12 New Product Announcements
MacBook, MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, iMac, Mac mini, Mac Pro, iPod shuffle, iPod nano, iPod touch, Apple TV, iPhone, and iPad. All 12 of Apple's primary offerings received major updates within the last twelve months. Even accessories like the Magic Track Pad and the Apple Cinema Display were updated, along with many software titles like iLife, Aperture, and Logic Pro, as well as core applications like iTunes, Safari and Quicktime. Most of Apple's iOS apps were updated this year as well. A smaller list is what Apple didn't update: Final Cut, iPod Classic, XServe and OS X. iWork doesn't count, since the iPad version made its debut.
11 Hours of Battery Life
While Apple claims only ten hours of battery life for the iPad, and only seven for the new MacBook Air, others have been able to squeeze out as many as 11 hours from each product. When Apple changed the way it calculated battery life, its new calculations tended to be more conservative, which is a refreshing deviation from standard industry practice.
10 More Gigs of Space
Since I became a subscriber of .Mac a while back, Apple has steadily increased the amount of storage available. Not too long ago, the space doubled from ten to twenty gigabytes. With the doubling of the data center in North Carolina, we my be in for yet another bump in the coming months.
9 Cloud-Based Services
While Apple's e-commerce initiatives may be strong, the same can't necessarily be said for the Mobile Me side of Apple's cloud-based strategy. With modest updates to their mail, contacts, calendar, gallery and disk services, Apple has been struggling to keep pace with some fierce competition from all the free services available from Google and others. Apple's recent decision to make at least one of those services free indicates a change in that strategy could be in the offing.
8 Rumors Brewing
Outside the normal product promotion channels, 2010 started out with a tale of woe for a particular Apple engineer who left his iPhone behind. Antennagate reached such epic proportions that Apple held an unprecedented press conference to address it. Consumer Reports added fuel to the fire by denying the iPhone 4 its coveted buy recommendation. Human resources even made a splash as Graeme Devine (top game developer) left Apple, and Mark Papermaster got the boot not long after his hiring attracted so much attention. There was even false speculation that Apple's COO Tim Cook was leaving for HP. How Apple will spend its money has also been a favorite topic. What did Steve Jobs have to offer Mark Zuckerberg over dinner back in October? Then there was the never-ending story of the white iPhone. All told, there were more likely eight new rumors each month in 2010 than there were just eight overall.
7 Colors of iPods
Silver, black, blue, green, orange, pink and red. The new colors of Apple's fifth generation iPod nano. Apple reduced the number of colors from nine to seven this year. I wouldn't read too much into this, as for the most part, Apple is quite color blind in all of its other product lines. Color is more Google's thing, anyway.
6 Strategic Acquisitions
Apple has quite the war chest ready to invest. Provided Apple continues its trend on purchasing companies based on their abilities and patent portfolio rather than a ready-to-market product, I think Apple will continue to be the inspirational thought leader it is today. In the last 12 months, we've seen Apple purchase Liquidmetal Technologies patents for the firm's advanced "amorphous" metal alloys, Poly9 for its online mapping, Quattro Wireless for mobile advertising, Intrinsity for its chip design expertise, Siri for its artificial intelligence, and Lala Media for its streaming media. This trend is very likely to continue.
5 Apple Keynotes!
This year saw the Jan. 27 iPad announcement, the April 8 iOS 4 preview followed by the June 7 WWDC launch of the iPhone 4, the Sept. 1 iPod updates and closing out the year was the Oct. 20 Back to the Mac announcements. It was a roller coaster ride that'll be hard to top in 2011.
4 Different App Stores
Is there an App Store for every Apple product on the horizon? Having software marketplaces for the iPhone, iPad, OS X and Apple TV would be amazing. Apple has to provide some kind of solution for adding new content providers to the Apple TV. Will they follow their own lead and introduce an Apple TV department in the App Store, or will everything be delivered via firmware updates?
3 U.S. Carriers
Verizon may be the most obvious contender as the next U.S. iPhone service provider, but T-Mobile also looms large. T-Mobile may be willing to let Apple own the customer experience, something Verizon seems less likely to do.
2 Potential Steve Jobs Successors
In 2009, there was speculation that Steve's health may impact the future of the company. In 2010, it was the rumored departure of Tim Cook to HP that made people question the line of succession; there's still no heir apparent. Phil Schiller has stepped up his online Twitter presence recently, perhaps as his way of becoming more of a public face for the company.
And an iPhone 5 in Every Apple Tree
We all know it's coming, and if 2011 is like 2010 (and 2009, etc.), this coming June will see the release of the iPhone 5. With carrier expansion, the number one reason not to buy an iPhone will be a thing of the past.
It actually is a catchy little tune if you try to sing it out loud. What was your most memorable Apple related story or event of 2010?
Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req'd):
- Motives and Possibilities for a Big Apple Acquisition
- Why Browsers Don't Matter Anymore
- Why Humans are the Biggest Threat to Cloud Adoption
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