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‘Tis the season to be jolly — or, if you’re a tech writer hoping to score enough clicks to help pay off the post-Christmas credit card, ’tis the season to label this the worst year for Apple since records began.

From Gizmodo’s restrained “Everything Apple Introduced This Year Kinda Sucked,” to The Verge calling this the year Apple spent in beta, to Bloomberg banging the “lemon of the year” gong for the Apple Watch, pundits aren’t exactly being kind to Cupertino as 2015 draws to a close.

But, you know what? They’re dead wrong. This was the most important year for Apple since 2007, when Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone.

Twitter has hired away Apple’s Director of Worldwide Inclusion & Diversity, Jeffrey Siminoff, who will join the microblogging company as its new VP of Diversity and Inclusion from January.

Pretty much everyone who met or worked with Steve Jobs has some anecdote about Apple’s late CEO that shines a light on an aspect of his personality and/or approach to life.

The latest is Evan Doll, co-founder of news reading app Flipboard, who worked at Apple from 2003 to 2009. In a series of tweets, Doll recalls the time Jobs was asked why Apple didn’t better remunerate its engineers.

Jobs’ response was classic Steve: part obfuscation, part passive-aggressive masterclass, all while subtly (or not-so-subtly) reminding the asker that they were lucky to be at Apple, and that it was their own fault if they weren’t being paid more.

User privacy has been a massive focus for Tim Cook during his time as CEO at Apple, but it’s apparently not an area of much concern for North Korea’s OS X ripoff RedStar OS.

The operating system, which borrows Apple’s “look and feel” but little else, is basically the “wet dream of a surveillance state dictator,” according to security researchers who analyzed RedStar OS.

Johny Srouji may only have been an Apple Senior Vice President for a hot minute, but already he’s reaping the benefits of his new position — courtesy of the festive awarding of restricted stock units currently valued at $9.6 million, plus common stock holdings worth $10.9 million.

It looks like Kris Kringle spent quite a bit of time delivering iPhones and iPads this year. Apple still remains very much in the dominant position for the tech logo people find most under their Christmas trees. The company garnered almost half of the market share — 49.1 percent, to be exact — for device activations this holiday season, far ahead of the usual runner-up, Samsung.

Apple might need to play catch-up on virtual reality in the coming year. Oculus, Samsung and Sony are already promoting their own brand of VR headsets and technologies.

Virtual reality is the next big thing. As such, we undoubtedly will see a ton of it at the upcoming Consumer Electronics Show. But one analyst already jumped in with his predictions about Cupertino’s chances for another hit product in the VR space.

Verizon Wireless is just about matching the deal other carriers have offered for a while to entice customers on other networks. It’s essentially offering to buy you out of your contract with up to $650 per line, less the trade-in value of your current device. But Verizon also has a few extra bonuses to brag about.

iOS 9 finally brought split-screen views to the iPad, but it’s still not nearly as useful as the windowed multitasking views you get on a Mac. Developer Steve Troughton-Smith has come up with a much better solution with a new proof-of-concept called iOS window management that would bring the joy of working in a windows environment to the iPad.

Apple already has the foundation built thanks to UIKit. It only took Troughton-Smith 500 lines of code to build the concept with the UIWindow subclass, allowing individual app screens to be resized an overlaid on top of each other.

Check out the concept video:

Just when you thought it was hard to achieve a first in flight in this day and age, a city near Las Vegas has broken ground on what is believed to be the first commercial drone airport.

The Aerodrome, a non-profit in unmanned aircraft education, has partnered with Boulder City, Nevada to develop the droneport. The 50-acre site about 28 miles from the Las Vegas Strip is already partially operational but won’t be complete until 2018.

The makers of a tiny (but badass!) new LED flashlight say they took inspiration from the 9mm bullet, but Apple’s incessant drive toward miniaturization seems at least as much of an influence.

You can almost hear the dulcet tones of Jony Ive’s voice in the description of the Bullet, which its maker calls “the tiniest flashlight on Kickstarter.”

Rapper, producer and dance meme-maker Soulja Boy finally removed his regrettable Gucci forehead tattoo over Christmas weekend, and to celebrate he released a fresh new song that’s all about his love of Steve Jobs’ greatest gift to gangsters: the iPhone.

The new meme-worthy trap song blasts the same highly repetitive lyrics and catchy trap beats that turned Soulja Boy into a sensation in 2007 with his hit “Crank That.” Aptly titled “Trappin On My iPhone” (but not to be confused with Bigg Quan’s “Trappin Off My iPhone“), the ridiculous new song contains more than 40 iPhone references and talks about why true CEOs of the streets manage drug empires with the best smartphone, instead of a lame flip-phone burner.

Listen to the song below:

As far as party invitations go, this may be the only one that asks unattractive people to stay away – unless of course they can produce a tax return at the door that shows a yearly income above $200,000.

Luxy, the dating app for only the wealthiest, will be hosting a series of singles nights around the globe next year. If you find such an invitation rude, you probably weren’t going to make it past the door anyway.

OpenEmu, the ultimate old-school game emulator for OS X, just got even better. A beefy update brings an improved user interface, real-time game rewinding and — best of all! — support for an additional 16 game consoles, including the Nintendo 64, PlayStation 1 and PlayStation Portable.

If all of the big boys’ flagship phones – the iPhone 6s Plus, the Google Nexus 6P and Microsoft’s Lumia 950 XL – raced in NASCAR, which would be the fastest phone around? This speed-test video puts that concept to the test, making all three phones “run laps” to see which is the fastest.

Tis the season for playing around with weird iOS apps with your friends and family, and boy, do we have a doozy for you. It’s called Face Swap Live, and it does exactly what it says on the tin.

Although Fitbit may consider the Apple Watch a technical threat, Apple’s smartwatch didn’t seem to hamper Christmas sales any for the company: the market-leading activity tracker seems to have had a huge sales surge thanks to Christmas. Could Fitbit have outsold the Apple Watch this Holiday season?

This week on Cult of Mac’s podcast: We venture into very heart of Apple, inside Jony Ive’s super-secret design lab, and what we find is amazing. Plus: the best holiday iOS App Store deals and our favorite movies of 2015!

Our thanks to FreshBooks — the easy-to-use invoicing software designed to help small business owners get organized, save time invoicing and get paid faster — for supporting this episode. Get started with a free trial at Freshbooks.com/cultcast.

In addition to rounding up the best stories of the year, we’re also showcasing the weirdest of 2015, and we can’t do that without including the sickest burns people laid down over the past 12 months.

It’s always strange when companies and CEOs snip and snap at each other like annoyed children. We should expect them to be above that sort of behavior, but guess what? They totally aren’t.

Here are some of the most blistering insults of the year.

If you got new devices for Christmas, don’t just put the old ones in a drawer — use Cult of Mac’s buyback program to get paid for them today!

Happy holidays everyone, however you celebrate it: Merry Christmas, happy Hanukkah, kickin’ Kwanzaa and a tipsy New Year!

We trust you’re in the company of family and friends, stuffing your faces and giving and receiving in the best spirit of the holidays.

Things are going be quiet around here for a few days while we enjoy a short break. We have a great Mighty Mac Freebies giveaway and several more “best-of-the-year” posts coming up.

We’ll be back in the New Year with a bang from Las Vegas! We have a crew heading to CES 2016, bringing you all the best in tech.

Meanwhile, take it easy on the eggnog.

Leander Kahney
Editor & publisher

It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas, so we’ve decided to unleash our weekly magazine stuffed full of great Apple news, reviews, and how-tos for your yuletide pleasure.

This week, we’ve got a peek inside Apple’s super-secret Industrial Design team, the ten best iOS games from this past year, a plethora of setup guides for all your shiny Apple gear, and a look at some of the year’s most dedicated iFans.

Here’s the rundown this week.

One of the most surprising movie flops of 2015 was Aaron Sorkin and Danny Boyle’s Steve Jobs: a movie which, miraculously, earned even less for its creators than 2013’s panned Jobs, starring Dude, Where’s My Car‘s Ashton Kutcher.

Now the movie has received another ignominious fate: being singled out by major film critic and former co-host of At the Movies Rex Reed as his pick for no. 1 worst film of the year. Ouch!

Apple watchers should expect the company’s mobile payment service, Apple Pay, to expand to new markets in 2016 — with a heavy emphasis on Asia.

According to a new report, Apple is focusing on Asia and Europe since adoption in the United States has been slower than expected. Regions set to get Apple Pay next year so far include China, Hong Kong, Singapore and Spain.

Police in Tigard, Oregon have cracked an organized retail crime ring which used stolen gift cards worth three-quarters of a million dollars to buy iPhones bound for the Hong Kong black market.

Tigard Detective T.J. Hahn told the local KOIN 6 News that organized retail theft has become a bigger crime than even drug sales.

“This kind of activity makes millions of millions of dollars, into the billions,” he said.