How is a large 15" laptop with a discrete GPU a successor to the MacBook Air?

The problem I have with that statement is that "the MBP" is an ambiguous term. It's a product lineup, and there are products in that lineup that are not in any way the successor to the Air.

It is quite hard to make a "Pro" machine targeted at professionals with a product line up of 4 laptop (and maybe 4 laptop total in the whole Mac line) with very little configuration options.

That's the most obvious conclusion of all those MBP review and comment. Apple just serve a small slice of the consumer market that intersect a narrow slice of the professional market. That narrow slice just gets smaller with each major iteration and Apple is not sad about it.

I think this is an okay viewpoint, but it forces the conclusion that Apple has never made a Pro machine (because the MacBook Pro lineup has never had that many options and configurations). Personally I'm fine with that conclusion, but it's not consistent with the narrative that this is the first MacBook Pro which is not for professionals.

I remember people always complaining about how the MBP was not for professionals.

Lack of ports, lack of DVD reader, lack of configuration options, lack of OSX corporate feature, lack of customisability, lack of Windows, too expensive, ...

Most of those "lacks" are relatively recent evolutions of the product line. It doesn't feel like it was that long ago I had a MacBook Pro with a DVD drive, Ethernet port, and expandable memory.

It was a bit bulky, but I really miss some of those features these days.

> How is a large 15" laptop with a discrete GPU a successor to the MacBook Air?

The article is talking about the 13": I’ve moved from a MacBook Air 13" to a MacBook Pro 13".

That's fair. I was particularly referring to the 13", and more so referring to how the article specifically was in context of someone switching from an air to the pro. They all seem to have gone the route of thinner and sexier while sacrificing "proness," though.

> That seems to sum up this review. The macbook pro is a successor to the air, not the old macbook pro.

I could see that argument for the MBP13 but not 15. You should clarify your remarks if that's what you meant because it looks like you're trolling otherwise.

The problem is that the 15'' pays for the sins of the 13''. It has to be the same thinness and share most of the same components, because of economies of scale (which are basically Cook's religion). But the priority for the 13'' is to be "a better Air, at Pro prices", so most trade-offs made there (33% smaller batteries, no high-power Ram etc) end up crippling the 15''. The artificial push to merge Air and Pro lines sacrificed one half of the audience.

Apple should have taken the boring, predictable step of giving the MacBook a 13'' version, rehashing the 12'' if necessary to match; that would gave been the super-thin Air line. Then they could have designed MBPs around the 15'' and power users -- which is what they basically did to great success in 2010-2012. But I guess the current solution has better margins, so 15'' users can go screw themselves.

Yeah, I see what you're saying. It makes some sense on product line delineation. Not sure MBP15 owners got screwed or are crippled though. All the criticism of the new MBP shows how awfully spoiled people have become. There's really not much more you could do there to improve on the best constructed laptop anyone has ever created.

So a MacBook Pro is a "Pro" device because it has lots of different ports ?

That seems illogical.

It's just about better specs, which before the great de-portening meant screen, CPU, and memory.