The more you know your use case, the more clear you’ll be on what to buy — and when.
Apple just announced two next-generation MacBook Pro models and, to be honest with you, they contain just about everything I’ve been asking for. In terms of CPU performance and graphics cores, there’s enough power in there for all but the most extreme of extreme pros. There’s also a considerable amount of RAM, configurable up to 64GB. No, you probably couldn’t render Avatar on this, but you can do just about everything a typical high-end pro needs. And yet, I didn’t buy one. Nor do I plan on doing so in the foreseeable future. For me, it’s about lifecycle and use case. I’ll talk about that in a minute. But let’s talk first about how we got here. If I were forced to pick a date when Apple’s relationship with pro-Mac users started to go downhill, it would be June 10, 2013. Flush with iPhone success, Apple had taken its eye off the Mac ball. It hadn’t done much with pro-level machines and the cheese grater Mac Pro hadn’t been updated in „forever,“ as ZDNet editor-in-chief Larry Dignan put it. On that date, at a warm WWDC in June, Apple previewed their next-generation Mac Pro. This is the device we would all come to derisively call the Trash Can Mac. Good ol‘ Apple VP Phil Schiller even put his foot in it, declaring „Can’t innovate, my ass.“ That Mac Pro was a disaster. It sacrificed all the upgradeability and flexibility previous Mac Pros were known for in exchange for a bunch of already out-of-date GPUs and no upgradeability at all. Apple, in a cycle I’ve seen going back as far as the 1980s, once again lost sight of what Pro users need. This „but it looks cool“ myopia was evident again in 2016 when Apple unveiled the MacBook Pro models that nearly killed the Mac. Apple replaced the wonderful MacBook Pro keyboard with the now-infamous „butterfly keyboard,“ and switched out the function keys, including the Escape key if you can believe it, with a line of soft keys on the underwhelming Touch Bar. Oh, and Apple removed all of the ports that Pro users relied on because Pro users prefer dongles hanging off a sleek case, rather than a slot for an HDMI port or a USB A port, or even an SD card slot (he says sarcastically). By June of 2018, it seemed clear that Apple had simply given up on the Pro demographic. You can get a feeling for that sorry state of affairs in a discussion I had with Jason Perlow, Adrian Kingsley-Hughes, and Boinx Software CEO Oliver Breidenbach. For those of us who had real work to get done and needed Macs to do it, those were demoralizing times. Quick note for Windows and Linux users: Yes, I know (and knew then) that Linux and Windows were alternatives. But I and many other Pro users relied on certain Mac-only software to get our jobs done. In my case, the PC-equivalent software solution had a workflow that was four or more times slower, regardless of how fast the machine was.
