[s9ix]

I think what the article fails to touch on is that people (myself included) used to love upgrading to the new Apple products because of new innovations or upgraded tech. The second-hand market for Apple products shouldn't be looked at as a problem, but rather a new demographic of people entering the ecosystem which might have been out of their price range otherwise.

For me, I was itching for a reason to upgrade from my 2012 rMBP and to be honest, I have no plans to now. I don't want a thinner or lighter laptop, I just want everything to work all at once and some better battery life. The USB-C (and they fact that they didn't even mention it during the terrible keynote) was my biggest drawback, because now I literally have to buy adapters to plug in to my pre-existing adapters for this damn thing to work... Nope.

When Apple got rid of the CD/DVD drive, or FireWire, it wasn't this much of an issue because I could agree that those were things I didn't use (along with the vast majority). But with the headphone jack (on the iPhones only thankfully), and now the SD card reader, USB, HDMI, and Mini-DP... All things I use on an almost daily basis. It sucks that people will have to buy ~ $100 of adapters to get their old functionality back.

Also, if they're really touting this thing as such a professional's device, then their magical touch bar is even more flawed. I plug in external monitors when I use Final Cut Pro, Lightroom, Photoshop, etc. - most of their demos. Looking at a different monitor and then using the touch bar seems like such an awkward gesture.

[9fiftyfive]

I'm in the same boat. I have a MBP 2012 (non-retina), and could probably use an upgrade (although I just built a powerful desktop PC). I could deal with the removal of Ethernet, but the fact that I'll have to purchase 3 separate adapters (given I'll leave the fourth port for charging) is ridiculous. On top of that, the price is inexcusable. The lowest-end MacBook Pro costs $1,500 and has a 2.0GHz Dual-Core processor (which my current Mac outperforms), 8GB of RAM, a 256GB SSD, Intel Iris Graphics 540 (nothing impressive for a "pro" device), and two Thunderbolt 3 ports (only one port is accessible while charging...). Oh, and it doesn't even sport the new "touch bar" gimmick. For an extra $400, you get a faster clock speed (on a dual-core...), slightly faster RAM, and two extra ports. Point being, every model is extremely overpriced.

Now, it's not the best comparison, as desktops and laptops have their own benefits, but if someone was to build a PC with the specs of the cheapest MacBook Pro (excluding peripherals), it would cost significantly less