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chucker
 
Join Date: May 2004
Location: near Bremen, Germany
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2019-07-09, 12:17

Now, some thoughts:
  • Critically, we finally have a MacBook line-up again that mostly makes sense. The 13-inch size is still a bit overcrowded, and the MacBook Pros start with an oddball model, but it's way better than before. The Air is both the lighter and the lower-end option, and there is no more 12-inch MacBook that really should've been called a MacBook Air, nor a 13-inch without Touch Bar that was quite different for no obvious reason yet still called a Pro. (The low-end MacBook Pro is still a bit of an oddball, having just two Thunderbolt ports and a rather slow CPU, but it's now at least a little bit closer to the other two.) Until yesterday, it was really hard to figure out why all these options existed; today, that's become a lot easier.
  • This means any MacBook now has Touch ID (neither the 12-inch MacBook nor even more oddly the low-end 13-inch MacBook Pro used to!). They should've done that in 2016, but, hey, great!
  • Likewise, the terrible 480p webcam from the 12-inch MacBook is gone. Good.
  • Lower starting prices and reduced upgrades are good. The MacBook Pros are still expensive as hell, though. I thought in 2016 that these prices would eventually go down; they have not.
  • These should all start at 256 GB SSD. In fact, the 12-inch MacBook used to (another oddity compared to the Air). Maybe this doesn't matter as much with people moving to cloud storage or having external disks, though.
  • I have yet to see reports on whether this new new new we really fixed it pinky promise keyboards also have reliability problems. They've only been in the wild for two months, though.

This is mostly a good update. A good ol'-fashioned speedbump which, for a few years, we saw too few of.

There are still nits to pick — for instance, why does the MacBook Air have Bluetooth 4.2 instead of 5.0? Why does the low-end MacBook Pro lack Hey Siri when the MacBook Air has it? Why has the iPad Pro had ProMotion for two years, and not a single Mac does today?
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