Assembling our annual Buyers’ Guides is one of the most challenging things we do for our readers. Although each one requires a month or more of hard-core production time, they’re actually each 12 months in the making, the distillation of thousands of hours of hands-on testing, photography, and writing into a single download you can carry around anywhere. When we say something’s the “best,” you know that’s not a term we throw around loosely, so when an entire 224-page book is filled with the year’s best Apple products, you can imagine all of the discussion and debate our editors went through to get to that point.
Our 2014 iPad/iPhone/iPod Buyers’ Guide is the latest and greatest product of that process — an easy-to-read summary of the top Apple devices, accessories, and apps we’ve covered over the past year.
Which iPad, iPhone, or iPod is the best? Which is the worst? We pull no punches, reassessing each product family as of where it stands today. And we devote the same perspective and energy to helping you pick the best third-party add-ons and software for your devices.
Of course, it wouldn’t be an iLounge Buyers’ Guide without expanded versions of some of our unique research projects. Where else can you find a complete table of the current market values for every past iPod, iPhone, iPad, and Apple TV model, or a plain English glossary that explains every one of Apple’s marketing and technical buzzwords in one place? We’ve also included a quick preview of the 2014 iLounge Pavilion at CES, which has grown to over 127,000 square feet at the famous January 2014 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.
Following our tradition, we’re soft-launching the 2014 Buyers’ Guide here first so that our most loyal readers can get their hands on it a little ahead of the crunch on our servers tomorrow. Choose from twin-page (iPad/computer) or single-page (iPad/iPhone/iPod touch) versions using the links below. Each version is a free PDF, which can be opened with iBooks on an iOS device, and most web browsers or Adobe Acrobat on computers. You can get a sense of how each version looks from the screenshots here; you will need to do some pinch-zooming to read text on the iPhone and iPod touch using the single-page version, but not as much as on the twin-page version, which resembles a magazine or book in layout.
