It is clickbait candy to point out even small inconsistencies in Apple’s branding but if you looked at Dell or Lenovo or Cisco or similar vendors nobody expects branding terminology to be meaningful at all.

Yeah I was just coming up against this with Lenovo's 2-in-1s.

It's simple: If you want a 2-in-1 you should be getting a Yoga.

Except actually some of them are branded things like ThinkBook Flex.

And actually if you get a Yoga Slim, you won't be getting a 2-in-1 at all.

Marketing is feel good wording, usually nothing of real value or substance. So words like "Pro" and "Premium" come off as "classy," but in no way shape or form reflect upon the quality or content of what's being marketed. It's all hot air to swindle you into spending your tendies.

Sometimes companies do use "Pro" or "Premium" to separate product lines and usually the puffed up one might have more features, which is where trust in Pro/Premium comes from (probably), however, eventually the terms become meaningless as product lines merge, situations like in this article occur, and don't forget the companies that just slap those words onto things to make whatever they're selling just seem better than they are ("premium" sound quality on $8 earbuds for example. wtf?).

maybe I'm just getting old and cynical...

> I can hear people asking: “Isn’t it a bit early to predict that, given that we’ve only seen two products?” It’s a very fair question. But it definitely seems like a first step — to me, the Mac Studio line is a clear successor to Apple’s iMac Pro.

I was under the impression that apple is planning on releasing one more M1 device and that could be the iMac Pro [1]. This article feels quite hollow to me.

[1] https://youtu.be/CMm7UZKtGNk

I got the impression from the title that this was about product differences ... and then they just talk to marketing folks, whose job is it to use a term and stretch it until they kill it.

I feel like I’m readding an article where the same people who announce “red is back!” and a few months later they bemoan how everyone is wearing red now.

> years of Apple and competitors slapping the name onto wireless earbuds and slightly fancier phones have made it hard to tell what “Pro” even means

Is it that hard to tell? "Pro" means "better than the models that don't have 'Pro' in their name, in some ways".

Pentium Pro (Now Xeon?) probably put the pro adjective into high gear. Maybe it has predecessors in the OPE world.

The M1 covering the entire line does remove the major perf difference that historically existed between iBooks and MacBooks, but seriously I know a large number of people who would love a return to a more “fun” colored non-pro.

Hopefully we’ll never see a toilet lid design again though.

I think with apple "pro" sort of evolved into "pro-sumer"

Sort of like SLR and DSLR camera systems vs pro-looking cameras without interchangeable lenses and other workhorse features.