I think this was just an ill-judged offhand comment.
P.S. I'm typing this on an 2010 MBP which, with an SSD upgrade, still works beautifully.
I don't think you have provided sufficient information as to why you think my comment was bad. You say the 'get' different use cases better than most in the industry, and that used to be something I agree with. However, this effect is shrinking, at least as far as my personal needs are concerned - which is admittedly anecdotal.
> P.S. I'm typing this on an 2010 MBP which, with an SSD upgrade, still works beautifully.
I did the same thing with my 2012 MBP, but I'll have to replace the machine entirely for performance reasons soon, and there is no upgrade path for current MBP models anymore, at all. What you buy is what you'll have.
Congratulations. You have one of the last macs that were upgradeable.
Apple promote their ability and willingness to cannibalize their own products.
I'm mostly in agreement with the article, but the author also misses some things, I think:
> Yes, the iPad Pro has a very fancy stylus. That’s great for artists, but the vast majority of people aren’t artists and don’t care.
> Yes, the iPad Pro has a very fancy, true-to-color screen. That’s great for artists, but the vast majority of people aren’t artists and don’t care.
I think good touch and pen input really still is the obvious better way to input. It doesn't work well (enough) without a few decades of UI engineering and real-world testing -- but a "real" digital drawing pad and touch interface is probably a very sensible way to spend the improvements Moore's law have given us: My Amiga 2000 had 4?MB of ram and a 7Mhz processor, my current desktop has four cores at 4Ghz and 16GB of RAM. Using some of that to go from 4096 colours and 320x256 to 24bit 4K or 8k along with real-time input in the form of free-form painting/writing seems reasonable.
Just because it's so hard to paint with a mouse that most computer users aren't digital artists, while everyone that's been given pen and paper will have at doodled is a great indication that we need better input for our digital devices. As for the better screen - I think getting pixel resolution on par with print resolution can only be a good thing. Personally I find it much more comfortable to read a thousand pages at high dpi, than at "standard" +/- 1080p on a 20-24" monitor.
[1] http://www.wired.com/2010/12/1209computer-mouse-mother-of-al...
"The Mother of All Demos, presented by Douglas Engelbart (1968)"
I have a stock HP laptop with a touchscreen and Windows 10, and yeah, I don't really use the touchscreen. But my mother has a Surface and splits the use pretty evenly between typing emails and looking up recipes or travel sites, and also doing jigsaw puzzles using the touchscreen.
I mean Apple's response to the different use cases is "buy two specialized devices", Microsoft's was to create a device that tries to do both. Yeah it's taken them a long time to be successful with that strategy, but I wouldn't say it's failing entirely.
Personally I think the greatest strength of the MBPs is the display. The touchpad is rather good in terms of quality, but is ultimately irrelevant to me because I wouldn't use it; it's an ergonomic disaster, especially for day-long work.
late-2009 MBP here. Core2Duo 2.4GHz + 4GB of ram. I added a 128GB SSD a year ago and it works beautifully, really fast enough for almost everything.