Like I said, I think Apple's been humbled a bit with the reaction to the 2016 design. All reports are that it really caught Apple by surprise, and that's about when they started to form their pro user panel and started to talk about how they were going to take pro Mac users seriously. So I think 2019!Apple is less likely to be moving in that direction than 2016!Apple is. I am sort of expecting this to be the "apology MacBook Pro."
That said, there are some things pros griped about I'm not expecting them to go back on. Like, I don't think they're going to go back to having full-size USB ports.
It's hard, because they're so reliant on Intel. What if Intel just can't get them Comet Lake-H in time? That's when things get sticky, and they have to start making some harder choices. They could go with a year-old Coffee Lake Refresh chip, and not get LPDDR4x and not get Wi-Fi 6 "for free," but that doesn't seem ideal. If they're faced with the choice of, say, a Coffee Lake Refresh-H chip in 35W TDP-down mode, or a Comet Lake-U chip in 25W TDP-up mode...
I don't think the Gen-10 weirdness is just going to be this year. It seems like the U/Y processors are always going to be "ahead" of their H-class cousins, in terms of architecture and process. So that's something Apple will have to consider.
I agree that the marketing is weird. "Pro" means different things across Apple's line-up. If you ask me, there shouldn't be a $1,299 "MacBook Pro" with 15W processors. That should just be the MacBook. But Apple clearly disagrees.
This new thing's definitely going to be priced like a Real Pro machine, though, at least at first. I think it really should be on the H-class chips, with a 10-core option. But I also think it should really have a 3:2 display, and it seems like they're going to stick with 16:10. So clearly Apple doesn't answer my calls.
