I'm not saying there are not scenarios where it isn't nice. I'm saying they're not in the 90% zone. How many people are in this scenario: all day in a conference room followed by a plane flight with no charging time in between?
True, it isn't necessarily a common use case, but the problem that we have in trying to de-emphasize it is that every Professional is slightly different. For example, I'm taking a daytime flight tomorrow, whereas my boss's flight schedule preference is to have the whole day off at home and then jump on an overnight Redeye because he's able to sleep anywhere.
With that said, I don't know why (actually, I do know—it's because accessories = cash) Apple doesn't make some tiny adapter like they did with MagSafe 1 to 2 for MagSafe into a single USB-C end. The wattages are sufficient. I'm not so much annoyed about the lack of MagSafe as I am about the fact that I have a bunch of extra MagSafe chargers (one at the office, one on my old Cinema Display, etc.) that I can't use going forward. And lordy lord... the prices on the new chargers.
And since the connector is proprietary... no one else can step in. Yuck. I'd like to see someone take a better crack at a charging cable than Griffin's BreakSafe which is meh at best.
Agreed, this proprietary everything has got to go. I've been hoping that the EU puts its foot down not unlike what they did a few years ago with cellphone chargers...but even there, Apple's solution was to provide an adaptor in the box to be pedantically compliant.
I've about had it with people telling me what "Pro" means. The "Pro" in the marketing means nothing because what a "pro" is and how a "pro" uses a computer has such variance it is meaningless. At this point I wish they'd drop the label entirely just to end the conversation. The "reason" it's called a "Pro" is because Apple has a marketing department. The needs of web professional web developer and a professional videographer are not even remotely the same.
Agreed, which is also why if Apple really wants to grow their base, they need to think about offering a broader variety of products instead of just a tiny handful.
I would argue that if you need the kind of horsepower that kills your battery in 45 minutes, you bought the wrong tool when you got a laptop. Unless you're carrying a generator with you, you'll need to be plugged in. There just aren't laptops out there where you can render video for hours on end with so I have no idea what you're even arguing.
Oh, I'm personally not disagreeing - - I'm totally in agreement with you on the "wrong product for you" type of discussion point. This simply circles back to the problem I just mentioned which is a woefully inadequate product variety mix: the angst is because Apple doesn't bother to offer the alternative "Super Pro" MacBook for these sorts of power users to consider.
You're either at a desk doing "pro" work with your extra monitors, keyboard, drives, etc. where battery life does not matter because you're plugged in, or you're on the go. The main power of laptop for "pros" that I have seen has less to do with portability in terms of using it off site and more to do with having a workstation to carry between a home office and an actual office...
An observation: a facilitating of ease-of-portability between sites is merely another type of requirement. I have a colleague who's a heavy-duty modeler and he uses one of those behemoth Windows luggables.
And as always, if it isn't "Pro" enough for you, actual professionals tend to buy the right tools for the right job. There's a word for people who don't: amateurs.
One can only buy the tools which exist. That's been a lot of the angst on the desktop after the debut of the Trash Can Mac Pro: it was a (at the time) great hardware solution for one very narrow type of Pro customer, but it sucked for the rest.
With the classical tower "cheese grater" killed, their choice is to seek out incremental upgrades to keep their old MP's running (well enough) while they hope that Apple realizes their mistake and corrects these deficiencies in a future post-Trashcan Mac Pro, or to transition off the OS X platform, typically either to Linux or Windows.
From there, each time that any Mac comes out, there's a pragmatic assessment that gets done which essentially asks
"Well, could this set of hardware possibly replace my 2012 Mac Pro?" ... and for many of them, the answer has consistently been "no".
Case in point, one of the datasets I'm currently working with today is 1.41TB in size. Sure, one can say that pedantically a 15" MBP with the +$1200 2TB SSD upgrade will at least allow the data to be loaded, but with only 0.6TB remaining in balance for the (a) OS, (b) Applications, (c) Scratch, and (d) OS X's hidden recovery partition ... its probably not enough. Sure, would prefer to have a new desktop instead, but the trashcan's also 3 years old and to make it even equivalent in capability to a cMP would require a pair of Promise RAID's, which means it will cost $7500 per desktop that's to be replaced ... or $2K more per node than simply throwing in the towel and moving these workflows over to Microsoft. OS X is good, but it simply isn't an extra $2,000 per Machine worth of goodness.
