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Comment by NovemberWhiskey | Hacker News Reader

>But if the last few years of Apple's new hardware is telling us anything, is that Apple is now strictly casual-oriented, and if you're in any capacity a professional, you need to start thinking about getting a PC again.

Was the new Mac Pro not 'professional' enough for you? Up to 28 core CPU, 1.5 TB of RAM, capable of driving six 6K monitors and so on? Even the iMac Pro is absurdly overpowered for 'casual' usage.

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It's plenty professional, just not portable. The problem is that just like with the iPhone, the pro line has just become the high class line so people buy it for the bling factor. They need to make a dev or nerd line or whatever marketing decides to call it. This would be more configurable and not thin and light just for the sake of being thinner and light that last year's model.

What PC are you thinking about that is both powerful and portable?

> just not portable

That's because the base model doesn't come with Apple Wheel. They're only 700$.

This is the third time I read this comment and lightly smiled. Wasn't until now that it occurred to me that "Apple Wheel" might actually be a real product. Lo and behold, it's 4 cart wheels that retails for $699, I'm not even joking. https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MX572ZM/A/apple-mac-pro-w...

Yeah, I'm mostly picking on Apple and their ardent refusal to use articles ('on [an] iPhone...', 'We've made [the] iPad xxx times faster') which drives me crazy for some reason, and also nodding to The Onion's aardvark 'Macbook Wheel' spoof. It could go either way.

the pretentiousness of it bugs me too, and I use an iPhone, an iPad, and Mac.

In euros they sell it for €849, or about $1k.

But this product segmentation is not at all new. Apple has never had a "pro" workstation-style laptop like the Thinkpad P. The MacBook Pro line has always been relatively-thin, relatively-light, not-very-upgradable: going back almost fifteen years.

I agree that Apple isn't trying to serve the market for "portable workstation", but they never really have, so why do you say they have lost their way?

It's also worth saying you can still buy a 16" MacBook Pro with an 8-core i9 processor, 64GB of RAM, a Radeon Pro 5600M with 8GB of RAM, 8TB of SSD storage - a specification that's hardly "casual".

> Apple has never had a "pro" workstation-style laptop like the Thinkpad P. The MacBook Pro line has always been relatively-thin, relatively-light, not-very-upgradable: going back almost fifteen years.

The 17" lunch trays were that product, and were bought by people who wanted to edit photos in the field or get a lot of spreadsheet cells on the display. They had the highest performance as well.

They were just as thin and upgradable as the other PowerBooks/MacBook Pros.

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