<2016 ∕ 51>

Interviews with people familiar with Apple’s inner workings reveal that the Mac is getting far less attention than it once did. They say the Mac team has lost clout with the famed industrial design group led by Jony Ive and the company’s software team. They also describe a lack of clear direction from senior management, departures of key people working on Mac hardware and technical challenges that have delayed the roll-out of new computers.

“Some folks in the media have raised the question about whether we’re committed to desktops,” Cook wrote. “If there’s any doubt about that with our teams, let me be very clear: we have great desktops in our roadmap. Nobody should worry about that.”

Once our official testing was done, we experimented by conducting the same battery tests using a Chrome browser, rather than Safari. For this exercise, we ran two trials on each of the laptops, and found battery life to be consistently high on all six runs. That’s not enough data for us to draw a conclusion, and in any case a test using Chrome wouldn’t affect our ratings, since we only use the default browser to calculate our scores for all laptops. But it’s something that a MacBook Pro owner might choose to try.

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The iPhone came out in 2007. So why was Apple still paying taxes like it was 1990?

Are the new Apple AirPods worth the wait? Only one way to find out. Ladies and gents, hold onto your headphones seats, it’s teardown time!

AirPods feel like a classic Apple product. Its custom hardware and tweaked software interact to create a product that’s packed with high technology but never feels complicated or flaky. They are exactly what you’d imagine if I told you that Apple was making a set of completely wireless earbuds. You pop them in your ears and go—they really do just work.

“Personally, I’ve never found being on the sideline a successful place to be,” writes Cook. “The way that you influence these issues is to be in the arena. So whether it’s in this country, or the European Union, or in China or South America, we engage. And we engage when we agree and we engage when we disagree.

The study found that even when people think they aren’t being careless or deliberate in breaking their phones, if there’s a better version of the product available or soon to come, they’re more likely to neglect their products.

2016 has been the year that I got used to iOS as my primary computing platform. After years of slowly transitioning from macOS, 2016 was all about optimizing my workflows and getting the most out of my iPhone and iPad.