The new Macbook Pro features an OLED Touch Bar(photo by: Apple)

First the good:

• The Macbook Pro features Touch Bar and Touch ID. These replace the normal function keys that have been at the top of laptops for years and can dynamically change for each application. Your F4 key now becomes your compose key in email, or the F1 key becomes a previous version of a photo you’ve edited.
• These beautiful laptops feature a gigantic trackpad with multitouch and Force Touch, Powerful 6th Generation Intel Core i(5/7) Series processors, Radeon Pro Dedicated Graphics(in the 15 inch model) and even faster Solid State Drives.
• The Retina Display is still here at the same resolution, but has a wider color gamut meaning more vibrant colors, and deeper richer blacks.

The beautiful Retina Display now has more vivid colors(photo by: Apple)

Now the bad:

• The 13 inch Macbook Pro does not have a dedicated GPU. If you are going to make a laptop for professionals,  you need professional grade hardware. A Dual Core CPU and integrated graphics is not the way to do it.
• You cannot upgrade the Macbook Pro’s RAM. It stops at 16 GB and is directly integrated onto the logic board. In the professional realm many users need 16 GB at a minimum. The inability to upgrade the memory in this machine significantly hinders its ability to be future-proofed and viewed as a viable long-term machine for a creative professional.
• There are no USB ports, so you’ll need an adapter for the Type C Connector to get anything done.
• If you are a photographer, I’m sorry to say that there is no SD Card Reader in this laptop.

It feels as if every step forward means Apple has to take a step backward in connectivity. Thunderbolt 3 is nice, but having to carry around multiple adapters to connect the most basic of things cancels out the benefits of making an ultra-portable laptop. This has been the overall feeling I’ve had with Apple’s computer offerings as of late. The 21 inch 4K Retina iMac has no Dedicated Graphics and non-upgradeable memory. The 27 inch iMac has processors from early in 2015, nearly 2 generations behind. The Mac Pro, Apple’s professional flagship computer hasn’t seen any upgrades since 2014 putting it nearly 3 generations behind the competition. All of this has not happened overnight.

Yearly iPhone upgrades are the norm(photo by: Apple)

You can see there are multiple examples over the last couple years of Apple’s focus drifting away from computers to mobile products. Apple’s iPads and iPhones have gotten yearly updates like clockwork, while Macintosh sales have dropped the last 2 quarters and now, we have a machine marketed to professionals without the necessary hardware or connectivity options needed.