Apple does not do eras loudly, it does them one product cycle at a time until you look up and the whole lineup has changed. This is the Apple product era that runs from 2022 to 2026, the stretch where Apple Silicon finished eating the Mac, the iPhone went titanium and then impossibly thin, and Apple Intelligence turned the company into a reluctant AI player fighting on its own terms. I covered it as it shipped, so here it is in order.

2022: the lineup matures

The 2022 lineup was Apple consolidating. The iPhone 14 was Apple’s big bet on mainstream innovation rather than spec-chasing, while the Apple Watch Ultra landed as the toughest watch the company had ever built. On software, iOS 16 made the lock screen customizable and changed the whole feel of the phone, and the iPad Pro M2 gained Pencil hover and ProRes video, pushing the tablet further into pro territory.

2023: Apple Silicon everywhere, USB-C at last

2023 was the year Apple Silicon and USB-C rewrote the hardware. The MacBook Pro with M2 Pro and M2 Max got faster in the ways that matter to people who actually render and compile, and then the iPhone 15 Pro brought titanium, USB-C at last, the A17 Pro, and a 5x zoom. The forced switch to USB-C was Brussels winning an argument Apple pretended it wanted to have.

2024: Apple Intelligence and the sovereignty question

2024 is when the AI question stopped being optional. The Apple versus EU Siri standoff set up a fight that will shape AI regulation in Europe, and at the iPhone event the iPhone 16 arrived with Apple Intelligence and a camera control button on every model. Hardware kept moving too: the Vision Pro finally shipped just as Meta showed its Orion glasses, framing the glasses versus headset fight, and the MacBook Pro M4 made 16GB the standard floor. But the post I keep pointing people to is the one about iOS 18 and the on-device AI sovereignty question Apple would not answer, because that is the whole game.

2025: on-device AI goes system-wide

By 2025 on-device AI went system-wide. Apple unveiled Apple Intelligence at WWDC 2025 with on-device AI across the product line, backed by Metal 4 adding native AI to the Mac graphics stack. The hardware statement of the year was the iPhone Air, the thinnest iPhone ever at 5.64mm, and then the M5 chip landed across iPad Pro, Vision Pro and MacBook Pro with a double-digit performance jump.

2026: the refinement year

2026 has been the year of refinement so far. The new iPad Air picked up the M4, iOS 26.5 shipped with new subscription payment options and performance work, and at WWDC Siri got smarter inside the garden but stayed behind everyone outside it. That last one is Apple in miniature: better than it was, still fighting the open frontier with one hand tied by its own privacy rules.

The full timeline

The pattern across these four years is clear enough. Apple finished the Silicon transition and made the hardware absurdly good, then hit the one problem it cannot design its way out of: the best AI right now lives in the cloud, and Apple’s entire brand is built on not sending your life to someone else’s computer. Everyone else is racing to the frontier. Apple is trying to bring the frontier inside the walls, on-device and private and a step behind. Whether that is principle or a trap depends on the year you ask me.