I strongly suspect that intel kept on promising Apple that its 10nm process would be live ‘soon’ and that the current MB and MBP were designed for this - the iMac too.
This would’ve resulted in powerful computers that ran cooler
However, you sense that the industrial design team wanted to build a sleeker, thinner & lighter computer as their overriding aim.
So this lead to things like:
the MB & MBP keyboard debacle - entirely self inflicted.
As was the decision to turn pro machines into near sealed units, compared to the previous generations.
The decisions around ports doesn’t bother me too much, but I don’t use my MBP for pro content creation.
And finally, the decision to even launch these products without the 10 nm processors that they were intended to have, has likely backfired (more with the MBP than the MB).
In retrospect, Apple should’ve ‘retrofitted’ elements of the new design onto the 2012-15 design. But then, they probably had intel saying ‘10 nm is next year, go for it!’
It’s going to be interesting when we first see what the ARM Macs look like. These will be an indication of the kind of computers that Apple really wants to make.
Likely we will be seeing consumer ARM Macs first and that they’ll be sealed units ie something similar to the iPad.
Such is the hostility of Apple’s pro customers to it, that they’ll need to launch the new Mac Pro before they even talk about ARM Macs.
A redesign of the MBP would help too, though I suspect that we won’t be getting one until intel can ship those 10 nm processors...
