I'm not sure Ive was ever truly "away." It's unfathomable that he's had zero input on recent designs despite the reported hiatus. And good designers don't just jam the next iteration with changes to the aesthetics and functionality. They do it gradually. I met Richard Howarth around the time that Ive was allegedly stepping back and this was the tone of our conversation.
What I'd like to see:
Full-speed TB3 ports on the 13" (huge mistake on Apple's part)
15" non-TB model
1080p60 FaceTime camera (seriously, Apple, why is this still not updated?)
AMD Vega GPU
32 GB DDR4
6-core Coffee Lake
Moonshot wish list:
Increase keyboard travel distance to 1.0 mm (currently 0.5, I believe). Seriously, the current keyboard is awful.
MicroLED panel, 120 Hz, HDR10
A11 chip to handle all lower-power tasks and GPU accelerated macOS animations (if that is even useful)
FaceID in the FaceTime camera module
6 TB ports @ 100 Gbps on 15" (or 4 on the 13"), which I think is the threshold for feasible eGPU solutions
Sweet DAC/headphone amp to drive 300 Ohm headphones
MagSafe
W2 chip for connectivity with BT headphones and Earpods; BT 5.0 with support for Sony LDAC and other HD formats
Lack of 'full speed' TB3 ports on the 13" MacBook Pro is not product differentiation - there just aren't enough PCIe lanes available on the 28w CPUs. Apple could have opted for 3 full speed ports with the 12 PCIe lanes but instead decided to give us 4 with the two on the right hand side sharing the bandwidth of a single controller.
If there is any product differentiation going on then they've neutered the non touch bar MacBook Pros with just two ports despite their CPUs also coming with 12 PCIe lanes. Leaving them with 3 wouldn't have been much differentiation.
Without a doubt Apple will be disappointed at the lack of take-up of USB-C but they can't chicken out now, especially with the case getting thinner.
1080p60 camera - can they even fit in the case lid as it stands?
AMD VEGA GPUs aren't even available yet - better ask AMD. Apple would choose GPUs within their thermal specifications anyway.
For marketing reasons Apple are all-in on the Touch-bar at the moment. Without a doubt they aren't interested in offering people an option to swerve it otherwise they balkanise the Touchbar market for app developers.
32Gb DDR4 won't be a possibility until Cannon Lake - which is the generation AFTER Coffee Lake (aka Kaby lake refresh). Ask Intel about that.
6 core coffee lake is a possibility in i7 mobile form. They are unlikely to be Iris Graphics equipped.
As far as the moon shot stuff.
It's been mentioned elsewhere that Keyboard matters have been noted at Apple.
The Touchbar already carries an A class CPU which adds to the costs, An A11 class CPU would add lots of the bottom line.
Thunderbolt 3 is 40Gb/s. TB1 was 10Gb/s, TB2 was bidirectional TB1 but seen as 20Gb/s. 100Gb/s suggests TB5. TB4 hasn't even been fully ratified yet (I expect 80Gb/s) and PCIe 4.0 is only just available. So technology not available for one. And 6 TB ports suggests half speed ports all round because CPUs simply don't carry that many PCIe lanes and there'd be no space on the case for that many ports.
And I'm sure they'd love Magsafe to be back. Not sure how that would work though.