“The good news: Apple has finally updated its Pro laptop line with some genuinely new and powerful options,” Vlad Savov writes for The Verge. “Even better, the new MacBook Pro has been shrunken down to the degree of serving as the MacBook Air’s spiritual successor, which is what many of us had been hoping for all along. The bad news? Apple isn’t just giving, it’s also taking away.”
“At first blush, the new 13-inch MacBook Pro, sans fancy Touch Bar, looks like the perfect replacement for my aged MacBook Air from 2013,” Savov writes. “It’s the thinnest and lightest Pro ever, and it provides the display and performance upgrades my three-year-old laptop has been in desperate need of. Costing $1,499, it sits right in the middle between Apple’s $1,299 MacBook and the new $1,799 MacBook Pro with a Touch Bar and four Thunderbolt ports. It’s like the Air, in that it bridges the gap between Apple’s most portable and most powerful mobile computers, but it does so in an interesting new way.”
“This more basic MBP is essentially the professionalization of the 12-inch MacBook. It’s a bigger and significantly more powerful version of that super-thin machine. More of a pro MacBook than a MacBook Pro,” Savov writes. “To Apple’s credit, there’s no single Windows laptop that yet matches all of the MacBook line’s key strengths — touchpad ergonomics, battery life, display, and industrial design — but Apple’s changes have now created an opportunity that didn’t exist before. All a Windows vendor needs to do to convince me is to build something as good as a MacBook and then top it off with a simple SD card slot.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: I’m not buying one because it doesn’t have a SD card slot and I’ve never heard of or can’t muster up the pocket change to pick up a wireless SD Card or bother to use a simple USB-C SD card reader like the rest of the world with IQs above 70, so I might subject myself to – gack! – Windows PCs instead.
Puleeze. Spare us.
Enjoy your next MacBook or MacBook Pro, Vlad!
SEE ALSO:
Phil Schiller explains why Apple dropped the SD card slot but kept the 3.5mm headphone jack in new MacBook Pros – November 2, 2016
Phil Schiller: Apple has more orders for MacBook Pro with Touch Bar than for any other professional Mac notebook ever – November 2, 2016
The debate is over: IBM confirms that Apple Macs are $535 less expensive than Windows PCs – October 20, 2016
The key mission of Apple’s new MacBook Pros – October 28, 2016
TIME Magazine: Apple’s new MacBook Pro Touch Bar is an inventive new way to get work done more quickly – October 28, 2016
Apple does touch right and, as usual, Microsoft does it wrong – October 28, 2016
IBT: Apple’s MacBook Pro Touch Bar is the coolest thing ever; will change the way we use laptops – October 28, 2016
Wired hands on with Apple’s New MacBook Pro: It’s a whole new kind of laptop – October 27, 2016
CNET on the new MacBook Pro: Apple’s amazing strip show reinvents the notebook – October 27, 2016
Hands on with Apple’s new MacBook Pro: Looks and feels so good it’s unreal – October 27, 2016
Apple debuts three new TV ads for all-new MacBook Pro with Touch Bar – October 27, 2016
Apple unveils groundbreaking new MacBook Pro with revolutionary Touch Bar and huge Force Touch trackpad – October 27, 2016
Vlad is the same type of journalist that would be “shocked” at the original iMac (1998) not having floppy drive as well as all of the older ports that Apple has replaced with the USB.
This is a short-sighted approach, but Vlad can not poke his Luddite bubble.
It’s true that every missing port/interface is meant to be fixed with a dongle/adapter.
It is, however, always one more thing to have to worry about/keep track of.
I do some work in NASCAR racing as a photographer. There’s a LOT of charging/adapting issues, lots of cables, batteries, cards to remember and deal with. LOTS of locations, from trackside, to photo room, hotel room, sometimes I’ll do editing at dinner at a restaurant. Just a few months ago I was in Kansas Speedway, left my cameras locked up in the photo room, and just grabbed the cards and laptop and figured I’d stop and have dinner and edit. Well guess what, I forgot the SD card reader. So I spent another 20 minutes finding the nearest Staples or Best Buy to buy one because it would take me an hour to go back to the track.
*11″ MBA. I bought a 13 MBA with SD card slot shortly after when I got a good deal on a open-box at Best Buy
MDN once again shows off its immaturity with its take. Savov wrote a comprehensive review with a good discussion of the pros and cons of the latest MacBook Pro. It was pretty much spot on, and is definitely in line with the decision making that prospective buyers will have to contend with when they buy their next machine.
We shall see if Apple’s forced adapter and price increases will sell well in the year ahead. Pent up demand is predictably pushing up sales this month, but I predict that like the disastrous 2015 MacBook, it will not draw new buyers to the Mac platform and in fact will push some longtime Apple users away. The value and convenience just isn’t what it used to be. Probably because Apple’s core focus now isn’t on mac hardware and software. Since the minute he arrived, Cook et al started pushing their SAAS business models, cloud server rental, and subscription based computing. Apple axed most of its pro software and now offers freebie amateur hour software that pushes iCloud at every turn. Adobe is now subscription only. Microsoft pushes subscription options for everything. If you are a person who works in the field and needs PC functionality and the reliability of solid hardware — wired connections or SD card slots — well, Apple and MDN no longer care about you. If your a coffee shop hipster who does nothing but post a wordpress blog, then the new MacBooks are just right for you.
Apple has become a dongle company. That’s the plain ugly truth. Can you handle the truth?
I frequently use USB keys and SD cards to transfer images to and from friend’s siblings computers and cameras while on the road (usually vacations). My old MBA manages this quite fine. A new one wouldn’t. I don’t see buying a new laptop until this one dies or OSX won’t run on it anymore. Otherwise I might have considered the new touchbar model.
Then again, I’m still doing quite fine on my 2010 Mac Pro with all of its upgrades, so haven’t seen any recent offerings from Apple that I’d consider to replace that with, either.
Different people have different needs. For some people, that SD slot and the ability to use a USB key drive are a big deal.
Bravo! There is a lot more to user experience than the thickness of the unit.
Good and reasonable points. I’m trying to imagine what Apple’s vision is for the next 5 years. I can understand them not showing their cards for future products, but is it too much to ask for an explanation as to why products are designed a certain way? What does Apple expect will replace SD cards in the near future? The simple task of transferring data from one external hard drive to another by connecting them simulateneously to 2 USB ports is now only possible by some sort of dongle/dock or two separate USB-USB-C adapters! The case can be made for the floppy disk and DVDs being on the way out when Apple abandoned them, but I think they jumped the shark on ubiqitous USB port. Of course the caveat is that Apple will still probably sell new Macbook Pros with touch bars, hand over fist, mostly to people who have no real need for them beyond sending emojis. Namely the “rich kids of Instagram” of Saudi oil sheiks who will buy a dozen at a time.
Steve Jobs solution:
Mac Book line : entry level with some ports
(couple of models, lowest priced for real budget users with way lower specs )
Mac Book Air : very light weight with fewest ports for the Facebook Twitter warriors
Mac Book Pro : for heavy duty with large number of ports and extras. Thicker, Weighs more.
Clean Easy to Understand Product Placement.
—–
now we got confusion.
for more than a year the Mac Book had FEWER ports than the Air for example (how did the general consumer figure that one out when the AIR was supposed to be the ‘light’ version ? , even retailers like Best buy etc were confused…)
Now people are calling the MBP the heir of the Air rather than the old MBP…
yes obsolete stuff should be removed like Floppy drives in PCs BUT the transition seems TOO FAST …
Apple should have kept the AIR line and made a second LUX version with the touch bar and kept the MBP with touch bar and Max features.
They should build a lower cost Mac Book model because entry to Mac land is very high now.
(Another reason why they should done what I suggest is that the NAMING : Air and MBP removes confusion. Now people are complaining that a ‘Pro’ model doesn’t have the required features)
stupidly CONSOLIDATING (turning MBPs into Airs) when Macs were making Billions (even more than iPad and way more than Watch) and outpacing PC growth for years (until recently with confusion and no updates) is the wrong strategy.
(I have an older MBP)