That's the same 2016 design as the new model. So it definitely doesn't prove that "they had the time" -- and even less that they wasted it in "a touch bar and a thinner design". The touch bar and thinner design came at the time of the Intel promises, and matched OK with the performance seen at the time.
On 2016, when they presented it, Intel was still promising lowered TDP cpus in the pipeline.
Yes. They had the time. They chose to invest it in putting a touch screen on your keyboard.
Apple put the "touch screen on your keyboard" when they introduced the current design in 2016.
At the time, and for the next year, 2017, the design was perfectly fine for the then-current Intel CPUs models. And Intel was promising even more efficient models.
It's not like there was a thermal problem in 2016, when Apple introduced the design and they ignored it to concentrate on the touch strip. Not only wasn't there such a problem at 2018, it still wasn't in 2017 either.
One could argue that Apple should have created a new design in the 5-6 previous months during which they had Intels new chips at hand.
But that's a much shorter notice, and something totally different than the inane complain about "focusing on the touch screen on the keyboard" which gets the timeline backwards.
No, I have my timeline correct. You are just ignoring what I'm writing.
> Apple put the "touch screen on your keyboard" when they introduced the current design in 2016.
Yes.
So, prior to 2016, they could have been working on building out a 32GB machine, giving people what they wanted.
But they didn't.
> At the time, and for the next year, 2017, the design was perfectly fine for the then-current Intel CPUs models.
But it wasn't perfectly fine for people they are currently marketing to.
Sorry, but they've already demonstrated they had the time to build out a 32GB machine that could do this. They had the time. They just chose to invest it in a touch bar and a thinner design.
They've had the time.