Nah, this absolutely looks like the result of Jony Ive leaving. Head of design quits and suddenly a long term trend under his leadership suddenly reverses? Makes more sense than any sinister explanation.
Both are not mutually exclusive. His leaving may be why they changed track. However that is not why they are harping these reverts as new features/innovation.
Marketing releases talking about “innovation” are equivalent to protestations of innocence before a criminal court; you should ignore it because everyone is motivated to claim the same thing regardless of whether it’s true or not. Doesn’t mean it’s always true or always false, sometimes real innovation occurs, but taken alone it provides no useful information.
Yeah, I think Jony Ive jumped the shark with the touchbar and eliminating ports. I dunno why they ditched MagSafe. The Worse parody of latter day Ive [1] was pretty spot on.
I really like this MacBook Pro but at $2000 I may wait for the next Air. I really don't need the Pro features, HDMI, SD card, that many GPUs, ..., and my 2017 Air is just fine for now.
> Evans Hankey, vice president of Industrial Design, and Alan Dye, vice president of Human Interface Design, will report to Jeff Williams, Apple’s chief operating officer