Apple’s massive MacBook Pro failure

Are not a good time to buy a MacBook Pro. The normally reliable and recognizable Apple has forced the professional macOS laptops into a state of change, disrupting its own market. What happened to Tim Cook’s flagship lineup?

Update: Sunday, January 14. Mark Gurman highlights one of the biggest problems with Apple’s upcoming MacBook Pro hardware. The addition of a touch screen in upcoming models means that Apple has spent more than a decade trying to explain why the Mac platform has ignored the ubiquity and usefulness of touch screens:

“…it made fun of companies like Microsoft Corp. for mixing laptops and tablets, introduced duds like the Touch Bar, insisted macOS wouldn’t provide a proper touch experience, and denounced the approach as “ergonomically awful.”: ”

As Apple moves apps from its various operating systems closer together — particularly iPadOS apps to macOS — that stubborn approach needs to change, not least because using touch-based apps on one of today’s macOS machines is at best uncomfortable and in many more cases painful .

But this isn’t the only problem hampering lagging Macs.

Where are the next generation of MacBook Pro laptops? The community eagerly expected the M2 Pro and M2 Max powered laptops to arrive in the last quarter of 2022. Apple did not release a new Mac in the last quarter of the yearthe first time it has failed to reach this milestone in more than two decades.

The 13-inch MacBook Pro, as reviewed earlier, is little more than a MacBook Air with an entry-level processor backed by an active cooling fan to add a little more performance. For many, including myself, this isn’t what you’d expect from a professional MacBook Pro.

The non-arrival in 2022 is aggravated by reports of further delays in 2023 with the laptops not expected to be announced before the summer, no doubt with further delays before they go on sale.

It is unlikely that there will be a significant performance improvement? The move from Intel to Apple Silicon brought an immediate jump in power and potential, but the jump from Apple Silicon’s M1 to M2 chipsets proved less spectacular with the MacBook Air refresh. The performance gain for the M2 Pro over the M1 Pro is reported as “marginal”. There are suggestions that Apple will stay on the 5nm process for its silicon rather than move to 3nm and take all the benefits the latter would offer.

Finally, Apple wants to equip future MacBooks with a touchscreen, some fourteen years after Microsoft first supported it in mainstream Windows devices. This would be a turnaround Apple’s approach to portable computing, but it’s one that feels inevitable as Tim Cook and his team try to bring the Mac and iPad platforms closer together, both in software and hardware. Those MacBooks would become the preferred laptops in the range, and while they wouldn’t completely Osbourne the rest of the range, they would lessen the impact of the vanilla-shielded laptops.

Those who expected the new MacBook Pro laptops to arrive on a schedule that Apple allows the community to accept are disappointed. Those looking to upgrade – whether it’s new hardware or finally joining the Apple Silicon platform – will have to wait for the professional-focused laptops. And anyone who wants the usefulness and ease of use of a touchscreen will be wary of investing in a new Apple laptop before the long-established technology finally arrives on the platform.

With Apple’s launch of the M2 family at the 2022 Worldwide Developer Conference, Tim Cook and his team built on the successful Apple Silicon launch. Since then, there have been delays, poor communication, and leaked features that could hurt sales in the short term.

The MacBook Pro platform is neither stable nor certain in 2023.

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