What a year 2011 has been in the Apple world, and not entirely for the reasons we all remember. Sure, new Macs, iPads, and iPods came out along the way, but the year was largely marked by events that reverberated within the Apple universe. After all, the Apple ecosystem is about much more than Apple itself, and new developments can take on a life of their own under the right conditions. So here are our picks for the top stories of the year from Ars Technica's Infinite Loop:
Steve Jobs passes away: The sad event that stands out above all else the death of Apple cofounder and former CEO Steve Jobs. When he resigned from the CEO position just a month and a half earlier, Apple-watchers suspected that there wasn't much good news to follow, and he ended up succumbing to side effects related to his pancreatic cancer just one day after Apple's fall media event, where the new CEO Tim Cook presented in lieu of Steve. We haven't spent much time yet under the new Cook regime, but it's clear he has already begun to imprint his own personality on the company with the introduction of an employee charity matching program.
Mac OS X 10.7 Lion is released: For Mac users, nothing is more exciting (or scary, as the case may be) than a new major operating system release. Mac OS X 10.7 (Lion) made its debut in July and, as usual, John Siracusa put the OS through its paces. The release has been somewhat controversial among the nerd crowd, and some members of the Ars staff have yet to be won over, but overall the Mac community seems to have embraced the features that come with Lion. Apple later added iCloud support as part of a software update, fleshing out Lion's feature list, and users are still keeping their fingers crossed for iMessage support under Lion so they can text their friends using iOS devices.
Malware on the Mac: finally cause for concern?: 2011 was the year the Mac apparently became popular enough that malware ended up infecting a non-zero percentage of users. When the news first broke about the MAC Defender scareware making its way around to Mac users, we were skeptical that it would catch on, but the software ended up taking off better than we expected. When we interviewed a number of Mac support specialists (including several Apple Store geniuses), most were surprised at the uptick in malware cases they had seen in recent months. Apple ended up adding MAC Defender and its variants to its malware definition list built into Mac OS X, and although the scammers made some effort to get around the built-in protections, we haven't heard much about the scareware since. Knock on wood.
Does Apple still care about creative pros? Apple's release of Final Cut Pro X at midyear did not go over well with professional video editors—the demographic that Apple has historically targeted with its Final Cut suite. But in a world of new product releases that generate grousing from hardcore user bases, this release stood out. The new product was not backwards compatible with past Final Cut projects in any way, shape, or form, and a number of features and UI elements that pros found themselves relying on went missing. Many users argued that Final Cut Pro X was more like "iMovie Pro" than a successor to the previous version of Final Cut Pro, and we made the argument that Apple was abandoning its pro users with this release. Apple did end up selling through some of its old stock of Final Cut Studio, but there remains little-to-no long term solution for videographers who were reliant on the suite. What's next, an iMac-shaped Mac Pro?
How Apple tracks your location without consent, and why it matters: "Locationgate" became one of the most talked about tech phenomenons in 2011—and not just among geeks. It all started when security researchers exposed parts of iOS that allowed regular people to spy on where the phone has been, even when the owner turned Apple's location services off. But the phenomenon didn't just stop at Apple; Google and Microsoft eventually came under fire for engaging in similar (if not exactly the same) location "tracking," and the issue became big enough that a Senate Committee held a hearing just to discuss what went wrong and what Apple and Google were doing to ensure it didn't happen again. Apple blamed its own folly on a bug and ended up issuing a software update that made sure to limit the size of the location cache and erase it altogether when location services were turned off. Still, the whole incident was a stark reminder that those devices we all carry around in our pockets might be doing a lot more than we—and even sometimes the companies who made them—thought they were.
Apple goes to battle against patent troll: The concept of the "patent troll" has slowly made its way into the everyday vernacular in recent years. A company named Lodsys perhaps inadvertently made itself the spokes-company of such a group when it began going after independent third-party app developers for allegedly violating patents built into Apple's own APIs. Lodsys then began expanding outside of the Apple world—why discriminate?—and began going after Android developers too for using APIs that were supposedly already covered by the APIs they were using. Apple's attempt to intervene on behalf of developers didn't seem to go over well with Lodsys, but the situation became big enough in the minds of regular people that radio show This American Life did an entire episode on patent trolls, centering around Lodsys and its apparent parent company, Intellectual Ventures. We haven't heard much in recent months about Lodsys' antics, but we don't expect them to fade into the ether. We have a sneaking feeling that we'll be hearing more from these guys in 2012.
Why Steve Jobs cried: Following the death of Steve Jobs, the world was primed for the one and only authorized biography of the man responsible for all these gadgets we love so much. Jobs chose biographer Walter Isaacson to carry out the momentous task of documenting his life, and when the book came out just weeks after Jobs passed away, we (and everyone else on earth) were ready to gobble it up. What everyone learned was simultaneously surprising and not—Jobs was a complex man who lived his life with a level of intensity that resulted in great achievements peppered with turmoil. While we weren't huge fans of the book, it did have its merits—after all, it contains the only first-person accounts from Steve Jobs about most things that happened in Apple's history and, more interestingly, his personal life. Apple-watchers will look back and remember 2011 as the year Jobs passed and the year Isaacson's book came out, hand-in-hand, and that's part of why we included it in our yearly wrap-up.
Listing image by Photo illustration by Aurich Lawson
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