>But if the last few years of Apple's new hardware is telling us anything, is that Apple is now strictly casual-oriented, and if you're in any capacity a professional, you need to start thinking about getting a PC again.

Was the new Mac Pro not 'professional' enough for you? Up to 28 core CPU, 1.5 TB of RAM, capable of driving six 6K monitors and so on? Even the iMac Pro is absurdly overpowered for 'casual' usage.

It's plenty professional, just not portable. The problem is that just like with the iPhone, the pro line has just become the high class line so people buy it for the bling factor. They need to make a dev or nerd line or whatever marketing decides to call it. This would be more configurable and not thin and light just for the sake of being thinner and light that last year's model.

But this product segmentation is not at all new. Apple has never had a "pro" workstation-style laptop like the Thinkpad P. The MacBook Pro line has always been relatively-thin, relatively-light, not-very-upgradable: going back almost fifteen years.

I agree that Apple isn't trying to serve the market for "portable workstation", but they never really have, so why do you say they have lost their way?

It's also worth saying you can still buy a 16" MacBook Pro with an 8-core i9 processor, 64GB of RAM, a Radeon Pro 5600M with 8GB of RAM, 8TB of SSD storage - a specification that's hardly "casual".

> Apple has never had a "pro" workstation-style laptop like the Thinkpad P. The MacBook Pro line has always been relatively-thin, relatively-light, not-very-upgradable: going back almost fifteen years.

The 17" lunch trays were that product, and were bought by people who wanted to edit photos in the field or get a lot of spreadsheet cells on the display. They had the highest performance as well.

They were just as thin and upgradable as the other PowerBooks/MacBook Pros.

> just not portable

That's because the base model doesn't come with Apple Wheel. They're only 700$.

This is the third time I read this comment and lightly smiled. Wasn't until now that it occurred to me that "Apple Wheel" might actually be a real product. Lo and behold, it's 4 cart wheels that retails for $699, I'm not even joking. https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MX572ZM/A/apple-mac-pro-w...

Yeah, I'm mostly picking on Apple and their ardent refusal to use articles ('on [an] iPhone...', 'We've made [the] iPad xxx times faster') which drives me crazy for some reason, and also nodding to The Onion's aardvark 'Macbook Wheel' spoof. It could go either way.

the pretentiousness of it bugs me too, and I use an iPhone, an iPad, and Mac.

In euros they sell it for €849, or about $1k.

What PC are you thinking about that is both powerful and portable?

Overreaction much? Last I checked the vast majority of their devices are sold with Intel chipsets. So if having multiple displays while running your MacBook Air for "professional work" is a deal-breaker then you can just get a different Mac. M2 chips and later will obviously support multiple external displays. Not everyone needs to be an early adopter. Sheesh.

As a "professional", getting a PC is a deal breaker. It's not a Mac. It doesn't run macOS. That's the whole point.

No overreaction, just sharing what I'm seeing in the European film industry already. Film professionals couldn't care less if it's Mac or PC, as long as it runs the software they want to run, that it won't make them lose their mind with performance issues and won't cost similarly to a semi-fancy car.

Apple currently is making it clear that they are not actively targeting those people anymore (max 16GB of memory, really?) and professionals are finally noticing, which is why in the last few years you see more and more professionals moving back to PC after being on macOS for many years.

> (max 16GB of memory, really?)

Again, this is the first iteration of the M1 chip. Again, you can buy a different Mac and spec it out to 32GB if you have that requirement.

I'm a professional. I'm "noticing". I'm still buying a Mac.

Apple hasn't made anything clear. These are entry level devices. They don't have anything to do with the customers you describe. Some other variants of Apple Silicon will address those customers. No data available yet to draw any conclusions.

Bit of a problem if you want to write iPhone or Mac apps though...

It's a good thing their Intel machines go all the way to 28 Xeon cores and 1.5TB if RAM then...

Sure, and I imagine the ARM ones will in time - but it moves the MBP further along the admittedly already in progress line of it not really being a Pro machine anymore.

For some definitions of "Pro" ;-).

Every professional group has different bottlenecks. For me, the amount of memory is more of a problem than CPU speed and I couldn't care less about GPU, although I like having more screens. These Pros would be a tight fit for me, but other people may want a faster CPU more than large memories, so everyone's mileage may vary. I suppose the next generation will bump it up to 32 or 64GB, so they may be more comfortable for me.

One thing I'd love would be more low-power cores. I don't do heavy lifting on VMs and, because of that, these cores seem like perfect for that little MySQL container. Also, the lower the single-thread performance, the sooner you'll see concurrency issues.