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Apple’s laptop designs are cornering Mac users
It’s funny, Apple crowing about its biggest Mac revenue year ever at a time when there seems to be quite a bit of unrest about the Mac out there on the Internet. Is the Mac doing well or is the Mac user base frustrated at the last few years of Apple’s stewardship of the platform? It might be a little bit of both.
I detailed some of Apple’s controversial laptop design decisions a couple of weeks ago. To be sure, there are classes of users for whom the latest generation of MacBook Pro models, introduced in October 2016, are appreciably worse than the previous-generation models. But I’ve also talked to a lot of people who have bought new MacBook Pros and love them. My daughter got a new MacBook for her birthday, and thinks it’s great.
It’s possible that this swirling dissatisfaction with Apple’s laptop direction has a little whiff of selection bias. People who are more likely to listen to Apple-focused podcasts and read Apple-focused websites are probably more likely to be in more technical fields with specific requirements that might not be well served by Apple’s design decisions. They’re also probably more likely to be persnickety about the details of their computer choices than the general public.