(because I need not to think about politics right now)
If there’s a one-shot indictment of the new MacBook Pro, it’s that it isn’t a MacBook Pro so much as a Pro MacBook. The 12” laptop, with its retina display and controversial keyboard and single USB-C port, has been scaled up to replace the entire existing MacBook Pro and MacBook Air lines. Now your choice is basically 12” and one port, 15” and four ports, or 13” and either two or four, with the TouchBar on every machine that has four.
This is, in a word, nuts. Apple has four operating systems for four different devices, and each relies on a mutually exclusive input. The iPhone only has Lightning; you can buy the USB-C to Lightning cable but you can’t plug your Lightning headphones into your Mac. The MacBooks now only have USB-C, which isn’t available on any other Apple device. The AppleTV relies on HDMI and Ethernet, neither of which is built into the MacBooks. The Apple Watch comes with a magnet-to-USB charger which can’t plug into your new MacBook.
Someone else nailed it: Jony Ive has made the MacBook Pro of the future. The only problem is, we need a MacBook Pro right fucking now. I stand by my assertion that Cupertino’s favorite immigrant has outgrown his skinny britches; this machine is “pro” only inasmuch as it has a bigger display than any iPad (barely). For the foreseeable future, anything at all – your video-out, your Ethernet, your SD card, any of your existing peripherals whether USB or Thunderbolt or whatever – everything needs a dongle now. Everything requires an adapter. Sure, the obvious goal is that everything is wireless and in the cloud and done through electromagnetic magic, just like an iPad—
Let’s revisit that word Pro again. Short for professional. Short for “I earn a living on this Mac, doing things that demand capabilities above and beyond what Ed Earl Brown and family require for Facebook and Pinterest and Gmail.” Apple has introduced radical shifts before, but – most famously – they did so with the iMac, a product that had no obvious predecessor save perhaps the original Mac. And they did it without shanking the existing PowerMac G3, which in its beige glory retained its ADB and SCSI and 8-pin serial connectors. There is no precedent for Apple taking all the ports out of an existing product line and leaving you with only one new standard; the closest would be the iPhone 7 line and even then, the Lightning port has been standard on iPhones and iPads for four years already.
No previous professional-grade Apple laptop had USB-C inputs. Now they have nothing else. Even that first MacBook with its one lone USB-C port and core-M processor – damned near an iPad Pro Deluxe rather than a MacBook – wasn’t the only laptop you could buy.
This is a bet. It’s a bet that Apple-using professionals are so desperate for modernized hardware that they’ll endure Ive’s hubris and splash out on a couple hundred dollars worth of adapters and dongles and new peripherals just so they can get a laptop running macOS Sierra that’s only twelve months behind the processor curve. In its way, it’s the inverse of the Windows 8 fiasco, when Microsoft introduced a new OS that had such a radically different UI model – and required new hardware to run – that a lot of people were tempted to say “if I have to learn a whole new OS, may as well get a Mac.” Now, how many people are going to say “long as I have to buy new everything, may as well get that slick new Surface”?
I suspect the powers that be over on One Infinite Loop may not like the answer.