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I'm not an Apple fan, but you seem pretty harsh.

- 3d touch: gimmick

- unnatural scrolling: I presume you mean "scroll the content" not "scroll the viewport" I thought the same but when I tried it out myself I actually adapted really quickly and now find it more natural. Either way this doesn't seem like a huge investment in anything, if you don't like it turn it off.

- touch bar: I actually think this will be quite useful. It turns a row of numbered keys into a row of keys that can be matched to the application that is running. Maybe a slight downside to power users (less tactile) but I think it is a pretty reasonable feature.

- gigabit ethernet: Can't you get this over USB-C?

- slots for interacting... Maybe not right now but I think that soon everything will be USB-C. I don't really see any reason for another port.

- maybe Apple drives a new wave of people to desktop Linux: I can only hope :)

I can definitely that especially in the short term the advantages aren't clear or not significant. However I am really looking forward to the universality of USB-C and most of the other features appear to have a market so I'm not so much losing faith in Apple over all but feeling that they are moving further away from the demographic I am in.

You didn't buy an iPhone in 'a while', but you imply that you own one where you can (unintentionally) use 3D touch, so either a 6S or a 7. So you didn't buy an iPhone since... last year?

> What I don't understand is the "pro" in the name. Doesn't a "pro"fessional need to do things with their computer outside of a coffee shop; usable I/O, gigabit ethernet, slots for interfacing with their other professional equipment, etc. I can totally understand these features in a consumer edition laptop. But there is no longer a reason to call these "pro" laptops.

You can buy a single ~$80 hub that gives you all of those ports, AND you only need to plug 1 cable into your computer when you sit down at your desk. If you buy a new USB-C monitor, then all of those things are integrated in the display. Even the charger.

It has more IO throughput than pretty much any laptop out there with multiple Thunderbolt ports at 40Gbps. Even most desktops don't have _multiple_ 40G ports.

Rather off-topic don't you think?

Pointless Mac vs PC debates are never off topic on internet forums :-)

> we can finally get a nice, modern, desktop environment

Have you tried Gnome 3? Not being sarcastic :). These days it's a very stable, slick environment with a very good window manager. Beats the pants off of OS X at least.

>Have you tried Gnome 3? Not being sarcastic :). These days it's a very stable, slick environment with a very good window manager. Beats the pants off of OS X at least.

I used to use OSX but now I use Arch with GNOME3 and your comment is not based in reality. GNOME3 doesn't even have feature-parity with Snow Leopard. It's many years behind the OSX in features and polish department [0]. I encounter various GNOME3 issues and bugs daily and have been subscribed to many issues on GNOME's Bugzilla to keep track of fixes. The worst issue, by far, is memory usage and memory leaks. On my PC, GNOME3 sometimes ends up using 1.5GB or RAM. GNOME is also infamous for being the only Linux DE that regularly removes features that people use [1].

Anyway, while I do like GNOME and have used it every day for the past 4 months, it's nowehere near OSX's Aqua.

[0] https://igurublog.wordpress.com/2012/11/05/gnome-et-al-rotti... [1] https://mail.gnome.org/archives/commits-list/2013-March/msg0...

> What I don't understand is the "pro" in the name

You can do all those things (and more) via ThunderBolt 3. You can even reuse old hardware by putting PCI-E cards into external enclosures. That's pretty Pro don't you think?

I imagine that there are very few companies worldwide that would refuse the sort of oblivion Steve Ballmer led Microsoft into