, compared to $5,624,000,000 for the Mac and $19,510,000,000 for the iPhone), and the amount of attention that Apple pays to the lineup is only going to shrink further.

The great unknown

And that leaves us with brand-new product categories, items that aren’t a refresh or a variation on gadgets that already exist.

It would certainly be great for tech journalists if Apple put out a completely redesigned iPad every six months, or if it introduced some new iPhone that only cost $100 unlocked. Those kinds of moves would be a significant departure from the company’s current strategy, though, and Apple isn’t a company that rushes to fix what isn’t broken. Incremental change is normal, and Apple’s refreshes generally keep its products ahead of or in step with what its competitors are doing.