Apple had an extraordinarily busy 2015. Most of its efforts were focused on hardware and software rather than niche initiatives like CarPlay or HomeKit—we got new kinds of Macs, a new kind of iPad, and an iPhone with a couple of twists. And perhaps most importantly, it launched two entirely new platforms with new iOS-derivative OSes, App Stores, and SDKs for developers: the Apple Watch and WatchOS, and the new Apple TV with tvOS.

With those new platforms and the updates to old ones, Apple is building on the platform work it's been doing since it launched iCloud back in 2011. As it broadens and deepens the links between its existing platforms and builds brand-new ones, it makes it more and more appealing for people with Apple products to buy other Apple products. Apple has benefitted from a “halo effect” since the iPod’s heyday, when the popularity of its music players convinced more people to buy Macs. Now the halo has been intentionally baked into all of its products, hardware and software, and the lineup is much larger than it was a decade ago.

Like we did last year, we'll run down Apple's entire lineup product by product, examining where the company went in 2015 and where it's going next year.

The iPhone: Staying the course

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

The iPhone is Apple’s biggest product and a lot of the time it’s where the company innovates first—looking at this year’s iPhone often gives you a glimpse of what every other Apple product is going to implement next year.

The pressure-sensitive 3D Touch screen technology is the most important new thing that Apple introduced in the iPhone 6S and 6S Plus, though the usual camera and performance improvements were nice too. 3D Touch can subtly alter and speed up a few common smartphone interactions, including moving your cursor around in a field of text, previewing e-mails and links without actually needing to switch away from the app you’re using, and quickly performing specific actions on the Home screen within an app.

Otherwise things were relatively quiet on the phone front, which is typical for an “S” year. The 6S keeps the year-old iPhone 6 design feeling fresh, but nothing could have as big an impact on the day-to-day user experience as those bigger screens did.

On the sales side, those big screens earned Apple some big money. The iPhone has never seen a year-over-year sales dip, but the revenue figures for the early months of Apple’s fiscal 2015 were staggering: $74.5 billion in revenue from iPhones alone in Q1, a 46 percent increase from the year before. Revenue increased 40 percent year-over-year in Q2, 59 percent in Q3, and 22 percent in Q4. We don’t have a full quarter of iPhone 6S sales to compare yet, but it’s safe to say that the performance of the iPhone 6 generation is going to be hard to top.

As for software, this was a relatively quiet year. iOS 9 introduced a handful of features for phone users—a low-power mode, Spotlight improvements, and a revamped Notes app among others—but nothing like the upheaval in iOS 7 and iOS 8. The software’s most interesting feature was that it didn’t drop support for any old iDevices, including stuff as old as 2011’s iPhone 4S and iPad 2. That old hardware struggles with the software a bit, but even so, this is an unprecedented level of software support in the mobile world.

2016 is all but certain to bring us one or more new iPhone designs—it’s safe to assume we’ll see an “iPhone 7” and “iPhone 7 Plus” introduced, though we haven’t heard much about them from sources we’d consider to be reliable. Perhaps more interestingly, rumblings about a new small-screened phone to replace the iPhone 5S have intensified.

Rumors about a new small-screened iPhone have existed basically since the moment Apple introduced the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus, so take them with a grain of salt. But since some users actually prefer the smaller size, it makes perfect sense for Apple to continue serving this portion of the userbase (and if the new phone is faster and supports features like Apple Pay and 3D Touch, so much the better).

The iPad: Going Pro, or trying to

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

The iPhone had a huge year in 2015, but the iPad had an identity crisis.

Apple still sells millions of tablets every quarter, and makes tens of millions of dollars doing it. Any other company would love to have such a successful tablet division. That said, sales have dropped about 20 percent year-over-year, and they were already starting to fall in 2014. The iPhone 6 and 6 Plus only appear to have accelerated the trend—for many, bigger phone screens obviate the need for tablets. Analysts also blame longer-than-expected replacement cycles that are a bit less iPhone-like and more Mac-like.

Apple stays mostly quiet about this—during earnings calls, CEO Tim Cook routinely swats iPad-related questions away by saying that he still sees a lot of potential in businesses and in emerging markets. But in the education market, once seen as fertile ground for iPad sales, iPads are losing out to Google’s Chromebooks, which are cheaper to buy and easier to manage. And the very big, very public LA Unified School District debacle didn’t exactly help anything.

Apple's response so far has been to put more space between the iPhone and the iPad, as evidenced by both iOS 9 and the iPad Pro. iOS 9 introduced a few new multitasking features, giving users (well, users of newer iPads, anyway) the ability to run more than one iOS app at once for the first time ever. It doesn’t exactly turn your iPad into a Mac or anything, but combined with the improved support for external hardware keyboards it makes the iPad more plausible as a productivity device.

The iPad Pro is a workhorse of a different color, a huge version of the iPad Air 2 packed with a super-fast A9X SoC and 4GB of RAM. It is, in other words, complete overkill for the current crop of iOS productivity apps, but Apple is using the new hardware (and the accessories, most notably the Apple Pencil) to drive the development of more capable, more serious apps. If that happens, it will be one more thing iPads can do well that iPhones can’t.

Expect the iPad in 2016 to continue trying to better define its identity and get away from the “big iPhone” usage model. iOS 10 should add more multitasking and productivity features (support for some kind of mouse pointer would be nice for the use cases where it makes sense) while refining the ones that are already there (Apple’s multitasking app switcher is poor for anything other than light use, for instance). We’ll be keeping an eye on sales over the next couple of quarters to see if that year-over-year slide slows down, stops, or reverses as a result of these efforts.

The Mac: Experimenting a little while playing it safe

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Apple’s most venerable product line continues to do just fine; it’s not a huge driver of growth, but sales continue to climb by a few percentage points year-over-year even though the lineup has changed only slowly and gradually over the last two or three years.

Apple’s most popular Macs, those in the MacBook Air and Pro lineups, were all given smallish incremental refreshes this year courtesy of Intel’s oft-delayed Broadwell CPUs (the 15-inch Retina MacBook Pro being the one exception; it kept Haswell). Performance went up a little and there were a couple of other interesting tidbits but nothing about them really stands out.

Two members of the family made bigger steps in 2015. The first was the iMac; the 5K Retina iMac got cheaper early in the year and then totally replaced the 27-inch iMac late in the year, and a new 4K Retina model brought that improved display technology to Apple’s smaller Mac. The entry-level 21.5-inch models got a smaller refresh but continue to lack Retina, and we’re still waiting for the entire lineup to get standard SSDs or Fusion Drives, but it’s great to see the whole Mac lineup going Retina one member at a time (the improved color gamut doesn’t hurt anything, either). The new desktop input devices are mostly good, but they cost more than the old ones—this is especially true of the new Magic Trackpad 2, which costs $129 all by itself.

The second is a new arrival with a resurrected name: the just-plain-MacBook is a streamlined, minimalist version of the MacBook Air with a Retina screen, a single USB Type-C port, a new keyboard design with reduced travel, and a Core M processor without a fan. It also introduced the Force Touch trackpad, a pressure-sensitive trackpad that serves as a precursor of sorts to the iPhone’s 3D Touch feature. It uses short vibrations to simulate clicking without actually needing to move enough to click, making it thinner overall and well-suited to thinner and lighter laptops like the MacBook.

This new laptop is a mix of impressive technological achievements and irritating regressions and omissions, a description that more-or-less applied to the original MacBook Air when it launched back in 2008. Its single port might not bother people who never plug anything else into their laptops, but for more “traditional” Mac users it’s definitely limiting, and it doesn’t help that its performance is two or three years behind the current crop of MacBook Airs. But it’s incredibly portable, its screen is worlds better than the Air’s, it’s dead silent, and it manages to deliver solid battery life despite its reduced size and weight.

It’s an extreme version of the MacBook Air concept that launched a thousand Ultrabooks, in other words, just with more features sacrificed in the name of thinness.

The Mac roadmap is still largely tied to Intel’s roadmap, and many of the high-end Intel chips that Apple prefers to use (mostly those with Iris-branded integrated GPUs) aren’t due to launch until early 2016. Once that happens, the MacBook family could go one of two ways: it could continue to use its current designs with new chips. Or the old non-Retina MacBook Airs could be discontinued, the MacBook could be made slightly more capable and take their place as Apple’s mainstream notebook, and the 13- and 15-inch Pros could be slimmed down a bit to provide more powerful alternatives that aren’t massively thicker and heavier than current Airs.

I’m inclined to hope for the latter result, since the MacBook Air and Pro designs are all starting to show their age. The MacBook Air hasn’t been redesigned since late 2010, and the MacBook Pros haven’t been rethought since 2012. Tweaking the lineup in this way would simplify Apple’s lineup without upsetting “normal” people or power users too much—the company would still have a more limited but very light system for consumers and beefier, larger, but more capable systems for pros.

It may also be time for a new Mac Pro revision, since the current machine is two years old and CPUs and GPUs have advanced far enough that upgrades could give buyers a lot more options (most notably, Intel is offering even more cores in its single-socket Xeon CPUs, so new Pros could finally meet or surpass the core count of the older dual-socket Pros). I wouldn’t expect the Mac Mini or iMac to change much, aside from getting new Skylake CPUs from Intel (the new 5K iMacs are in fact already using them)—for the former I’d like to see the return of quad-core CPU options, and for the latter I’d like to see standard Retina screens and Fusion Drives in all models.

Listing image by Andrew Cunningham