With Apple these days, Pro means ‘bloody expensive’, and even more so outside the US. The rebrand may help to justify the pricing, but it’s odd to do that with such an incremental update, rather than save it for a year with a bigger design change.

For a lot of the world, a $500 smartphone was a luxury, and a $1500 smartphone (like a $3000+ laptop, or $1000 monitor stand) is an unfunny joke.

While they’re amazing devices, they’re just not replacements for a real computer, being locked down, with no exposed file system, and the imprecision of touch-only input.

I live in a country where practically no one except businesses possess personal computers and maybe 50% of the urban population has a smart phone (usually some $30 Huawei crap). I worry that this kind of leap frogging that 3rd world countries do is harmful in this specific case. The web to them consists entirely of Facebook, YouTube, WhatsApp, and Instagram. Telecos provide extremely popular subsidized “internet” packages that consist exclusively of access to these sites. Instead of the web and technology being catalysts for production, they are solely used for consumption.

This in my opinion is very dangerous and will prevent the country from ever becoming a producer of information and services.