Normal people have absolutely no need for a $2~3000 laptop so I'm not really sure about what you're trying to prove here. Your argument would work with Chromebooks too.

Note, I never had one and I really don't give a crap about what Apple does with its product line. But you can't deny that a lot of developers, particularly people who post on HN, have been predominantly MBP users for the past decade. And I can understand they care about connectivity[1] and battery life, and probably a lot less about the TouchBar.

Also you have a weird definition of "enthusiasts". The ones I know don't buy laptops, much less Apple computers.

[1] I have to admit, it's funny they still haven't understood that Apple never did.

I agree - sometimes we forget that Apple caters to my mother and my nephew just as much as it does to us - this is a segment which still has growth potential (still plenty of elderly ladies out there without computers; and new teenagers produced all the time). For these types of people Apple is just fine.

I think though what many of us are complaining about is that "Pro" used to mean a machine that was targeted at us, i.e. Professionals. I guess now it just means "high end" but I remember a few years ago the Macbook Air was targeted at the "pretty things" market.

I remember about 5 years ago my brother a professional animator complaining about how Apple dumbed down Final Cut Pro X to the point it wasn't usable in his domain. These days his shop doesn't use Macs any more (typically a staple industry).

I've a friend too, who works in automotive industrial design who won't touch a mac because it just doesn't have the power he needs.

My sister is a professional photographer and up until a few months ago I wouldn't have hesitated to recommend her a MBP but in all conscience nowadays I can not. This dilemma actually forced me to look at Windows laptops and I'm amazed how much they've come along in the last while.

So it's not just "us" that feel abandoned by Apple, but professionals from other walks of life. It's fair enough, if its a segment that doesn't make as much money for Apple as it used to, and as a business they have to make business decisions.

As professionals we have to make these decisions too, and if Apple isn't the right tool for the job we need to source one that is. But, there was a few years there where it felt like Apple was our friend. They made some amazingly pro-friendly gear. It seems those days are waning, and that relationship is coming to an end, and some of us feel a little jilted.

On the one hand, we hope that this "friend" will hear our protests and change their ways but we know deep down that won't happen. On the other we have to give the best advice to our friends and acquaintances as to what is a good device for them. We, as in "those sorts of groups" have a responsibility to critically evaluate new hardware in this light.

Not all, or even most complaints I've seen is from 'those' groups, whatever that is supposed to mean exactly, are enthusiast really the worst issue with persobal computers ?

Back to the issue, most complaints I've seen/heard are from actual professionals who wants - or needs - magsafe, more RAM, more ports, more storage, more speed, or better batterylife.

The new MBP doesn't give you much more than what you already have, and for people having machines starting to wear out, buy another of essentially the same thing feels like a bad deal.

For me personally the biggest issues are magsafe and no RAM upgrade beyond 16GB. I simply run out of RAM all the time, but I would prefer not having to switch to windows simply to get more than 16GB RAM, with all the pain that would entail. Magsafe because it have saved my machine several times while on the road or working from home with kids running around.

I've heard a lot of people cite their with as why they need more capacity but most of them go silent when asked to explain e.g. what they can do with 32GB but not 16GB (exceptions were edge cases like someone who worked on a model which was ~20GB), a gaming-class GPU, why Kalby Lake is a requirement, etc.

I'm actually in the camp which would prefer more battery but this seems more like the effects of forum echo chamber reinforcement than anything like a strong trend.

32gb vs 16gb for me is the difference between having my local development environment a replica of production EXCEPT massively scaled down vertically and horizontally. Meaning I can still have clustered databases (couchbase, etc) to test against vs having to test against an environment that has zero clustering at all. This might be fine for some, but there are a lot of gotchas that you encounter when dealing with disparate query + index servers that you wouldn't ever run into if you completely wrote code against a single instance.

Sure, this is an edge case but that doesn't minimize my requirements for 32gb of ram. I'll be buying a new laptop next year to replace my 2015MBPr and it will definitely be one that has 32gb minimum. That is, at this point, more important by far than OSX to my workload.

Over what time span do you survey users? For example, I was completely happy with my 16 GB iPhone for the first two years and now I feel like an idiot for not getting a larger model. I'm perfectly fine with a 8GB computer now, but what in two years? I think a lot of the enthusiast outrage is about future-proofing, which wouldn't even be a thing if machines were still upgradable.

Enthusiast?

If they were real enthusiasts, they would be for things like the Thunderbolt 3.0, the TPM, the touchbar, the excellent battery life and noise levels...

If they were real enthusiasts, they would know about USB-C more than "Hurr durr dongles"

Enthusiasts in the same way the people who buy X-series Intel desktop chips for much more than better Xeons so they can overclock them to play GPU bound games are enthusiasts.

Interesting. Could make for a good article.

Wish we could!