It’s a bit sad that Apple is at the point where their computers are so powerful and efficient, made with lasting materials, and priced competitively that changes and improvements they make annually are no longer exciting (to me at least).
Apple has always been a lot more slow/evolutionary than people want to admit. Most of their product design is on a 4-5 year cycle.
Likewise, they do not expect people to upgrade to every new iteration of any of their products.
My understanding is that during the Intel period of "is the Mac dead", the problem was that by the time they got new Intel parts into a computer (e.g. mapped Intel's roadmap to real availability and their claimed TDP to the actual thermals of the case design) they either missed their window or had a product which was no more compelling than what was already in the market.
Their schedule now would likely get boringly predictable, except that they may still get delays and cost surprises from being single-sourced for CPUs with TSMC.
The M1 really transformed their product lines and gave them enough headroom in processing power and efficiency to then focus on fixing some of the neglected components like the keyboard and screens. It seems like they’re going to need a few more years before there is anything ground-breaking done with the lineup, and we’ll see incremental improvements this year and next.
They'll tweak components in between design refreshes, but once we had butterfly keyboards we were basically stuck with them for five years. They got incrementally more reliable, but changing the keyboard depth basically required a full product redesign.
Same with screen tech. Once they put a panel in a laptop, they aren't going to happen upon a new panel that works. It will either be incremental improvements from the manufacturer, or an entirely new panel that Apple negotiated to be built. It's possible in the middle of a design run, but not common.
So it is a lot less that the M1 gave them headroom to focus on other things, and more that their design iterations were staged to happen during the Apple Silicon transition. Our late 2021 MacBook Pro was the from-scratch design refresh that took into account all the feedback and learning they had from the Touchbar/USB-C MacBook Pro, and incorporated new parts and tech like the notched screen.
www.macrumors.com
