A Look At OS X Yosemite And iOS 8.1
by Brandon Chester on October 27, 2014 8:00 AM ESTConclusion
It has definitely been a busy few months in the Apple world. September delivered the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus, along with iOS 8, and a preview of the still mysterious Apple Watch. This month we got the iPad Air 2, the iPad Mini 3, the iMac with Retina 5K display, iOS 8.1, Apple Pay, and OS X Yosemite. Those last three points are some of the most interesting, and they all happen to be part of Apple's software ecosystem. I don't think that's a coincidence. We're reaching a point where it's becoming more and more difficult to differentiate your products based on hardware alone. Great software driving a great experience is where the focus needs to be moving forward.
Apple's strategy to provide that experience appears to be deep integration of their services across all of their product lines. It starts with the cloud, with new additions to iCloud like iCloud Drive and Photo Library. From there it goes to software commonality, with a design language that exists on both iOS and OS X, and applications that exist on both platforms. On the opposite end of the spectrum from the cloud are the new continuity features which provide integration between all the devices that you have right there with you. SMS Forwarding and iPhone call transferring expands communication on iPad and the Mac to new areas, while Handoff makes the transition between applications seamless and accurate right down to where your cursor was.
What interests me the most about Apple's stategy is how it provides incentive for a user with one Apple device to buy other Apple devices. This exists to a certain degree with other manufacturers as well. If you own a Samsung smartphone, you may be more inclined to buy a Samsung tablet due to the similar hardware design and user interface. But apart from any brand loyalty you feel, you don't really have any incentive to buy a Samsung laptop which runs Windows and doesn't integrate with your other devices. Apple's integration covers their entire lineup of devices. An iPhone user has a lot to gain by choosing a MacBook over a Windows Ultrabook, and an iPad over a Nexus 9. It would be interesting to analyze what percentage of people purchasing a new Apple device already own one or more Apple products.
Overall, I'm happy with the work that Apple has done with iOS 8.1 and OS X Yosemite. It's clear that a lot of this has been in the works for some time now, and integrating products and services to this degree requires a lot of planning to position your hardware and software so that it will be capable of working together in the ways you want them to. The Yosemite redesign has also gone quite well, and there aren't as many jarring inconsistencies as there were with iOS 7 at launch despite OS X being a more expansive operating system. Apple has definitely learned from their experiences with the iOS redesign. That being said, there is still a lot of work to do. Apple Pay needs to expand rapidly, and iCloud Photo Library isn't as far developed as I had expected it to be.
It's hard to say where Apple will go as we move forward. It will be hard to outdo the work that has been done with Yosemite. However, history tells me that there are still great things yet to come from Apple. It seems that year after year Apple is able to make updated products and proclaim them to be the biggest advancements in that product's history, and regardless of my initial reaction, I somehow always find myself agreeing .
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
173 Comments
View All Comments
Impulses - Friday, October 31, 2014 - link
Clearly that just means you're a shill, doing it for the money rather than the love of all things out of Cupertino.jk
KoolAidMan1 - Monday, October 27, 2014 - link
Its all because not enough negative things were said, right?Middle aged fanboys and their unfulfilled negativity quotas, how sad...
retrospooty - Monday, October 27, 2014 - link
Generally speaking tech articles will list the good and bad and diplay it for the user to determine what fits best. I honestly cannot recall the last time I saw anything at Anandtech on the neg. 1/2 of that equation with regards to Apple products... And there has been quite of that alot lately... Anandtech? Amazingly quiet.But, drink on kool aid man. Your name says it all.
KoolAidMan1 - Tuesday, October 28, 2014 - link
Or maybe all the positive reviews you see on the internet are because its actually good?Your love of conspiracies rivals 9/11 truthers
retrospooty - Tuesday, October 28, 2014 - link
OR MAybe I see all of the negative reports of the heinous slowness IOS8 has caused and the various other problems and bugs that go along with it... My once nice iPad 4 is now slower scrolling through web pages than my old Droid3 w/OMAP CPU on Gingerbread FFS. Then I read an article at a once great tech site that has been my home page for over 15 years and see "Its a little bluebird on my shoulder".I am not calling that a conspiracy, but it is a very one sided take on things... Which as I said is par for the course at Anandtech for the past several years. If you cant see that then you are far too biased to even talk about it... Oh wait... n/m
Brett Howse - Tuesday, October 28, 2014 - link
Let's be fair here this is right from Brandon's iOS8 review: "Given that the iPad 3 I have for testing falls into both the Apple A5(X) camp and the iPad camp, I won't be updating it to iOS 8. While the new features like SMS Relay will be nice, the missing features and issues like keyboard lag outweigh the benefits of updating."KoolAidMan1 - Tuesday, October 28, 2014 - link
The iPad Air was my first one. It runs everything great in iOS 8, totally fast and smooth.I can't speak for your two year old hardware. I know my GS3 from the same year was choppy and slow right when I bought it, wifi was bugged after an update, and so on. Brainwashed apologists deflect that but whatever.
Nothing is perfect, even your precious, but try and keep your head together.
retrospooty - Wednesday, October 29, 2014 - link
It doesn't require you to "speak to" it. It's all over the place. The slowness, the apps crashing, even on the pliant 6 and 6 plus.KoolAidMan1 - Wednesday, October 29, 2014 - link
iPhone 6 here, solid. No slowness, no stutters, no crashing. Oh, right, I must be lying...And you're still going with the bendgate thing when only dozens out of tens of millions of units have bent?
Suckers that feed on news cycles are funny.
KoolAidMan1 - Wednesday, October 29, 2014 - link
By the way, I just Googled for "bent iPhone" to see how big it is. The stories run from September 25th to October 1st, then nothing.Only a couple dozen out of tens of millions of units have bent. If this was actually a problem then it would still be a part of the news cycle, maybe even a recall.
I changed my mind. Middle aged fanboys desperately grasping at dead news stories from a month ago are what's actually funny.