I hate my late-2016 MacBook Pro. I suspect the CPU-bump that came out in early 2017 was probably much nicer, but I'm going to be stuck with this box for a while. I think the reason it's so bad is that Apple doesn't like it. They don't want to make this machine. They want everyone to move to iPads. Hell, I want to move to an iPad. My iPad almost never disappoints me. It's fast, beautiful, light - powerful. If I could do my job on it (I'm a programmer), I would love the idea of using one as my primary machine. I can't, yet. That may not be true forever, but it's true now.

Steve Jobs, while he was at NeXT said:

If I were running Apple, I would milk the Macintosh for all it's worth — and get busy on the next great thing.

The iPhone and iPad are that next great thing. They just need to keep milking the Mac for all it's worth. And having two separate laptop lines isn't what they want. It feels like they really want to just have one. And I don't blame them - Mac sales are going well, but the PC market is still shrinking over time.

I for one, welcome our USB-C overlords

Lots of people have complained about USB-C - I actually think it's great. It delivers a nice chunk of power; the idea of one single cable giving you DisplayPort as well as power at the same time is great; the idea that even if one of your ports breaks, that you can still charge your computer - all great.

But there are definitely problems. Marco Arment does a great job of explaining them here. I also feel like the cables can get detached too easily, and that's a nuisance as well.

The fact that there's no mag-safe is I think understandable - if you think about it in the context of an iPad. An iPad doesn't need a break-away cable, because you rarely use it tethered. I think if the MacBook Pro battery life were as good as an iPad's, we wouldn't be having this discussion. This works great in the MacBook - not so here with the Pro.

I think Apple should've pushed more first-party peripherals here. The fact that I had to cobble together some janky collection of cables in order to hook up to my Apple DisplayPort Cinema Display? That's awful.

But I've found that - if you just stop buying stupid adapters and that kind of bullshit, and buy the actual cables you'll really need - then you end up in pretty good shape. Want lightning? Don't dongle yourself up. Just buy a USB-C to Lightning cable. Need micro-USB? Buy a cable for that. Keep at least one USB-C-to-A adapter for hooking various random doodads up, but just replace your cables. You'll travel much more confidently that way.

I also wish they had swapped out the Lightning port on iPhones with USB-C as well. That'd be much, much better. I love the idea that I could plug my MacBook Pro into a USB-C charger and charge it, then unplug it and plug in my phone, then plug in my ipad - USB-C everywhere. But leaving Lightning on the iOS devices was, to me, a mistake. Tim Cook has allegedly said that they can't change the connector for 10 years - and Lightning was only introduced in 2012. Well, that's stupid. We're already replacing everything! Why not just replace everything! That would've been "courage."

The Touchbar

I think this is a clever idea, and clever hardware. But I think the software is garbage. When I go to change the volume, I have to click three different little things. I should be able to push and immediately get a nice slider - no more up/down buttons, just go straight to the slider. And wherever you push down, the slider should show enough space on either side to let you drag around to set the volume. This and other changes like that could make it much, much more useful. Instead there's this weird mode thing going on, where there are some things that are 'universal' and some that are 'application specifc'. It's bizarre and I think the implementation is really quite awful. They could've done so much better.

And the escape key, that's really repugnant. There's nothing for you to 'feel' your way around, you have to either have perfect recall of where to hit the escape key, or look at the stupid keyboard. It should either be bigger, or it should at least 'hug' the left corner of the touchbar strip. Or, maybe, keeping it as a physical key. Not handling that was, in my opinion, a grave mistake.

The Keyboard

I like this keyboard much more than the original MacBook keyboard, but it still leaves quite a bit to be desired. Who knows, maybe in the next generation of MacBooks and MacBook Pro's they will manage to get this right. But it's not there yet.

The Size

This gets us back to my original premise - they're basically making this machine closer and closer to a plain MacBook. Until, finally, one day there will be one grand unified MacBook. I'm expecting the next MacBook, for example, to have more than one USB-C port, and potentially support Thunderbolt 3 as well. At that point, why would I need a MacBook Pro? The latest iteration of the MacBooks already support 16GB of RAM (which I desperately need, if not more). So the next one probably will too. Unfortunately, they just can't seem to get that ceiling up to 32GB, which would make me happiest. I suspect that's mostly on Intel though - not on Apple. Still, it's a big problem in my opinion, and they've got to find a way to solve it.

But if there were a MacBook with multiple USB-C/Thunderbolt 3 ports - that could take more than 16GB of RAM? I wouldn't use a MacBook Pro anymore; I'd be done. And I suspect a lot of other people would be too. The same way they discontinued the 17-inch MacBook Pro, they'd be able to do that with the various other MacBook Pros. I don't think anyone would care.

My CPU is almost never pinned (well, CPU's). I could stand a lot less CPU in exchange for more RAM, or better battery life.

I suspect we're getting close to the Grand Unified MacBook theory. Even though the wattage and GHz and whatnot of the various Intel mobile CPU's certainly do seem to want to be in different 'classes' of machines.

The iPad

So as I said, I think Apple really doesn't want to be making these things anymore. If that's true - and I suspect it might be - then they need to be able to get people like me to be able to work - really work - on an iPad. They don't seem to be trying very hard, though.

My argument has been "When Apple comes out with XCode for iPad, you know the Mac will be dead soon after." And I still believe that. But I don't understand why they aren't pushing that, right now. Build the software, and the usage will come. And then that will make a bigger Professional market in the iPad world, which will invite the creation of more Pro software.

Considering how much I love my iPad, I think this would be great. Compatibility be damned!

Conclusion

Well, I've been thinking of writing this for a while, and when I went to research that Marco Arment quote up there, I found that he did the same thing. Oops! Well, his arguments are more about how to fix it; I think mine are more about why they made it this way in the first place. Of course, I'm not 100% convinced that I'm right on all of this - but it seems to fit with the facts pretty well - or at least my interpretation of them.

I suspect that Apple might walk back a lot of these ambitions. With the new iMac Pro (which looks sexy as hell!) they seem to have suddenly remembered that there are real professional users who use their products, and they need to keep catering to them. If they really can build a MacBook with more Thunderbolt 3 ports, and/or one with more than 16GB of RAM - then the Pros have to really step up what they can be. I think they'll be able to do that if Apple relaxes their insistence on making these things as thin as razor blades. Lighter is always better, don't get me wrong - but this is my professional workstation. I need firepower here.

But what I want, even more than that - is to really find a way to live on my iPad. That's the machine I hold dear to my heart. And I think that machine is the key to Apple's future here, and to the future of computing. As the iPads get more and more powerful, and iOS gets more feature-rich - I think we can get there, eventually. It's just a matter of time.