After settling my opinions on the MPBR 2016 announcement for a day, I decided to pen down some thoughts on the #AppleEvent.

Pros:

  • USB-C type charging - This might make frayed cable replacement cost-effective.
  • Brighter displays - Always welcome.
  • Better battery life - The more the merrier.

Cons:

  • Bad sign for Apple’s uniform connectivity ecosystem.

    • It’s disappointing when even the latest iPhone (7) cannot connect with MBPR 2016 without an additional connector.

    • Apple doesn’t seem clear on how it wants its users to consume audio (Lightning port on the iPhone VS 3.5mm jack on the MBPR?) (The probable reason here is that professional grade headphones still come in wired variants and need to connect to a DAC amp in some cases. Therefore removing the 3.5mm jack on the MBPR would mean Apple shooting its own foot.)

    This shows a bit poorly on how internally the various HW teams are on different pages, in the same year.

  • TL;DR - Dongles galore.

    • *USB 2.0/3.0, VGA, HDMI, DisplayPort and Thunderbolt 2 output are supported using adapters which are sold separately. If you already have an existing monitor setup, this will make your final cost much higher than just the MBPR cost. Yes, Thunderbolt 3 might be the future, but forcing the price of this early transition on the consumer is a bit sad. It would have been nice of Apple to at-least provide the basic connectors as a part of the bundle.

    • Carrying all these extra dongles around is going to be less than ideal. This tweet gives a better picture of the overhead this transition is creating.

  • Farewell SDHC/SDXC card slot. Folks from the digital photography community will miss you. :(

  • Memory still limited to 16 Gigs of RAM.

    • With no ability to upgrade due to the RAM being soldered onto the board (Apple justifies that the 16 GB decision was taken considering energy consumption issues)

Things that are nice, but we could have managed without:

  • TouchBar - Although this is innovation, I’m sure there were better things to fix than the function keys. Also, I’m more of the tactile feedback kind of person.
  • TouchID authentication - Other than purchases via Apple Pay, I don’t see a strong enough use-case for this
  • Bigger TrackPad. The old one housed 4 fingers. Wasn’t broken IMO.
  • Thinner than previous version. It’s called Pro and not Lite for a reason. Last year’s weight/thickness did not hurt anyone. Maybe we would not need to compromise on some essentials that way.
  • The space gray color variant is a nice addition. Although its just a cosmetic change.

Takeaways:

In the direction that Apple is heading towards with the newest release of iPhone and MBPR, it is increasingly evident that Apple wants to drive all communication/data transfers the wireless route (Remember AirPods?). I am surprised the 3.5mm jack managed to stay on the MBPR this year. ;)

All in all, the #AppleEvent was lackluster and had #Courage written all over it. Sadly, I’ll be skipping the upgrade as being a MBPR mid-2014 user, I see more compromise than gain.

Also, I would like to reference another wonderfully written article on the same topic.

Disclaimer - I might have missed a bunch of technicalities. Moreover, this is just my attempt to pen down some musings I had from the announcement. Also, inevitably it might carry a slightly negative tone because the announcement was not on par with what we expect from AAPL. MSFT takes the HW innovation trophy this year, at-least for me. Hope AAPL has better things to showcase next year around, like it used to back in the days :)