Designer Basic Apple Guy, known for nifty wallpapers for Mac, iPhone and iPad screens, dropped his annual Apple Product Tier List Monday. The Apple product rankings give letter grades to everything the iPhone giant released in 2024. He considers M4/M4 Pro Mac mini the best of the best, by the way.
"For the third year in a row, I am once again painting a target on my head and releasing my tier rankings of the products Apple released in the 2024 calendar year," he wrote. Undoubtedly, not everyone will love his choices, particularly those he grades in the low D and F tiers, but he takes care to explain them.
So let's cut straight to what BAG ranked in the top ("exceptional, best of the best, flawless") and bottom ("poor, failing or unacceptable") tiers. At the top he slotted M4 and M4 Pro Mac mini desktop computers.
"Finally, in 2024, we get the biggest small update to the Mac mini," he said of the newest Mac mini. "Its volume has shrunk to 59% the size of the previous mini & 23% the Mac Studio. And perhaps most shockingly, the new Mac mini with M4 Pro is more performant (on single-core & multi-core tasks) than the current M2 Ultra Mac Pro, all at 1.6% the volume!"
At the bottom he put AirPods Max and USB-C Magic accessories (Magic Keyboard, Magic Mouse, Magic Trackpad). And in between are four other letter grades filled with all of rest of Apple's 2024 products.
"Every AirPods Max fan who patiently waited for 1,371 days can be forgiven for being frustrated with the dead cat bounce update these headphones got in September," BAG noted.
And interestingly, M4 iPad Pro gets the second-highest ranking, A ("excellent, great to nearly perfect"), while the new iPad mini gets a D ("below average, flawed in many ways").
"Apple's 2024 iPad mini refresh felt half-baked, seemingly only released to make the product compatible with the rollout of Apple Intelligence," he said. He found it the update much less worthwhile than the previous update to iPad mini, when it got camera updates, 4K video recording, USB-C and more.
So how does BAG decide on the rankings?
"Ranking System Explained: If the product is brand new, like the Apple Vision Pro, I rank it based on my opinion of it, its value (including cost and utility), and the vibes of the public and tech ecosystem," he wrote.
"If the product is an upgrade, like the M4 MacBook Pro, its ranking is based on comparing it to its previous generation (i.e. M3 MacBook Pro) or against current competing Apple products (MacBook Air, M4 Pro/Max Pros)," he added. "If a product is ranked low, it doesn't mean it's a bad product (although it could be); it could just mean that its value compared to the previous iteration didn't make it a compelling update."
BAG describes the tiers this way:
The chart below shows how BAG ranks everything Apple released in 2024. And you can read in-depth justifications for every ranking on his website.