Apple just told the world it has no idea who the Mac is for
By: Owen Williams
Tags: MacBook, Apple

The MacBook Air is dead, which is great news, but why are there two MacBook Pro 13" now? The only difference is one doesn’t have the touch strip, but why not just… call it the new MacBook air to alleviate confusion?

Adding an additional option, without the touch bar was a smart move. I was speaking with a number of friends on Slack during the event, who all said they’d buy the new Mac if you could get it with a normal function row. Then, Apple dropped this and they were interested. But as a final “fuck you” for those that get this, it has two less ports, slower memory and a worse GPU– and to add them back it’s basically the same price.

“The fact that Apple itself considered the MacBook Pro as a competitor to the MacBook Air shows it’s not really a Pro.”

-@lapcatsoftware

What video editors are going to do edits on a tiny touch bar below the screen? What DJ — like Apple demonstrated — wants to use a tiny touch bar to mix their music when the action is… on their screen?

The event also left Apple with a ton of bizarre loose ends. At the iPhone event in September, Apple told the world that headphone jacks were dead because wireless headphones are superior — so why is there a headphone jack on the Mac? Even worse, Apple has delayed its wireless headphones which were supposed to change the world.

From there, the questions just get even more ridiculous:

Why can’t you plug the Lightning headphones that come in the iPhone box into the new Mac? Why doesn’t the iPhone come with the right cable for the new MacBook Pro? Why doesn’t Apple make a screen that properly works with its own devices? Why did Apple highlight how great the Touch Bar is for Messaging, but didn’t even port most of the new iMessage features to macOS properly? Do I have to carry two pairs of headphones now? How do I charge my Lightning cable mouse? Why remove the HDMI port, a standard that’s still incredibly popular for plugging into TVs? Why remove the SD card, a popular slot for… creatives using cameras?

“Watching someone DJ with the top of a keyboard was just embarrassing, doubly so from the company that makes the iPad and as recently as this year’s WWDC showed off its ability to be used by blind people.”

Even worse, what took so long to get to this point? Many people have been waiting a year or more for a refresh, and this itself wasn’t even that notable.

The new MacBook Pro has a Skylake chip, not the Kaby Lake one that’s recently landed– if you look at benchmarks at the top-end it’s pretty clear something is wrong: the CPU in this MacBook Pro actually appears to perform worse than the older one.

CNET spoke to Apple’s marketing head, Phil Schiller, who said:

Marketing chief Phil Schiller, software engineering lead Craig Federighi and top designer Jony Ive explained, in exclusive interviews earlier this week, why the Mac matters. Since they say it’s so important to Apple, we asked them why it took four years, four months and 16 days to deliver what they call a “milestone” and a “big step forward” for its top-of-the-line laptops. “The calendar isn’t what drives any of the decisions,” Schiller says in a 90-minute briefing at Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino, California. “We challenge the teams to do great work and sometimes that great work can be done in one year, sometimes it takes three years… What we really care about is creating new innovations in the Mac and continuing the story that has really defined Apple for so many years.”

What does that even mean? It took four years to add a touch bar to the keyboard, which delayed any meaningful progress in the meantime? Apple’s customers are those that need powerful machines, but it delayed them infinitely for what amounts to a vanity project that the core demographic of Apple’s customers probably won’t even use.

This does, indeed, speak to the longevity of the machines that Apple sells: you can use a MacBook from 2012 right now and probably can’t tell the difference. But therein lies the problem — the company waited four years, then didn’t really deliver any real future-value other than it’s “new.”