1080p not has been the high-res standard for video for the last few years, that would be 3840p (4K). The 15" and 13" Apple laptops are 1800p and 1600p respectively, which isn't nearly enough to display 4K video at 1:1.
So it's basically the same situation now with the current high-res standard, but for the fact there is no 17" MacBook Pro as your "only choice"...
Hence my point literally two paragraphs below what you quoted that a similar argument about what 1080p was back then could be made today about 4K, you are essentially just agreeing with that
Though, since you opened that bottle, I'm not sure if I'd call it the
same situation, for a number of reasons. For one, if Apple were to use the same pixel density that they have on the current 2018 MBs/MBPs for a 17" one (namely, 220dpi), then we would likely still end up below 4K, presumably at around 2000 pixels vertically (by the way, wouldn't 4K be 2160p, not 3840p like you say, as this number derives from the vertical, not horizontal amount of pixels?). So it would be closer to 4K than we are now, but still not quite there. One could make an argument that Apple could just depart from their current pixel density on a hypothetical 17" model either way, but then again, if that were to happen then we'd also get a resolution bump in the 13" and 15" models aswell, likely pushing (at least) the 15" model up to or above the 4K barrier and making that argument irrelevant either way.
Secondly, most people would find the jump from 1800p to 2160p not nearly as large as the jump from 900p to 1080p – our current "Retina" screens are already above the threshold where the average human eye can distinguish between individual pixels at a normal screen distance, which is not true for the jump from 900p to 1080p. And thirdly, I'd hardly call 4K
the (one and only) standard for video content – it's
one standard, alongside 1080p, 1440p and so on. There is still plenty of video content that is only available in sub-4K resolutions, for a variety of reasons. Many streaming services like Netflix have 1080p as a standard option for subscribers (with a premium-tier with 4K content above that, and even then, a large part of their library just isn't available in that resolution), a large portion of videos uploaded to YouTube and other video sites are still "only" 1080p or 1440p. And so on and on. For a great deal of people, the 4K content that they watch makes only a small fraction of the video content they consume in total.
Don't get me wrong – there are absolutely people that would profit from a 17" screen with a higher resolution on a MBP; if you believe that I'm against the idea of such a model then you haven't been reading my previous comment till the end. But from Apple's perspective, it just makes much less sense to offer one than a 17" model did back in 2011 and earlier, with the resolution of the current machines being one big factor why. My guess is that the next resolution bump on the MacBook-side of things will be in one of their next big redesigns in form of a
pixel density increase, not in the introduction of a 17" model. If the 15" model gets a resolution bump up to a clean x2 of their standard base resolution (instead of the below-x2 one that they are sitting at now), then we'd have a 2100p screen in them (and maybe they just bump it up to 2160p at this point and make 1080p the standard base resolution).
As for performance, the 15" MacBook Pro could be purchased with comparable specs to the 17" MacBook Pro, so the 17" never offered an advantage there.
Possibly, though I'm doubtful if Apple would really put 6 USB-C ports in such a model, even if they could. But even then, the port difference would arguably not be as significant as it was back then where the larger sizes had entire ports that weren't at all on the smaller models, whereas now all four ports can "do the same".
