Macbook Pro "improvements" over the last 3-7 years:
* No more matte display
* RAM soldered to the board
* SSD soldered in
* remove all ports except USB-C
* make keyboard worse
* remove function keys, replace with touch surface that's redundant at best
But it's very thin!
And even thinner was the recent Macbook, and if the law of "diminishing returns" matters as little as the usual defenses of all the above tradeoffs in pursuit of light/thin imply, you'd think that that'd be worth keeping.
Maybe there is a limit, and Apple's actually reflected on that?
Or... maybe it's just a recognition that the Air and Macbook had come to a place where there was little distinguishing them. And that really, the MBP is less and less designed/deployed with actual professionals in mind and more and more meant for a prosumer subsegment. In which case reducing focus to two models (general purpose consumer laptop, light netbook) makes sense.
* No more matte display
* RAM soldered to the board
* SSD soldered in
* remove all ports except USB-C
* make keyboard worse
* remove function keys, replace with touch surface that's redundant at best
But it's very thin!
And even thinner was the recent Macbook, and if the law of "diminishing returns" matters as little as the usual defenses of all the above tradeoffs in pursuit of light/thin imply, you'd think that that'd be worth keeping.
Maybe there is a limit, and Apple's actually reflected on that?
Or... maybe it's just a recognition that the Air and Macbook had come to a place where there was little distinguishing them. And that really, the MBP is less and less designed/deployed with actual professionals in mind and more and more meant for a prosumer subsegment. In which case reducing focus to two models (general purpose consumer laptop, light netbook) makes sense.