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chucker
 
Join Date: May 2004
Location: near Bremen, Germany
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2019-11-21, 17:56

Quote:
Originally Posted by kscherer View Post
I made a list somewhere in the forums of the product line I wanted to see, but I can't find it. It looked a bit like this:

Mac
Mac Pro

iMac
iMac Pro

MacBook
MacBook Pro

iPad
iPad Pro

iPhone
iPhone Pro
So here's what's fundamentally wrong with that. And that's not on you; it's on Apple.

When they moved to Intel in 2006, they shuffled some product names around (to get rid of "Power", I suppose, even though PowerBook originally had nothing to do with PowerPC).

The Power Mac became the Mac Pro, the iBook the MacBook, the PowerBook the MacBook Pro. The iMac remained (calling it "Mac" would've been weird, and "iMac" was kind of a brand of its own). The Mac mini remained; it sort of fit already.

In retrospect, it surprises me what a mistake (or, well, weird choice) they made here. By calling the desktops just "Macs" and the laptops "MacBooks", they encoded a default assumption that a Mac is a desktop, and only a MacBook is a laptop. That makes sense in 1995, but does it in 2006? Around 2005, notebooks outsold desktops for the first time. So that wasn't even a thing about to happen in the near future; by the time Apple introduced the "MacBook" brand, it already had happened.

So how could they not see that a new naming convention should default to the laptop, and make the desktop the outlier?

I bring this up because of a flaw in your list. It contains four desktops and two laptops, when really, the opposite should be the case. The vast majority of Mac sales at this point are laptops. So if anything, those should have four variants.

Should most of them be called "Pro"? No, of course not. Paul's right; the way the 13-inch MacBook Pro exists in two rather distinct versions is just bad. It's gotten a lot better this summer when at least, all MacBooks Pro now have a Touch Bar, but the lowest-end Pro is still an odd outlier. Barely a Pro at all. Certainly a very different kind of "Pro" than the 16-inch MacBook Pro. And, perhaps more to the point, also a very different kind of "Pro" than the iMac Pro. Or the Mac Pro!

So as much as I like the cleanliness of your product / product Pro alignment, it's kind of a lie. It's a lie because the iMac is already the Mac, and it's a lie because most Macs aren't desktops. Should Apple have four desktop Macs? Well, let's not complain about that because the Mac platform three years ago when the iMac Pro didn't exist, the Mac Pro seemed dead, and the Mac mini hadn't been updated in years was terrible. But if they have four desktop Macs, they should probably have more MacBooks.

Given that the two-port 13-inch MacBook Pro is neither as powerful as its more expensive siblings, nor (likely) purchased as much by "Pros", it just shouldn't be called Pro.

Quote:
Originally Posted by kscherer View Post
Where the descriptor "Air" is used, there is another, close by product similar in size, specs, price, etc., sometimes at the end of the lineup, sometimes in the middle, and sometimes, but in neither case is it the "latest tech" or anything like that. It's just … weird. And it needs to be simplified. I know this as fact, since I deal with confused customers on a daily basis, and getting those two "Air" things to make sense to them is just plain hard. On the laptop side, it's trying to make sense of that $1299 MacBook Pro, and on the iPad side it's trying to make sense of that $499 iPad Air.
Given that they bumped the $329 iPad in specs, and added Pencil and all, I really don't understand why they bothered to reintroduce the Air. Unless it sold so poorly that they scrambled to do so?
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