I'm 40. Decades ago I used to be a developer and graphic designer. But, I hated Apple products. I was 100% PC. Then, about a decade ago I bought my first MacBook (white one) and then the iPhone...that's when I realized Apple products were better. They were better built and (the most important) they were convenient and easy to use. I've sold so many people on switching to Apple it's not even funny.
Similar, although I seriously disliked Macs
for my purposes (developer, sysadmin at the time with heavy Unix and Linux) until ~OSX Leopard, and there were still some annoyances (taking a perfectly good Unix and hiding/removing various *nix standard conf files and such), but overall,
most things - just worked. Same philosophy they have on the phones and tablets, which I've also gone back and forth on (e.g. no filesystem access nor expansion card slots on iPad and iPhone), but while some things irked me, the value in 'just works' as well as 'works how someone would expect' made it great for a wide variety of users. As my career progressed, I've moved to basically 'all Apple' + VMs.
It seems to me, in order to obtain lighter, smaller, etc. sacrifices had to be made. Hence moving to USB-C and such.
In a way, aren't we, the consumers to blame for this? Didn't we 'ask for' smaller, lighter, faster?
Thinner + lighter is for marketing to the masses as an 'Ooh, ahh!' item, and is relevant to some in reality, e.g. road warriors (e.g. sales folks, others) and those looking for status in their laptops. It's a
nicety for professionals, but many of us would gladly keep the same form factor as prior with added memory and battery.
I think "lost focus" is the wrong choice of words. Apple hasn't lost focus; they're simply focusing on things you don't want. They've stopped developing desktop machines to focus exclusively on laptops. They've stopped developing iPods to focus exclusively on iPhones. They've stopped developing iWork to focus on Apple Music.
Yep. Yet there is interplay between professionals not 'needing' lighter and thinner at the expense of performance (or ports or RAM or .. ), as well as up and coming future professionals. We have some front-end devs that have moved to MBPs (JS is JS after all), but run Visual Studio + others (e.g. SQL Server, .. )in VMs when needed. Everyone has been hoping to see 32GB of RAM in the new models - unless an upcoming release corrects that as an option, it'll be back to ThinkPads in the future.
You've also got teens and college folks typically into gaming. Gaming on Macs is pretty substandard, while the love of gaming drives a
lot of people into CS degrees, even if most don't wind up actually going into game dev. Do you want them on Macs or on yet another Windows PC, as they jump into development? There are repercussions not readily apparent and there is value in having a TRUE 'top end' system.
Every new product and every major redesign from Apple has been met with mobs naysayers and angry posters. And those people are always invariably wrong.
I'm sorry the products don't meet your needs. Maybe it's time to check other vendors.
I use Apple devices professionally and so far they are the best I've used. The 15" MPB will be a huge step up when it arrives.
How arrogant. People have investment in software and in skills, often assuming that Apple would not forget one of it's core customer segments which kept them afloat in leaner times - professionals of
many kinds. While it is wonderful the new system works for
you, do not assume it works for all professionals using Apple products, nor that they have eno right to be disappointed or provide an opinion that Apple is going in a non-desirable direction.
One professional's workload that can be accomplished on a system does not mean it works for everyone, while MS is innovating and will eventually impact Apple's art and engineering pro users negatively without a response, and lack of RAM and higher performance will eat away users that need it over time.
