Releasing the TouchBar laptops last November, which apparently have seen a 20% yoy sales increase, screwed up their Mac Pro desktop line released 3 years ago. I don't even...

Truth. I had $1,500 earmarked for a new macbook pro before they launched. Switched to Linux for all my development work shortly after. Which, I should have done earlier tbh.

I was ready to pay 6k+ for a max MacBook pro with external gpu and whatever other usb-c accessories they were going to sell. The lack of a ram upgrade caught me off guard, really no ram upgrade in like 6 years? Really its usb-c-only and they have no usb-c accessories? SMH

I've been reading up on various eGPU enclosures. I'll probably do it the next time I get some side-gig money, but the hacky-ness of it makes me nervous. If Apple were to make an official one, it'd be a day-1 purchase for me. I could see this type of product possibly fitting into a new Mac Pro hardware line, but I'm probably just dreaming.

To be honest I feel like the touchbar MBP gets a bit of undeserved hate. I do think the touchbar is a total gimmick admittedly but what else did people really want? More RAM, sure, but that'd mean lower battery life.

I was admittedly disappointed at first but then realised there isn't really anything else that they could've done to interest me anyway. I'm genuinely very happy with my existing 2014 MacBook Pro. I just also think it's telling that I as someone who's spent far too much money on Apple hardware also uses a hackintosh desktop.

In my opinion, Apple started losing its way when it started caring more about "fashion", which is not necessarily the same as (and it's often the opposite of) good design.

I don't think they had an issue with design so much as only having a single team as bottleneck for the entire product lineup. They really need the equivalent of Intel's tick-tock strategy where the designers can be going full speed on the cool new manufacturing techniques but a second team is just taking last year's industrial designs and shipping updates with current spec / capacity components so they stop drifting so far behind the market every time the design team isn't ready to ship a major change.

The hardware has mostly stalled out. A great CPU from 3 years ago is still more powerful than what most people are buying today. RAM and SSD space is plentiful enough to be a non issue for most people. Battery progress is steady but very slow. So, what's left to base a new laptop on GPU?

Storage? Nearly everyone I know who has a MBP is 100% on it all the time on disk. Understand apple makes a load on the SSD upgrades, but seriously increasing base storage would be enough for a bit.

Is 1TB not large enough, or is it a cost issue?

Sure, they IMO should increase the minimum past 128, but many people don't use close to that and the 1,300$ price point is attractive w/ 2.7GHz i5.

They could go the desktop CPU route, although that's likely not an option for Apple since that would require them to either use extreme throttling or beef up the cooling (meaning louder fans and probably a thicker case)