is interesting.
While the current offerings don't meet expectations set for the MBP... maybe this is a long play by Apple?
How quickly will the disappointment be forgotten when 32 gig / quadcore / nvidia GPU's are released?
Apple is awfully good at knowing just when to extract that little bit more from their customers. And I suspect that similar to the USB-C MacBook the concern over ports will just be from a vocal but tiny minority.
I can't find hard numbers for MBPs, but here's a list of prices over years for Mac Pros; from a consumer perspective, the changes are essentially random.
I do think it was a big misstep that their flagship, brand new phone can't connect to their flagship, brand new laptop without an adapter that has to be bought separately. I also think they could have done it in a more phased approach without losing anything. But ultimately it will turn out to be a good decision.
No idea how common this is but I feel like it's common enough that it should have been handled better.
How hard could it really be to make a basic Linux desktop environment work sorta close enough to OS X to make enough people switch to finance further development? My quick and dirty estimate is that 50 good people could pull off a great first release in 18 months.
(I do have relevant consumer UX software design management experience and feel that I can do reasonable quick estimates based on that.)
What this means is that the very first model released with a new case is usually underpowered, because the chips are not quite as powerful and power efficient as the (upcoming) chips the case was optimized for.
For this and other reasons I tend to not buy the first version of a new Apple product.
http://www.macrumors.com/2016/11/14/late-2016-mbp-amd-gpus-s...
And it would probably require rewrites of high-performance apps and games to be something closer to client/server setups to manage communication between the CPU/memory and GPU.
There is really no difference for anything but the most demanding applications though.