Apple's 2013 Scorecard
At the beginning of last year, I posted a list of things Apple can and should do during 2013. It's time to settle up. Because I'm feeling scholastic, I'll give a letter grade to each item. — Ship OS X 10.9 and iOS 7. Done and done, with only a few minor bumps in the road.
Context & Ripple Effects
The year-end Apple gradebook is an established genre: Valleywag ran the same exercise against the original 2007 iPhone launch, and John Siracusa's Hypercritical post carries the format forward with letter grades against a pre-set list of things Apple "can and should do" in 2013.
What makes 2013 gradeable is that the checklist was largely met — the confirmed record shows OS X 10.9 and iOS 7 both shipped within the year, capped by the reimagined Late 2013 Mac Pro that debuted at WWDC and reached reviewers and iFixit teardowns by December 31. The pickup list tells its own story: AppleInsider, Daring Fireball, @gruber and @siracusa all carried the item on or about January 3, meaning the scorecard landed squarely inside the core Apple-commentary circle rather than radiating outward.
First-order effects
- Siracusa's verdict — shipping both major OS updates in one calendar year, with only minor bumps — publicly validates the dual-platform release cadence Tim Cook's Apple committed to in 2013, giving the company a clean bill on its most visible deliverables.
- The piece hands every other Apple commentator a ready-made template: a named checklist, published in advance, settled in public after the fact.
Second-order effects
- Rival Apple outlets now have incentive to publish their own advance lists for 2014, since the grading format generates link traffic and lets syndicators like Daring Fireball and AppleInsider react rather than report — the same-day pickup cluster shows how cheaply the genre travels.
- A scored year raises the bar for 2014: any slipped ship date or delayed refresh lands against a documented promise instead of vague expectations.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, independent analysts become a standing accountability layer over Apple's release discipline — an informal scoreboard that persists regardless of whether the company ever acknowledges it, shaping how each year's output is remembered before official narratives set in.
- The deeper question the format poses is whether annual public goal-setting by outside observers measurably influences a company that plans its roadmap years ahead, or simply formalizes hindsight into grades.
The trend: Independent Apple commentary is consolidating around annual, pre-committed scorecards that turn product-delivery cadence into a public accountability exercise.