I jumped all-in into Apple's ecosystem in late 2013. Got myself MacBook Air (11", i7, 8GB, 512GB) and iPhone 5S (64GB), so all maxxed out, for about $2.5k. So. Awesome. I felt like road warrior, popping 5S with unlimited 4G in front jeans pocket, and having 12+ hours on (barely noticeable) MBA in my backpack. Looked cool to pop 5S single-handedly from pocket while unlocking it with fingerprint in a single motion, cowboy style. It fell down the toilette on more ocassions than I care to admit. Works fine. It runs a Personal Hotspot 24/7 too. Continuity is awesome, I don't even need to touch phone to use phone! MBA I can balance on my thigh while smashing keys without looking at them (touch typist over here). Tried it on 13", it was too big for that. When the waitress comes to take my order, I look her straight in the eye - "Oh, hi. I'd like an espresso and a fizzy, thanks!" - while touch-typing some JS crap. She's first confused, then smiling, then awed. I can see the progression on her face. I smile back, while still smashing the keys without looking. Sometimes I whip it up at POS to transfer funds to credit card. "Oh, no, he's gonna delay the lin..." "Done! Please try card again!" Magsafe is lovely, I have my USBs, headphone jacks, the works. Siri is a gimmick, but I let it slide. There's future in voice interaction, they need the data, and it's not like I'm forced to use it.

I know, mostly I'm just pro-signalling. But I am a pro, and my hardware, software and its usage should reflect that.

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Cut to 2019...

Apparently, they want you to really dig into your phone now. Like, literally dig in. With two hands and a face. It's harder to let go of it if you already hold it in both hands. I guess engagement with Instagram app is higher like that. I don't use Instagram. And my right thumb doesn't reach upper left corner on more than 4".

Cameras on phones are ridiculously powerful. What's good that for me when 90% of my photos are just document archival. It's just gonna eat up my storage. I don't use front camera at all. I don't even own a mirror at home!

FaceID is useless to me. My phone is mostly a hotspot and a notification hub at arms length, on desk. Static. For most interactions, I never face it. Fingerprint works really well.

There's special thingamayings to do with AR and it's another gimmick. I did AR decade ago in consumer-space. It's bullshit. I can see it quite well in industrial environment though. I guess they just needed to fill up keynotes with something.

Notch is a lot of dead pixels in my book. Screen margin space for handling the device is reduced.

Touchbar discourages touch-typing and steals my treasured media/sound/brightness keys. I listen to a lot of music and have pretty good idea how bright my monitor should be at any time.

Butterfly keyboard is supposedly thwarted by some dust. I sometimes use my old MBA even with a drizzle. Plenty of smoke particles around it too.

I get less hours of battery life mostly due to pushing pixels I don't need.

If I wasn't in-the-know, on paper, new MBA would look worse and more expensive. CPU is crap. Storage is way too expensive.

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Apologies for a longer, what it amounts to, rant. Wanted to get a lay of the land for myself, as my batteries are showing age - almost 3000 cycles on MBA!

I think I've concluded that hardware I got in 2013 was kind of a miracle, not design. A coincidence that happened to align with my use-cases, due to various hardware and economic constraints of the time.

Right now, I'm gonna just go and order replacement batteries for current hardware, and go look elsewhere. But where? For 4" phone, I'm looking at Caterpillar Android stuff, made for people who get shit done. For laptop? I don't think I'll ever find anything that's not significantly worse experience than MBA with macOS. Desktop seems to be healthy in interesting options these days.

Or maybe just wait. I can push this 2013 hardware to 2020, I think. Pretty damn good!

Disappointment abounds.