Analysis of the MacBook Pro announcement from friend-of-the-blog John Garner:
Yesterday’s announcements about refreshing the high-end MacBook Pro models effectively gave away Apple’s plans on the less capable models. As I’ve mentioned multiple times, when you attack to disrupt an existing market, you do it at the low end. Notice how there were no significant announcements in the low end segments of the laptop models yesterday.
What Apple effectively did yesterday was to recapture their R&D expenses on Intel laptops by releasing models in a high margin segment, and left the medium- and low-end segments for its future A-series laptops. They
- kept the pro users happy with a new faster machine,
- made sure that the funds that they’d spent designing last year’s models which were never released because of failed Intel execution, and
- bought themselves about six months to get their new ARM chip models ready.
And if you looked closely at the announcement, you can see what technologies will feature in the future lower-end A-series models, i.e., 13.5″ 4k Retina Screen likely with Haptic Engine and TrueTone, much longer battery life (24-hour), 256-512GB SSD, 7nm six-core ARM chip with T2 chip built-in clocked at about 2GHz, two Thunderbolt 3 ports, and 8-16GB of RAM; priced at about $1000 USD. Performance measured with GeekBench 4 will likely be about 4500-5000 single core and 10-12000 with multiple cores.
Personally, I’m pleased because the new MacBook Pro finally offers me the RAM and the speed which will justify buying a new laptop. (Mine is actually 9 years old.) I aim to double RAM, storage, processor performance, and ideally screen resolution every time that I upgrade. I used to upgrade every 2-2.5 years; it’s been a long wait (but this 2009 MacBook Pro has also been a wonderful machine.)
My take: I got a little lost there in the geeky weeds, but sounds plausible to me.
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