2022 | APPLE | TECHNOLOGY
4 Major Innovations Apple Released In 2022
Stage Manager, MacBook Air and Apple Watch Ultra + one dark horse (FreeForm) have been winners.
Apple has not shown signs of slowing down. Every year those who know better have predicted the imminent fall of the tech giant, but so far, these descendants of Nostradamus (1503–66) have not managed to get their crystal balls right.
Apple’s market cap as of December 16 is $2139.8B. Not bad for an ailing performer that has increased its revenues steadily quarter by quarter and year by year. The latest Q ending in September 2022 brought home $90.146B, an 8.14% increase year-over-year.
Against that financial backdrop, we can assume that Apple has enough money to innovate, explore, and slow down if needed and strategically wise to do.
In this article, I look at four products that made the significant impact on personal productivity.
Apple Watch Ultra — a titan of time and wearable tech.
My friend (186 cm and about 120 kg of pure muscle) took the Apple Watch Ultra from his wrist and handed it to me. When I tested it, I started to salivate like Pavlov’s dogs.
My wrist looked tiny under the watch. For the first time in my life, I wished to be as big as this Rugby guy sitting with me at the cafe admiring the gadget. Silently I thought to myself, I will grow, and one day, I’ll get this. Sweet dreams.
It is a gorgeous monster. It is so shamelessly masculine that even ladies can wear it without compromising anything. And it is beautiful.
Apple Watch Ultra’s design talks about strength, practicality and durability. The screen is spectacular in brightness and colours, and it is enormous compared to my Apple Watch 7. It is so futuristic. It looks like somebody brought it from 2065 to impress us, historical creatures.
– “I bought it because I am running my company daily at the building sites. This Ultra gives me the mobility I need without worrying that I accidentally break it when inspecting the work and helping builders,” explained my friend, “I can answer and make my calls without fiddling with the phone. It’s important when I stand 20 meters above the ground and need both hands to keep me safe”.
For my construction company owner friend, Apple Watch Ultra isn’t so much a fitness tracker but a personal productivity tool. However, he goes tramping with his teenage son and likes the freedom and safety Ultra gives. For him, everything needs to be rugged and robust.
On my list, Apple Watch Ultra took wearable gadgets to a new level. It is almost overpacked with features for extreme use. It sets a benchmark for sure. See the specs here.
MacBook Air M2 — a mobile beast and the beauty squeezed into the same package.
The original MacBook Air was great in principle but not in practice. It was a promise that Steve Jobs so eloquently took from the envelope at Macworld San Fransisco in 2008. Here is a link to the video; Jobs does the trick at 3:22.
However, MacBook Air set a new standard for ultralight laptops in design and build quality. Since then, it has been a go-to laptop for most mobile professionals. Apple improved its performance gradually, but the Intel processors didn’t allow Apple to boost the tiny wonder to its desired glory.
And then came Apple silicon. First, the old design got a new heart when Apple released MacBook Air M1. It was a massive boost in performance, but nothing compared to the MacBook Air M2 that they released this year.
This MacBook Air M2 is something I have never experienced with laptops. I love having my bag light; I hate carrying accessories like chargers but having the lightest possible workhorse with me.
MacBook Air M2 ticks all the boxes and some more. I wrote my first impressions in a previous article, and since then, the device has impressed me daily.
Until MacBook Air M2, I had to have an iMac for heavy duty, but not anymore. I am not a movie producer or video wizard, but I need to work on large video and audio files daily — not to mention my addiction to huge presentations with the Keynote. My Air M2 does all this without a hitch. It works so silently and gracefully with its bright and superior screen that your eyes celebrate and want more. And the battery lasts way longer than my stamina.
As a writer, there is one feature above all that I love about this new MacBook Air M2: the keyboard. It makes writing faster; its responsiveness is just right, and it reduces typos significantly, at least for me.
So, on my list of Apple products of the year, MacBook AirM2 is the clear winner. It is thin, light, super powerful, and so beautiful that it motivates you to work.
Stage Manager — a third dimension deep dive into the daily tasks.
The heart of any digital device is the operating system. We have come a long way from the command-based OS to graphical UIs.
Macintosh OS on personal computers has been leading the way, and the new macOS Ventura is again a leap that others need to copy, follow or be envious about.
The graphical UI has been surprisingly unchanged since the first iterations. The screen has been a two-dimensional space with icons to show the user what’s available. People have used to work in the 2D space both in Windows and Macintosh environments. This paradigm has stood the test of time.
This year Apple changed the game with Ventura. It has a brilliant new way to interact with content and apps called Stage Manager.
Stage Manager builds a 3D view of files and apps on the side of the screen. You can have several sets of these little 3D groupings for different purposes. For example, when I write, I have all I need for writing as one group (dictionary, Grammarly and Pages) with the documents I need to support my writing.
Switching with different groups of files and apps in Stage Manager is so smooth that you don’t even need extra screens but can use your main screen to the fullest.
I wrote an article earlier about Ventura and Stage Manager. See the article below.
The Stage Manager makes working on a laptop faster and smoother. It gives a promise of more 3D -like UI features in the future. I cannot wait to see how Apple will improve it and add more features to the already brilliant productivity tool.
Freeform — underdog that doesn’t bark but can have a strong bite.
The online collaboration grew during the pandemic exponentially.
Tools like Miro and Mural are widely used for digital whiteboarding, sharing ideas and building bridges between insular files and teams who share the ideation process.
Apple has been observing but not offering much in this field until December when they released the new OS updates, and the Freeform app became available for all users.
It has the simplicity and elegance that the other collaboration platforms lack. When I have been using the other whiteboarding apps, they often get so visually noisy and confusing that the productivity goes down, like trying to kill mosquitoes.
Freeform does this way easier and without the need to learn an entirely new UI. If you youse a Mac, iPhone or iPad, you already know how to use Freeform.
Freeform gives you an infinite canvas (boards). You can create and add anything you like on those boards, sharing them with others.
I started to use Freeform for my writing. I collect ideas and background materials (links, files, pictures, etc.) on different boards, which helps me focus on the topic better than linear note-taking apps.
Because Freeform is still a young app, there are some annoying issues. When the board gets big, there is no easy and quick way to pin or mark certain areas and navigate to those parts of the board quickly. It’s all scrolling and zooming, which is not ideal. I hope Apple will add some quick navigation (like pins or area marks) methods to help using larger boards.
Time will tell if Freeform gains more collaboration users, but for a Mac/iOS/iPadOS users, Freeform gives a very nifty tool to brainstorm and organise random thoughts better.
Freeform is available only on Apple devices — so there is no way to use it as a cross-platform whiteboarding tool.
However, compared with the other tools on the market, I have found Freeform is already now handier than the other tools I mentioned. The collaboration is smooth and iCloud sync works seamlessly and quickly. Apple should make at least a web-based app available for Windows users to benefit from Freeform’s simple yet powerful features.
The jury is still out, but the start of the Freeform app is promising.
So, why iPhone and iPad were not on the list?
In my list of Apple’s year, 2022, iPhone and iPad didn’t appear as big winners. They have been gradually improving and setting the bar higher and higher, but the real innovation boost came from, Apple Watch, M2 and Ventura.
It is interesting to see what Apple will come up with in 2023. I am not a great fan of predicting the future and guessing what Apple might be up to.
Instead, I enjoy what is readily available. It seems that Apple has been building their ecosystem so that we can expect gradual and incremental improvements, innovations and services without hiccups. Still, I wouldn’t be surprised if they can again pull the rabbit from the hat and disrupt markets, industries and businesses with something cool and unexpected. It’s something to wait for.
But until something new comes, I am happy to learn more from what we already got. Apple has money, resources and good genes to surprise us again — and hopefully, they do.
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