Thinking about it, Apple's genius has been finding this line: "How closed can we go, how disposable can we make them and maximize churn, while not slowing down buying. We can even create a desire for churn [it's September, time for a new $600 phone, anyone?] Its exactly like the one you have, only different." As others have pointed out here, the dog and pony show they put on recently, by inviting a select group of reporters (market influencers) into their hq was damage control when several magazines/sites called them out for crossing this line. New machines with lower specs than older machines, gaming battery life tests, irrational pricing, and selling 5 year old spec machines as 'Pro'. I might recommend reading the reporting of the meeting, it's a textbook example of high-end one-on-one selling, impressive location, the appearance of insider-access, sealed with a personal commitment from the leaders. Meanwhile, they don't have a 'pro' product line, and though they have enough cash on hand to buy every pro team in every sport in the U.S. they haven't made any investments or advancements in pro pc technology in a decade. And that's cool, if apple doesn't want to fill the gap, someone will fill the space eventually.
And I concede that the headphone jack is fine, it;s a combo, first glance i assumed just output. That works.
working on a game. PVS calc took lots of memory and lots of time. Everyone's machines got a 6x upgrade in ram so they could be used at night to compute the PVS.
another anecdote. friend in another game found rebuilding assets on SSD was several X faster. Since the entire team was often waiting hours for asset builds to finish all machines got upgraded to have SSD.
this is especially true in GPU related fields. new gpus enable new things