Not quite true. They made on significant improvement by bringing back the physical Escape key.
While a minor improvement technologically, it addressed major and/or very vocal complaints from users.
Well,
something did happen then:
Jony Ive left the company.
The industrial design head under whose tenure on of the main objectives seemed to be to make products
smaller, thinner, slimmer. More
minimal, with reduced physical ports. With the iPhone being a notable exception of Apple caving in to customer and market demand (but remember how they were claiming an iPhone 5 to be a perfect size and held off on releasing bigger-display phones?).
Ive's departure coincides with what seems to be a slightly less
dogmatic but more
pragmatic approach in product design at Apple:
- The return of the Escape key on Touch Bar models
- MacBook Pros (slightly) heavier and thicker to accommodate scissor-switch keyboards
- iOS 13 gaining external mouse and trackpad support, later even physical trackpads made for iPads. I'm not sure if Ive has or would have signed off on these (though on the other, it seemed a somewhat consequence of adding USB-C and external storage support to Pro iPads
- There's now talk about Apple bringing MagSafe and "more ports" to the MacBook Pro, with Ming-Chi Kuo saying most people may not need to purchase dongles.
Now, going back to the rumoured display, I wouldn't hold my breath for Apple bringing any other port than one single latest-generation Thunderbolt. On the other hand, I wouldn't be shocked for an HDMI 2.1 port (on a 4K or 5K display).