[JamilD]

I think out of all companies, Apple has generally been the best (though not perfect) at maintaining focus even when a product is "good enough".

I felt the same about the early MacBook Airs too, and my iPads. Reaching a local optimum is not necessarily a bad thing.

My brother still uses my 2012 original retina MBP, and it works fine. For most people, upgrading every 4 or 5 years is more than enough for any Mac.

[nolok]

To be entirely fair, this is not just a macbook think and mostly a computer thing.

My 4 years old work windows laptop is a dell xp13 with an i7-8something cpu and is more than enough for anyone who was ok with that laptop when it came out.

Which is not to say the m2 isn't awesome, but since bazillion core cpu and nvme drives became commonplace there isn't much beside very heavy usage (gaming, ia, ... anything that require a top level gpu) that can stop an "old" computer, even a laptop.

[soylentcola]

That's what I've found as well. Only bothered to update my 10yo computer during 2020 work from home because I wanted to play around with some new stuff, had a bit of disposable income since I wasn't going anywhere, and it had been long enough that the performance jump would be nice in games/playing with graphics rendering stuff.

But I easily could've kept using it for another several years for all but the most demanding software and it was an i7-3770k/16gb/GTX980/various SSDs/HDDs.

Still, I understand that the form factor meant that portability wasn't an issue. The difference between a 10yo laptop and a modern one would've been much, much more noticeable.

[musicale]

10-12 years ago was a sea change for laptops. On the Apple side, the "Retina" MacBook pro was a drastic improvement over its predecessors because of the display as well as the fast flash storage, while preserving a thin(ish) form factor.

Unfortunately Apple followed up with some missteps like the awful "butterfly" keyboard, and the unpopular touch bar which initially removed a physical ESC key.

[edschofield]

> the unpopular touch bar which initially removed a physical ESC key.

I still have the scars: I no longer use a Caps Lock key, even on my newer computers — it’s permanently mapped to ESC…

[rewmie]

> I think out of all companies, Apple has generally been the best (though not perfect) at maintaining focus even when a product is "good enough".

I don't quite agree. Switching from USB-C back to magsafe feels like a downgrade, and it makes no sense at all to provide only 2 USB-C ports on the left side when some models not only provided a pair on each side but also they could all be used to charge the laptop.

Insisting on 8GB of RAM is also completely unjustified, specially as some miniPCs that ship with more RAM are sold for less than the cost of upgrading RAM on any laptop from the MacBook line.

[bradknowles]

You can still use those USB-C ports to charge the laptop if you want. The MagSafe port is just there in case you want to charge it very quickly, or use their custom cable that will help reduce the probability of the device accidentally being ripped off the table and dashed on the floor, if you should happen to trip over the cable.

I welcome the new MagSafe cable. IMO, they should never have gotten rid of it in the first place.