Forums | MacLife

Best:  Mac Mini
Worst:  Continued frustration with iMovie

Best: Dramatic increase in discounts in the refurb store. Used to be the best you ever saw was maybe 11% off, now 33% or more is common.

Worst: Aperture

Worst: Dropping FireWire from the entire iPod family.

Best: Either the Quad core PowerMac G5 or the new iMac.

Let's not fill you in and say we did.

(It transfers faster with larger amounts of data. Not bad for nano and smaller, but one hell of a time for people with a bunch of video on a 60 Gig iPod. Also, many older macs don't have USB 2.0, but do have FireWire. Those are the complaints. Please no discussion.)

All in all 2005 was a big "meh" for Apple I think.
The Mini turned out to be exactly what I expected and that was not a good expectation. All the cutsie portable audio gadgets bore the crap out of me.
Aperture fell so short of the hype I was embarrassed for Apply by proxy.
The built in iSight just seems pointless, so much for any versatility in a web cam. People do like to point them other than straight ahead sometimes, at least from what I have seen.

The surprise of the year for me was that I actually use the new Podcast thing in iTunes. I was positive that was going to be pointless for me but I found a couple of very nice photography geek podcasts that I listen to all the time.

Best: Quad G5, improved Mac sales/marketshare

Worst: Forgetting it's a computer company.

I understand those contradict.

Best: Switch to Intel

Worst: Killing of free music vids on iTMS

Worst runner up: iPod's mediocre video playback capability

was it this year that Gates was demoing some MS tripe and the thing crashed at some convention? a few weeks later Steve was doing his keynote speech and had some kind of a screen freeze? the difference was that in a few seconds Mr. Jobs was back in action because , as he said "we have backups" I of course found this the funniest thing.

Worst, hmm... the loss of the power pc.   best: having friendly debates with my old manager about PC vs Mac and when I asked him for a file he confessed his C:\ was being formatted from some form of virus and he lost everything. But of course he could play NFS:underground on his PC

The Good: Mighty Mouse
                iPod shuffle
                Mac mini

The Bad: .Mac (maybe it's not just '05, but Apple needs to beef it up to get me to renew)
              iPod nano scratching, (Sure, it did get overblown by the media looking for something wrong with the high profile launch, but apple should have handled it better)

Pariah wrote:

All in all 2005 was a big "meh" for Apple I think.

I was going to make this an Apple's Best of 2005, but I realized I could come up with just as many or more bad things as I could good things. I agree with you.
2005:
2006:

There were a lot of good/bad things.  I'll start out with my good:

1. The Intel switch and the fact that Apple gave everyone a year to get ready for it.

2. The eyeMac with it's built in webcam.

3. iPod videos and nanos

4. The design of the Mighty Mouse

And my bad:

1. Getting rid of the iPod mini

2. Getting rid of the eMac (which spanked the mini in testing and was a better bargain)

3. The quirkiness/fickleness of Mighty Mouse

4. The bitch slapping of Firewire from the iPod lines.

5. FUD about the Intel switch (including "I'm 100% sure this machine will dual boot even though they haven't been released yet")


Funeral of the Year: AppleWorks

Most likely funeral of next year: OS 9 and below

Prediction for next year: Apple striking up a deal with Yahoo/MSN for integration with iChat.

Best: AAPL stock price.

Worst: Aperture.