The last time they "innovated" on macbooks we got a touch bar (ignoring M chips). I'm good with incremental improvements if we can avoid those gigantic blunders.
And why did Apple do all this? To increase the Average Selling Price ("ASP") of Macs. That's literally it.
the new M4 Macbook Air for $999 is incredible value and that's what I want the Air to be: a good compromise of power and price. For example, the 12" Macbook made too compromises to be just a little bit thinner.
I recall the amount of hate touch bar got on HN and everyone asking Apple to revert back to building normal machines (which they did with Macbook Pro).
They should have added the touch bar, not replacement the F keys with it.
Hence, innovation. Now you just get risk-averse updates that offer little reason to upgrade from previous models.
It's even better on the 2019+ models when they brought back the escape key.
I would agree that the added expense of that oled touchscreen isn't worth it tho. The M series Macs often go on sale at pretty large discounts (seemingly even more than the Intel Macs), and removing the oled touchscreen and the T2 chip that controlled it probably contributes to that.