2025 Winners and losers: Apple | Infinium-tech

Apple is having one of its strongest years in recent memory. The iPhone 17 series is one of the best-selling smartphone lineups in recent memory and will help it overtake arch-rival Samsung as the world’s leading smartphone vendor for the first time in more than a decade.

But 2025 was important for more than just iPhones as Apple extended its lead in the ARM chipset race with the M5, which is available on a variety of devices ranging from iPads, MacBooks, and even the updated Vision Pro.

The AirPods Pro 3 bring class-leading noise cancellation and upgrades in almost every meaningful way over the already excellent AirPods Pro 2. Despite a largely positive year, Apple also took some risks that didn’t work out in its favor – namely the iPhone Air.

Apple Intelligence is still half-baked, and the new Siri is nowhere to be found. Here’s what Apple did right in 2025 and what could have been better.

Winner: iPhone 17 Series

In typical Apple fashion, the iPhone 17 series continued the refinement game and arguably perfected the formula. From a sales standpoint, the baseline iPhone 17 is as strong a boost as we’ve seen, and with good reason — it’s arguably the best device in Apple’s current lineup.

apple iphone 17

The long-awaited ProMotion display upgrade, along with an updated 18MP multi-aspect selfie camera, the latest-gen A19 chipset, and 256GB of base storage, makes the iPhone 17 an easy recommendation. And the iPhone 17 achieved all this while keeping the same starting price as its predecessor.

The 17 Pro and 17 Pro Max brought a new and somewhat controversial design, associated with bold new orange and dark blue colors. They’re the first iPhones with a dedicated vapor chamber cooling system, and they’ve also got updated 48MP periscope telephoto cameras, meaningfully larger batteries on eSIM versions, and 12GB of RAM as standard.

apple iphone 17 pro

apple iphone 17 pro max

The iPhone 17 models proved to be winners from day one and helped Apple extend its lead at the top of the shipment charts in all major markets.

Loser: iPhone Air

Despite all the hype and anticipation leading up to its launch, the iPhone Air turned out to be a major flop rarely seen in Cupertino. Turns out consumers aren’t willing 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 a great build, excellent screen and a flagship A19 Pro chipset, but the camera, mono speaker and battery life trade-offs aren’t worth it, and this resonates with the poor shipment of the Air.

We’ve seen signs that Apple isn’t finding a successor to the Air any time soon and that it’s losing its resale value at a record pace. Furthermore, the lead designer behind the Air has already left the company and the whole situation has reportedly discouraged rival manufacturers from launching their own thin and light phones.

apple iphone 17 air

Loser: iPhone 16e

While the iPhone Air was a headline-grabbing flop in the second half of the year, Apple somehow managed to launch another awkwardly positioned model with the iPhone 16e. At $599, Apple is asking premium money for what is essentially a device built with recycled parts from previous generations of iPhones and many missing features.

Like the Air, the 16e has a 48MP camera, but with an even smaller sensor and no sensor-shift OIS. While the Air gets a huge 6.5-inch Super Retina

Our biggest complaint with the 16e is the absence of MagSafe, which has been present on every new iPhone for the last five years. Apple could have also 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

Winner: MacBook Pro 14 with M5 chip

There could be a latest-generation 14-inch MacBook Pro Get a laptop now. It retains all 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 unleashes its potential is the Apple M5 chip.

This may not seem like a big upgrade given the core count and clock speed, but the M5 chip is a major change to Apple silicon with big benefits over its predecessor. You get a huge upgrade on the GPU front with a 45% improvement in graphics performance and a neural accelerator in each GPU core.

This is associated with a 30% increase in memory bandwidth and a 15% increase in CPU multithreaded performance. And the most impressive thing is the battery life, which has remained consistent across the two generations despite improvements in performance.

Losers: Apple Intelligence/Siri 2.0

Making the list two years in a row should be an indication of what a big flop Apple Intelligence is. And while some of its features reached consumers in 2025, the same can’t be said for the smart Siri assistant, which is now over two years overdue.

It’s not easy to praise Apple’s AI efforts, and according to rumors, Cupertino has entrusted none other than Google and its Gemini model to power the new Siri. as the saying goes: If you can beat them, go ahead and use their better AI models,

Winner: AirPods Pro 3

The AirPods Pro 3 came out as the long-awaited sequel to the AirPods Pro 2, which was already considered one of the best wireless earbuds. As we found in our review, the Pro 3 offers excellent microphone quality and generally useful health and workout tracking features, as well as best-in-class noise cancellation and transparency modes.

Apple also managed to improve battery endurance and expand its class-leading software integration with Live Translation, as well as offer updated IP57 ingress protection.