It looked gorgeous, and many people thought they were _the_ machine to have, but once you prodded the specs a bit, it seemed over-priced, and they lack of upgrades has meant it's just now a really poor buy.
Since they decided with the MBP lineup that touchbars were seemingly more "pro" than decent chipsets and more RAM, I've started looking more earnestly at getting out of the Apple ecosystem.
I have been eyeing up the iPad Pro for a while, but struggle to make the jump because once I move out of Apple, everything will go: I'll move to an Android phone, an Android tablet, and a Linux laptop.
I have already used Linux server-side (although am preferring to head towards Lambdas and "pure Go" Docker containers more and more), all the while, but in 2006 I moved to OS X for my main workstation because it was the best Unix box I could unpack from a box and just expect to work.
And then there is the household ecosystem. If I move, I'll be buying my family non-Apple kit in future as well.
In my small office alone more than a dozen developers are considering the same switch. That's $30k/year or more we spend collectively on Apple gear we're going to shift off from. In one, small office.
Imagine how this scales. It's a mess. Maybe we're too small a market, maybe if every dev with Apple kit in the World switched away Apple would barely notice the shift, but they would within a few years.
They courted Unix devs back in the early 2000s. They know if they could get the best professional developers onto Apple, they in turn would make great software, which would then make the product lineup competitive. It worked.
As the exodus picks up pace, they'll only have a few years before they realise there are only a handful of developers prepared to keep a Mac around, and the collective innovation will move from OS X and iOS to Linux and Android. That could be an interesting shift for those of us who are comfortable in both, but I don't fancy going long on AAPL long-term.
A really great Mac Pro that is best in class out of the box, some really amazing displays which Apple could make in ways that no other manufacturer has pockets to match (and the ability to use third party displays, please!), an MBP that at least holds it own, that can compete with the Dell XPS, it could add up to keeping people in the loop, and others too.
The Mac Pro stagnation was the first sign that Apple had given up on their traditional market. The MBP was an underline and an exclamation mark.