Apple is sending out one of its strongest years in recent memory. The iPhone 17 series is one of its best-selling smartphone lineups in recent memory and will help it edge out arch-rival Samsung as the world’s leading smartphone vendor for the first time in over a decade.
But 2025 was significant for more than just iPhones as Apple extended its lead in the ARM chipset race with the M5, which is available on a wide variety of devices ranging from iPads, MacBooks and even the updated Vision Pro.
The AirPods Pro 3 brought class-leading noise cancellation and upgrades in just about every meaningful way over the already great AirPods Pro 2. Despite the largely positive year, Apple also took some risks which did not play out in its favor – namely the iPhone Air.
Apple Intelligence is still half-baked, and the overhauled Siri is nowhere to be found. Here’s what Apple got right in 2025 and what could have gone better.
Winner: iPhone 17 series
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In typical Apple fashion, the iPhone 17 series continued the refinement game and arguably perfected the formula. From a sales perspective, the baseline iPhone 17 is as strong a boost as we’ve seen, and there’s good reasoning – it’s arguably the best device in Apple’s current lineup.
Apple iPhone 17
- 256GB 8GB RAM
$ 789.99
- 512GB 8GB RAM
£ 999.00
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The long-overdue ProMotion display upgrade, coupled with the updated 18MP multi-aspect selfie camera, latest-gen A19 chipset and 256GB base storage, make the iPhone 17 an easy recommendation. And the iPhone 17 achieved all of that while keeping the same starting price as its predecessor.
The 17 Pro and 17 Pro Max brought in a new and somewhat controversial design, coupled with bold new orange and dark blue colors. They are the first iPhones with dedicated vapor chamber cooling systems, and also got updated 48MP periscope telephoto cameras, meaningfully larger batteries on the eSIM versions and 12GB of RAM as standard.
Apple iPhone 17 Pro
- 256GB 12GB RAM
$ 1,098.00
- 512GB 12GB RAM
$ 1,387.95
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Apple iPhone 17 Pro Max
- 256GB 12GB RAM
$ 1,449.97
- 512GB 12GB RAM
$ 1,710.00
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The iPhone 17 models proved to be winners from day one, and they helped Apple extend its lead at the top of the shipment charts across all key markets.
Loser: iPhone Air
For all the hype and anticipation leading up to its launch, the iPhone Air delivered a monumental flop that’s rarely seen from Cupertino. Turns out that consumers are not ready to spend flagship-level money on a device whose main selling point is how thin and light it feels in your hand.
Don’t get us wrong, the Air is an impressive engineering feat with top-notch build, an excellent screen and a flagship A19 Pro chipset, but the camera, mono speaker, and battery life trade-offs are simply not worth it, and that resonates with the Air’s poor shipments.
We’ve seen indications that Apple is not following up with a successor for the Air anytime soon and that it is losing its resale value at a record pace. In addition, the key designer behind the Air has already left the company and the whole situation has reportedly discouraged rival makers from launching their own thin and light phones.
Apple iPhone 17 Air
- 256GB 12GB RAM
$ 799.99
- 512GB 12GB RAM
$ 919.99
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Loser: iPhone 16e
While the iPhone Air is the headline-grabbing flop of the second half of the year, Apple somehow managed to launch another weirdly positioned model with the iPhone 16e. At $599, Apple is asking premium money for what is essentially a device entirely made with recycled parts from previous generations of iPhones and a lot of missing features.
Like the Air, the 16e features a single 48MP camera but with an even smaller sensor and no sensor-shift OIS. While the Air gets a spacious 6.5-inch Super Retina XDR OLED display with 120Hz ProMotion, the 16e only gets a 6.1-inch 60Hz OLED with the older notch, thicker bezels and no Always-On Display (AOD) functionality.
The bigger gripe we have with the 16e is the absence of MagSafe, which has been present on every new iPhone for the last five years. Apple also could have introduced some fun color options with its most affordable phone, but no, you can only get it in boring black or white.
Apple iPhone 16e
- 128GB 8GB RAM
$ 356.80
- 256GB 8GB RAM
$ 515.32
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Winner: MacBook Pro 14 with M5 chip
The latest generation 14-inch MacBook Pro may just be the laptop to get right now. It retains all of the excellent features of its predecessor like the premium build quality, pro-grade Liquid Retina XDR display and 72.4Wh battery cell. But the real kicker that unlocks its potential is the Apple M5 chip.
It may not look like a big upgrade going by the core count and clock speeds, but the M5 chip is a monumental shift in Apple silicon with sizeable gains over its predecessor. You get a vast upgrade on the GPU front with 45% improvement in graphics performance and a Neural Accelerator in each GPU core.
That’s bundled with a 30% increase in memory bandwidth and a 15% bump in CPU multithread performance. And the most impressive bit is the battery life, which has remained consistent across the two generations despite the performance gains.
Losers: Apple Intelligence/Siri 2.0
Making the list two years in a row should be indicative of how big a flop Apple Intelligence is. And while some of its features did make their way to consumers in 2025, the same cannot be said for the smarter Siri assistant, which is now over two years overdue.
Apple’s AI efforts haven’t been easy to praise, and according to rumors, Cupertino has entrusted none other than Google and its Gemini models to power the new Siri. As the saying goes: if you can beat them, go ahead and use their superior AI models.
Winner: AirPods Pro 3
The AirPods Pro 3 arrived on the scene as the long-awaited sequel to the AirPods Pro 2, which were already considered among the best wireless earbuds. As we found out in our review, the Pro 3 delivers best-in-class noise cancelling and transparency modes, alongside excellent microphone quality and generally useful health and workout tracking features.
Apple also managed to improve battery endurance and expand on its class-leading software integration with Live Translation while also offering updated IP57 ingress protection.
