Rebooting the MacBook Pro
I recently had to buy a new MacBook Pro because my laptop died unceremoniously in a Panera Bread after posting an episode of my podcast so I bought a maxed out 2016 MacBook Pro from B&H Photo because I saved about $1,000 on the laptop and the spec difference between the 2016 MacBook Pro and the 2017 model was nominal at best, definitely not enough to justify the price delta. The has been a lot of talk about how trained the current MacBook Pro is…it is certainly a polarizing machine from its Touch Bar to its port selection to its keyboard. Apple is the only maker of Mac laptops and it seems like the most recent MacBook Pro has become the problem child of the line with people hating the laptop…I mean really hate it. Every time I hear a Mac podcast there is somebody on the show who loathes the laptop for one reason or another. The biggest problem is that Apple can not afford to have a large segment of their market hate their products because they are literally the only company who produces Macs. It got me thinking, what should they do to the Mac laptop line to remedy this? Here are my thoughts on how to spend Tim Cook’s money.
MacBook “Air”
I feel like Apple should take the single port MacBook and rename it the MacBook Air. The MacBook Air started off as a premium machine that focused on thinness and battery life. I think this should continue and them go ahead and remove the headphone jack and replace it with another USB type C port. I think they should continue to omit the Touchbar to keep the price down and maybe make the case a little bit thicker (crazy I know) to make the laptop easier and cheaper to produce. Ideally, this entry-level Mac will start at $999 That would make it $899 for education customers and be a great entry port for students and home users who have bought into the iPhone ecosystem and want to take the next step to replace their Windows Pc or Chromebook. The focus of this laptop would be probability and battery life. I could also see that this would be a model that LTE would make a lot of sense as an upgrade.
The MacBook
I think that Apple should take the current 13” Touch Bar MacBook Pro and rename that the “MacBook”. Keep the current design and then introduce a non-GPU model 15” laptop. Kill the 13” Touch Bar-less MacBook Pro…that machine only serves to confuse people at this point being truly underpowered to really be a “Pro” laptop and lacking the other premium “Pro” features like the Touch Bar and all the other Thunderbolt 3 ports. In the future they could maybe replace TouchID with FaceID and make the Touch Bar extend equally across the entire length of the laptop keyboard. Whenever they do introduce FaceID I would hope that they also introduce an edge to edge screen option so you could have a 14” screen and a 15” screen in the same bodies. These laptops would be basically the current MacBook Pro’s minus the name and costlier configuration models. These would be the everyone Macs.
The MacBook Pro
I think this should be the real “Pro” version of Apple’s laptop lineup. I think they should go as far as to make the machines a little bit thicker to support a deeper travel on the keyboard to make them less shallow, which is a big complaint with the current MacBook Pro. Maybe have something between the 2013 MacBook Pro and the 2016 models. I like the uniform travel of the butterfly keyboard, but I would not mind if it had the same travel as my iMac’s Magic Keyboard. I also feel like the both the 13” and the 15” MacBook Pro should come with Nvidia Graphics cards by default. The MacBook Pro’s should also have larger memory options than the normal MacBooks, allowing for up to 32GB of RAM even at the cost of battery life. I think they should have the same port configuration as the current MacBook Pro, it’s already too late to go back to USB-A, but I do think they should retain the headphone jack for now and reintroduce the SD card slot. Ideally, I would hope that Apple also figures out a way to do introduce an elegant replacement to MagSafe in the form of a breakaway USB-C cable. Even if it’s not even magnetic and maybe requires a credit card or pocketknife to get the USB-C connector out, that is much better to be slightly inconvenienced having to pry out a connector than replace the port, which currently requires a new logic board to the turn of $600+ at the Apple store.
On Dongles
Dongles are a part of the Apple ecosystem experience right now. I feel like its just petty for a company as wealthy and premium as Apple to not include an USB-C to USB-A adapter in the box of the MacBook Pro’s. For laptops that start at $1,300 I do not think its too much to include at least 1x adapter in the box like they did with the iPhone 7 transition. There are still people with a lot of traditional USB accessories. I think that the MacBook’s and MacBook Pro’s should come with these adapters in my lineup.
Closing Thoughts
I feel like the current Mac laptop lineup has probably gone too far by appealing to the larger audience of Apple’s modern customer base and at the end of the day reached a compromised lineup that does not really appeal to any one professional. I have been reading the book “Becoming Steve Jobs” and there are those people who want Apple to stick with the “Magic Quadrant” idea that Steve Jobs introduced when he came back to the company, but the more I read the book the more I realize that the Apple of the late 1990s is not the company today. I think they are big enough that they can afford to have a few lines of laptops without straying too far off the reservation. I think that diversifying the lines a little more to focus on their core strengths would be a good thing. Apple is no longer a phone that makes a singular phone every year to cater every year. Today we have an iPhone 8, 8 Plus, and X and that seems like that has been working well for them. I see the Macbook’s being the Macs for everybody with the new MacBook “Pro” line being a niche product like the iMac Pro or iPhone X. I feel like by serving the high-end of the market, even if it is niche, is important to Apple because these people are the taste makers and influencers that produce content. There should not be a glass ceiling in the Mac laptop line that after a certain point in somebody’s professional career they either have accept lackluster performance or compromises or switch to a Windows laptop.
