>Was anyone ever legitimately inconvenienced by the thickness of the 2010 MBP?

Sure. Here's a certain Linus Torvalds:

"I’m have to admit being a bit baffled by how nobody else seems to have done what Apple did with the Macbook Air – even several years after the first release, the other notebook vendors continue to push those ugly and clunky things. (...) I don’t think I’m unusual in preferring my laptop to be thin and light. (...) Btw, even when it comes to Apple, it’s really just the Air that I think is special. The other apple laptops may be good-looking, but they are still the same old clunky hardware (...)"

I absolutely adore the Air. I do a lot of remote HPC coding and typically just connect to the cluster via SSH. I have a monstrous desktop at home for when I'm back.

To me the Air is magical because it has a balance of my exact needs: portability, toughness and, battery life. I would give anything for an updated model.

Be cheered, there are a lot of great 13" devices that are at least as good as the Air for every category you list with the addition of price.

Most people ignore Chromebooks as direct comparisons, but many are just as tough, have similarly crummy/capable internals, cost a pittance, are as unupgradeable, and run Linux like champs. They're the platonic ideal of single function computing.

The 13" Acer I bought in 2012 had a 1080 display, could output over HDMI at 2160p, and played video for at least 8 hours on a full charge. Cost maybe $250 and had a very sturdy case that didn't bend or break when dropped. Not that shabby.

Do they pack them into the final boxes/packaging somewhere close to the end destination? Because those boxes haven't changed in size AFAIK. My 2017 MBP came in a 70 mm tall box, same as my 2012 one.

Even so, the difference in weight is still definitely a cost saving measure.

> My tinfoil hat theory is yes [...]

We don't need to speculate. How many MBPs fit in a cubic meter, and how much does it cost to ship a cubic meter of goods on a cargo plane?

According to this[1], flying a 40-foot container from Shenzen to London is around $2000. A 40-foot container has a capacity of 76 cubic meters.

The MBP fits in a 17” x 13” x 5” shipping box[2], which leaves some room for bubble wrap. That's 0.02 cubic meters, so 50 MBPs per cubic meter. So for $2000, 50*76 = 3800 MBPs can be shipped.

That's around 50 cents shipping cost, for something that sells for $1000, which means Tim Cook would have to be quite irrational to reduce the size of the MBP in order to reduce the (50-cent-per-MBP) freight expenditure.

[1] https://www.freightos.com/freight-resources/air-freight-rate...

[2] https://swappa.com/blog/the-best-way-to-ship-your-macbook/

I would guess that they are dense enough that their volumetric cost is weight constrained rather than volume constrained, so this may be less of a factor than you think.