アップル2025年：シックスカラーズの成績表

Apple in 2025: The Six Colors report card – Six Colors MENU Support this Site

February 23, 2026 11:22 AM PT

■ Apple Report Card

Apple in 2025: The Six Colors report card

It’s time for our annual look back on Apple’s performance during the past year, as seen through the eyes of writers, editors, developers, podcasters, and other people who spend an awful lot of time thinking about Apple. The whole idea here is to get a broad sense of sentiment—the “vibe in the room”—regarding the past year. (And by looking at previous survey results, we can even see how that sentiment has drifted over the course of an entire decade.)

This is the eleventh year that I’ve presented this survey to my hand-selected group. They were prompted with 14 different Apple-related subjects, and asked to rate them on a scale from 1 (worst) to 5 (best) and optionally provide text commentary per category.

I received 56 replies, with the average results as shown below:

Since most of the survey categories are the same as in previous years, I was able to track the change in my panel’s consensus opinion. The net changes between 2024 and 2025 are displayed below—you’ll note that scores were down in 11 of the 14 categories:

Read on for category-by-category grades, trends, and select commentary from the panelists. (You can also read the entirety of panelist commentary—all 32,000 words—if you are so inclined. I discuss the results and give some of my own opinions on today’s episode of Upgrade.)

Grade: B- (average score: 3.5, median score 4, last year: 4.2)

After a few years of relative stability, the Mac has now given back all the goodwill it earned from our panel with the release of Apple silicon Macs. The issue wasn’t on the hardware side: There was wide agreement that Apple is at the top of its Mac hardware game. But macOS 26 Tahoe was condemned as a disastrous OS release, due to its half-baked visual design that hurt the Mac’s usability. The panel lauded Apple silicon’s continued combination of performance and energy efficiency, but cautioned that the chip landscape and product lineup have gotten a bit more messy.

Hardware excellence

“The biggest compliment I can pay my M4 Pro MacBook Pro is that, apart from the unwieldy name, it’s boring. It’s boring that, unlike my high-powered PC laptop, I don’t need to worry about having a charger on hand. It’s boring that I almost never hear obtrusive fan noise. It’s boring that the screen is beautiful, a perfect size, perfect clarity, perfect contrast, perfect colours, perfect brightness and perfect smoothness.” — Shahid Kamal Ahmad

“Mac hardware is better than ever, with nearly every current Mac (except the Mac Pro) being a strong performer with no major drawbacks or compromises.” — Marco Arment

“I feel that [the MacBook Air has] become transparent. They work perfectly, do what I need, don’t complain, I rarely hear the fan on my iMac, and they are both sufficient for all the tasks I do.” — Kirk McElhearn

“Apple kept the MacBook Air at a pleasing $999, with a base config of 16 GB RAM. All’s right, if not exciting.” — Shelly Brisbin

“Hardware? Great, steaming ahead. Software? Terrible, steaming pile.” — Charles Arthur

macOS Tahoe controversy

“Tahoe is the worst user interface update in the history of the Mac. Every change is either wrongheaded, poorly executed, or both. The Mac remains usable only because of Tahoe’s lack of ambition: it mostly alters the appearance and metrics of interface elements rather than making fundamental changes to the structure of the Mac UI. Thank goodness for that. The bad ideas embodied in Tahoe reveal an Apple design team that has abandoned the most basic principles of human-computer interaction.” — John Siracusa

“Tahoe is the worst regression in the entire history of MacOS. There are many reasons to prefer MacOS to any of its competition, but the one that has been the most consistent since System 1 in 1984 is the superiority of its user interface. There is nothing about Tahoe’s new UI that is better than its predecessor…. Fundamental principles of computer-human interaction — principles that Apple itself forged over decades — have been completely ignored.” — John Gruber

“Mac hardware: stunning in a good way. macOS Tahoe: stunning in a bad way.” — Craig Hockenberry

“I am forced to use macOS Tahoe for work, otherwise there is no universe in which I would have it running on even one of my machines.” — Christina Warren

“The hardware is great. I have a 2025 M4 MacBook Air, and it’s great. But it’s running Sequoia and will be for the foreseeable future. It’s not that Tahoe doesn’t provide some great new features, it’s that as a long-time Mac user, I can’t bear to look at it.” — John Moltz

“Liquid Glass doesn’t shine on the Mac, but there’s more to macOS Tahoe to make it worth the upgrade. Spotlight is a lot more powerful, Live Activities are useful, and Shortcuts are more capable.” — Chance Miller

Some loose threads in terms of hardware

“The M3 Ultra is the latest in a long line of failures when it comes to high-end desktop Mac hardware: late, underwhelming, and fully two generations behind the rest of the Mac line. Meanwhile, the Mac Pro, with its M2 Ultra chip that has lower single-core performance than the two-year-old iPhone 15 Pro, seems well and truly dead.” — John Siracusa

“Mac Pro looks to be abandoned, iMac is getting long in the tooth, and I would love to see a bigger iMac Pro make an appearance.” — Eric Slivka

“Apple’s external displays continue to age, rather ungracefully. Mac users shopping for a display have more options than ever beyond the Apple Store. The Studio Display is too expensive, and the XDR is just… well, there’s a lot going on there. I hope Apple has some new products ready sooner rather than later.” — Stephen Hackett

Grade: B+ (average score: 3.9, median score 4, last year: 3.7)

It was a very good year for iPhone hardware, which helped drive this score up from last year. The iPhone 17 line-up earned a lot of praise, including the base iPhone 17, for adding a bunch of features previously seen only on pro iPhones. The iPhone 17 Pro got a lot of love, too, while the response to the iPhone Air was more polarizing. Of course, the new Liquid Glass design on iOS 26 also came in for a lot of criticism, though many panelists praised it. Generally, iOS is considered the place where Liquid Glass shines best, even if some panelists felt that was damning with the faintest of praise.

The iPhone 17 lineup

“This is probably the best year for the iPhone that I can recall. The hardware is basically perfect across the lineup. There’s no duds.” — Casey Liss

“The iPhone 17 line is yet another strong showing from Apple. The vapor chamber in the Pro models addresses one of the few persistent hardware weaknesses of the high-end iPhones. The plain iPhone 17 is one of the best values in years, adopting many formerly Pro-only features.” — John Siracusa

“2025 brought more iPhones than ever, as Apple leaned into differentiation between models. The iPhone Pro and Pro Max were redesigned to maximize the performance of the camera and the silicon inside. The iPhone 17 gained ProMotion and the always-on display, making it the best base iPhone ever.” — Stephen Hackett

“The iPhone Air, with all its compromises, is the best iPhone I’ve used in a long time. And by ‘best’, I don’t mean technically the best, because it’s not. I mean it in the sense that the iPhone Air is the sort of futuristic, forward-looking, almost impossible product that elicits the same sense of joy and wonder that the iPhone X made me feel in 2017.” — Federico Viticci

“Apple missed the mark with the iPhone Air — too many compromises at too high a starting price made it easy for people to ignore.” — Peter Cohen

“The iPhone Air is the most ambitious iPhone redesign since the iPhone X, and it’s what I use every day.” — Chance Miller

Liquid Glass on iOS

“Liquid Glass works best on the iPhone by a mile. The pearl-clutching about legibility is justified — most of it anyway — but I do love the way things look, and especially, the way they move.” — Casey Liss

“Liquid Glass is not as bad on the iPhone as on the Mac, but it’s still terrible.” — Brent Simmons

“iOS 26 feels like a step backward in terms of design and legibility. I’m annoyed daily by it still after several months of use.” — Matthew Haughey

“I know people are attracted to the ‘fresh’ look, but it’s poorly considered and will age like milk.” — Joe Rosensteel

iPhone 17 value

“The best iPhone for almost anyone this year is the base iPhone — which is an amazing value…. You’re honestly making very few compromises for the cheaper phone.” — Christina Warren

“[The iPhone 17] stands out to me as the best overall iPhone in years, finally with ProMotion and Always-On.” — Chance Miller

“The 16e, I contend, costs too much. If this were $499, I think I would have an easier time defending it.” — Christina Warren

“The 16e seems very expensive for what you get — not really a budget phone, not a particularly small phone, and far less capable than the still-available 16.” — Nick Heer

“The 16e is an excellent platform to allow the cutting of the kinds of corners that pro users hate, while the value-conscious get a very recommendable device.” — Shelly Brisbin

Grade: B (average score: 3.7, median score 4, last year: 3.5)

It’s a new era of good feelings for the iPad, which posted gains on last year’s huge improvement over the no-new-iPads year of 2023. A lot of praise was for iPadOS 26’s new windowing system, in which Apple seems to have figured out how to balance the iPad with a desire among some users for Mac-style window management. Some panelists who said they had drifted away from the iPad reported coming back into its gravitational pull. But as always, some skepticism remains about the iPad’s very reason for being.

iPadOS 26 windowing

“iPadOS 26 is a leap forward in multitasking, finally delivering what iPad power users have wanted for many years: the radical concept of windows.” — Marco Arment

“iPadOS 26 has brought me back to the iPad in a big way. I feel like Apple has finally taken off the training wheels from the OS and let it be the best that it can be.” — Myke Hurley

“They did it! Multitasking the way it should be! iPadOS is as good as it’s ever been, and the hardware continues to be fantastic. But the main question of the iPad remains existential: what and who is it for?” — Dan Moren

“Windows on iPad still have a lot of rough edges, but it’s a change that I’m so glad Apple made.” — Craig Hockenberry

“The course reversal Apple has made for advanced users, from eschewing (often to the point of frustration, sometimes to the point of absurdity) the desktop GUI concept of overlapping windows, to embracing regular old-fashioned GUI windows, was the right call, and a welcome sign of humility. It’s a new start for iPadOS, and I look forward to seeing where it goes.” — John Gruber

“It’s the first time in years where iPadOS doesn’t feel like an afterthought.” — Quinn Nelson

The iPad’s identity crisis

“More than 99% of what I do is better on my Mac, my iPhone, or my Kindle. But if you like iPad, this was a good year.” — Michael Tsai

“I still can’t shake the feeling that, in spite of the outstanding improvements to the platform, the iPad’s app ecosystem ship has sailed, and it’s not coming back.” — Federico Viticci

“Even though multitasking has improved, the app model inherited from iOS is not conducive to power user applications.” — Gui Rambo

“This is the year that Apple finally called our bluff on making iPadOS more useful. My only concern is whether they waited too long. Are users and developers ready to embrace the iPad for more serious work and software?” — David Sparks

“The iPad remains incredible hardware that is, still, let down by its software. Now, far less egregiously so, but let down nonetheless.” — Casey Liss

The hardware lineup

“The iPad mostly took the year off, with only mi