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.