What do “Pro” users want?
Some assertions you can read on the Internet seem out of touch with a company which made the glaring mistake of building a machine without a floppy, released a lame mp3 player without wireless and less space than a Nomad, tried to revolutionize the world with a phone without a keyboard, and produced an oversized iPhone which is killing the laptop in the consumer market.
.. What makes them stand out is that they are bolder, dare I say, more courageous than others, to the point of having the courage to use the word courage to justify an unpopular technical decision.
.. Having said that, us pros are generally conservative: we don’t update our OS until versions X.1 or X.2, we need all our tools to be compatible, and we don’t usually buy first-gen products, unless we self-justify our new toy as a “way to test our app experience on users who have this product”.
The Great Criticism Of The 2016 Macbook Pro is mainly fueled by customers who wanted something harder, better, faster, stronger (and cheaper) and instead they got a novel consumer machine with few visible Pro improvements over the previous one and some prominent drawbacks.
Experiment, but not on my lawn
If I could ask Apple for just one thing, it would be to restrict their courage to the consumer market.
.. But when Apple rebrands this Air as a Pro, real pros get furious, because that machine clearly isn’t for them. And this time, to add more fuel to the fire, the consumer segment gets furious too, since it’s too expensive, to be exact, $400 too expensive.
.. The explosion of the iOS App Store has not been a coincidence. It’s the combination of many factors, one of which is a high number of developers and geeks using a Mac daily, thanks to its awesomeness and recent low prices.