Let’s start with the company You and your favorite slay queen actually care about.

Okay, Apple. We figured if we’re going to start vetting how well international companies did this year, the one both you and your favorite Instagram influencer care about should be top of the list. This might also be an interesting article to read for long time readers because well, we tend to be VERY critical of good ol’ Tim Cook and friends here. So it might surprise you that in a year where some of our favorite companies have kind of been letting us down, we’d say Apple did an almost perfect job.

2022 kind of started on a high note for the Cupertino firm, with their March “Peak Performance” event showing the company was definitely in flex mode when it comes to bringing more M processor products to the market. Right at the forefront of this was the new Mac Studio, a machine that on arrival made the Mac Pro obsolete and went on to challenge tons of giant Windows desktops, not necessarily always beating them but definitely being impressive for its size and form factor. Simply put, this little thing is the new Mac Pro until the Mac Pro finally moves to M series machines. The Mac Studio also came with the Studio Display, but we’ll jump into that thing a little later. Because next on the list we have the iPad Air, easily Apples best iPad getting the M1 processor. Does it need it? Probably not. Is it awesome that it has one now? Definitely. The iPad Air is still the best working product of a leisure tablet that can become more productivity focused if need be. So simply put this thing could mainly be for reading and the web, but if ure into art or script writing it can totally keep up due to the M1. Simply put, it’s so good that it makes the other two iPads that came out this year look a little confusing by comparison.

Then there’s the mid to bad releases from March, starting with the iPhone SE. Is it good that Apple put out a new one? For the most part yes. Does it now feel too old to really keep existing? Also yes. The 2020 SE is still a solid phone. So much so that this SE feels like it’s just behind for being a 2022 phone with a small screen, giant bezels, one camera, a 60hz display, or even cool Apple features like FaceID. It’s simply too compromised in a world with Pixel 6As and Nothing Phones. But the Studio Display we didn’t expect to be compromised. What seemed like a makeup for Apple’s Pro Display XDR debacle 2 years ago is kind of a repeat of that this year. The Studio Display isn’t a bad product, and as has been shown it can fit the Apple faithful niche pretty well. It’s just not the best display out there either and has glaring flaws hence it not being a home run.

The middle of the year had a smaller set of announcements, though they were all pretty pivotal. First off the line where the M2 machines, the M2 MacBook Pro 13 and the M2 MacBook Air. The former being a bit of a headscratcher while the latter is by far one of the best Laptops of the year. The biggest announcement from that time however was actually iOS 16, which everyone has gone crazy about since it came out. We wrote about how it’s a huge step in the right direction for making iOS more customizable, but also how it’s a sign of how Apple has its users in a choke hold that the literally lose their minds over lock screen wallpapers. A lot of safety features were introduced as well such as Safety Check, and it seems a focus on safety was a huge focus for Apple going into the rest of the year’s devices. This goes along with Apple’s focus on Privacy as well, which has led to the company’s app tracking protection essentially killing Facebook/Meta’s app tracking capabilities on the iPhone and fueled a not-so-quiet war between Apple and Facebook. It does tend to meld into corporate beefs at the end but one can still be very grateful that Zuckerberg and friends can’t track you as easily on the iPhone, or target you with ads. Though the fact that Apple seemingly wants to start their own ad services might not really bode well either, but we’ll deal with that when it finally happens.