Grading my 24 Apple predictions for 2024

Speaking of things I wrongly predicted, considering that it’s the final day of 2024, I’d better check in on how the 24 predictions I made about Apple this year turned out.

I thought this would be a breeze to mark off with a simple 🛎️ and 👎 emojis, but I’d forgotten that I convoluted things by going with (a modified version of) the Connected podcast’s Rickies grading system:

But let’s make this interesting by playing by The Rickies grading system. Correct picks in Round 1 (slots 1-8) and Round 2 (slots 9-16) will be worth 1 point each. Round 3 predictions (slots 17-24), are the riskiest picks and will be worth a whole 3 points each, but any wrong picks in this round will deduct 1 point apiece.

Total possible points: 48

Points earned or lost are noted at the end of each line. Let’s see how I did. 😬

Round 1 (the optimistic picks)

1. Vision Pro will be previewed in January. (👎 0)
2. Vision Pro will go on sale in February. (🛎️ 1)
3. Vision Pro will have multiple storage tier options. (🛎️ 1)
4. The next Apple Watch will be called Series X but pronounced “ten”. (👎 0; It really could have gone either way.)
5. The Music app will get a major revision. (👎 0)
6. The Apple TV will be revised and include the A17 Pro chip. (👎 0; I kind of still think this will happen.)
7. All new Apple TVs and at least some new iPads will be Carbon Neutral. (👎 0; All new Apple Watches and the new Mac mini are Carbon Neutral, but no Apple TV or iPad is yet.)
8. Apple will commemorate the Mac’s 40th anniversary with some kind of video. (👎 0; I’m shocked!)

Round total: 2/8

Round 2 (with a few bummers)

9. Mac Pro will not get a beefier “Extreme” series chip. (🛎️ 1)
10. The iPhone SE will be revised but will be larger than the iPhone mini (and I will be sad). (👎 0)
11. There will be no new Apple external display revisions or introductions. (🛎️ 1)
12. FineWoven products will get a major revision that increases durability and premium qualities, but the brand name will remain. (👎 0; LOL they got all but dropped. FineWoven MagSafe Wallets and watch bands remain without any notable revision in quality, and the iPhone cases are gone.)
13. At least one new face will join and at least one will depart Apple’s Leadership webpage. (👎 0; Agh, so close! Here’s the comparison. Carol Surface is gone, and Luca Maestri’s spot is set to be replaced by Kevan Parekh as soon as tomorrow. Notably, Deirdre O’Brien got her picture updated alongside resuming her role at SVP of Retail + People when Surface left the post of Chief People Officer. No one else on the page has had their picture updated in a long time.)
14. An Apple Pencil Pro will replace the Apple Pencil 2. (🛎️ 1; Okay, technically you can still by the 2nd-gen Apple Pencil, but it’s all but hidden on Apple’s website and we all know that the Pro is there to replace it.)
15. Apple TV+ content will win more Emmy and Oscar awards than in 2023. (🛎️ 1; Past Jarrod assigned more homework for this one than present Jarrod is willing to do, so I’m deferring to ChatGPT for this. According to Chatty G, they got 4 Emmys and 1 Oscar in 2023, and 10 Emmys and 0 Oscars in 2024.)
16. Apple will acquire at least one household name company (think a NeXT, Beats, Shazam, or Dark Sky). (🛎️ 1; I didn’t think I would get this one, but Apple pulled through with its acquisition of the Pixelmator team and apps late in the year.)

Round total: 5/8
Total so far: 7/16

Round 3 (Risky Picks)

17. Vision Pro will ship in March. (👎 -1; It shipped in February.)
18. There will be a Fitness+ aspect to Vision Pro. (👎 -1; Nope. The Mindfulness app is as close as we got. It’s probably too big and bulky for anything active.)
19. AirPods Max will get a revision that includes lossless audio and a lighter-weight design. (👎 -1; Apple was so lazy with this update that you could say it lost lossless audio since it no longer supports a headphone jack cord.)
20. Lossless audio and other high-bandwidth device-to-device data transfer will be enabled through Ultra Wideband radio chips. (👎 -1; A big ol’ bummer. I haven’t stopped thinking about this possibility since John Siracusa implanted it in my brain nearly three years ago.)
21. iPadOS will gain multi-stream audio capabilities, good for podcasting from the iPad. (👎 -1; Another nada, although Federico Viticci has cooked up ways around this to record podcasts from his iPad.)
22. Shortcuts Personal Automations will come to the Mac. (👎 -1; “Shortcuts is the future of automation on Mac” my ass.)
23. Always-on system extensions will be introduced in iOS/iPadOS to enable things like third-party clipboard managers, text expansion, or launcher apps. (🛎️ 3; I’m really jonesin’ for a win here, so I’m counting this even though it’s not available here in the U.S. The European Union’s mandate for sideloading got a clipboard manager, Clip, on the iPhone.)
24. Apple will host at least one live event with presenters and an audience in the Steve Jobs Theater. (👎 -1; I could have awarded myself points here seeing as Apple did host a live moderated discussion with iJustine from the Steve Jobs Theater during WWDC. But it wasn’t live streamed, just live-blogged like olden times, and wasn’t what I was picturing when I said a “live event”.)

Round total: -4

Grand Total: 3 out of a possible 48 points

That point total looks pretty harsh but The Rickies are notoriously difficult to score highly in. I’m satisfied with getting 8 out of the 24 predictions correct. And Round 2 was particularly pleasing!

Putting my money where my mouth is

No one else joined in my challenge to make their own predictions and pool money toward a winner, but I’ll make good on the promise to award the Winner (me) $3 and the compel the Loser (also me) to make a donation of the difference ($45) toward a worthy charity.

I’d better start brainstorming for 25 predictions in 2025!

Bets