In case you missed it, developers and creative professionals have been kicking up a storm since Apple announced the new MacBook Pros (MBP).
The negative reaction has been brutal, and startling in its immensity. Even the removal of the iPhone 7’s headphone jack didn’t see such a huge blowback. And these aren’t just dismissive voices from Apple’s habitual critics, but complaints from some of Apple’s most prominent and loyal, long-time users.
To wit, here’s a summary of their main gripes with the new MBPs:
- Underpowered with the previous generation of Intel Skylake processors (to be fair, this one’s on Intel more than Apple)
- Lower-performing AMD Radeon graphics compared to NVIDIA Pascal
- A thinner keyboard with less travel
- An upper limit of 16GB RAM
- Only two USB-C ports on the “MacBook Escape” without Touch Bar
- Four USB-C ports only on the MacBook with Touch Bar
- Removed S/PDIF optical digital audio output
- Removed SD card slot
- Removed MagSafe
- A substantial price hike from the previous generation
In short, the pros are protesting that the new MBPs are underpowered, lack the ports they need for their everyday work, and charge more for the privilege. To be sure, the new MBPs do bring a list of improvements:
- Thinner and lighter than before
- A new Retina screen with a wider color gamut
- USB-C ports with Thunderbolt 3 support
- Faster SSDs
- A new Touch Bar
- Long battery life
So these new MBPs are nice MacBooks, just not MacBook Pros. That’s what the pros are saying, and they should know what they’re talking about. After all, they don’t use these machines on their time off for fun, but day in and day out for demanding work.
As for why Apple made new MBPs that don’t appeal to the professionals, the company may simply be doing the practical thing. The specs that pros are asking for would probably result in a chunkier, heavier MBP with lower battery life, all trade-offs that pros are willing to make. But these are changes that would appeal less to the average person than a thinner, lighter notebook with more battery life.
Personal computer sales have been on a downward trend for years, and it doesn’t make business sense to concentrate on a thin slice of the pro market when Apple can sell MBPs catered to the bigger mainstream. This is the heart of what worries Apple’s pro base; that Apple is abandoning them in favor of everyone else. The signs are there to suggest this.
It took Apple four years to redesign the MBP, and these new ones deliver lackluster specs with a disregard for what pros actually need. The Mac Pro — Apple’s quintessential Mac for power users — hasn’t been updated in three years. This was the Mac that Apple senior vice-president Phil Schiller announced with the immortal line, “Can’t innovate anymore, my ass.”
In an interview with The Independent, Schiller said he was surprised by all the criticism that has arisen around the new MBPs. I don’t know whether to feel relieved that Apple might have made an honest miscalculation, or disappointed that Apple is so out of touch with its customers it really didn’t see this coming.
In the same interview, Schiller revealed that the new MBPs have received more online ordersthan any other pro notebook before, so people are buying into this new product (update: more than many other notebooks released this year) . Maybe Apple has its sales strategy right after all.
And to be fair, Apple slashed the prices of USB-C adapters on its online store last Friday, to help ease the already expensive transition of buying a 2016 MBP. But honestly, it feels like applying balm on a deep wound — better to have avoided the cut in the first place.
For the longest time, Apple has been the PC of choice for developers and creative professionals. As a photographer and writer whose friends and family work in creative industries, I can attest to that. We’ve loved the Mac for years because it married form and function beautifully, in ways that other companies didn’t. There were bumps along the way, but Apple always seemed to be sailing in the same direction as we were.
The new MBPs seem to indicate a change in course for Apple. For better or worse, Apple has cast its lot, and it’s not for the developers and creative pros who have loved the Mac. If you’re a staunch macOS power user, you now have some difficult choices to make when it comes to your next laptop. The new MacBook Pros aren’t awful, but it wouldn’t sting so much if Apple hadn’t called them the MacBook Pros — because let’s face it, they aren’t.
Source: Hardwarezone
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