MacBook Pro 2019: The Breakdown... and the Fix!

Vector with Rene Ritchie

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Like I said on Michael Fisher’s channel last week, when I first reviewed the new MacBook Pro back at the end of 2016, I called it the love/hate future of laptops. Love, because we finally had a new design, terrific wide-gamut displays, Touch ID, and super fast, super forward-thinking USB-C Thunderbolt 3 ports.

Hate, because unlike the previous version with its function row and scissor switch keyboard, the new Touch Bar and butterfly and dome keyboard proved to be incredibly divisive. And that’s just not tenable when you want or need to use macOS and Final Cut Pro X and there’s only one vendor to choose from.

But, there are rumors of a new MacBook Pro coming our way. One that, like the iPhone X, shrinks the bezels to expand the screen size — in this case, up to 16-inches. And one that maybe, just maybe, ditches the butterfly and dome keyboard and full-height arrow keys for something with more click, an actual ESC, and an inverted T.

Now, I don’t want to get anyone’s hopes up. I don’t want to create any expectational debt. The rumors have been few and very far between. We could end up with a spec bump again and membrane 2.0. Or with nothing. But maybe, just maybe, the same Apple that released the iMac Pro, finally updated the Mac mini, and hired a full-on Pro Workflows team to really pound on their bits and atoms before the public ever gets exposed to them… Maybe, just maybe that Apple has gotten its Mac mojo back.

So, because the rumors are so sparse but the tension in the community is kinda high, I’m going to do something different in this video. Usually, I’m a big believer in not stating solutions I think I want but rather problems I have because there could be better solutions for those problems that I’ve just never thought of.

This time, though, I’m going to lay things out. And loud. Not just from a customer wishlist perspective, because we customers want it all. Bigger battery but lighter. More tech but lower price. No matter how contradictory that might be. No, I want to think about it from an actual product point of view — what could the people in charge of the MacBook Pro do to really meet the needs of the vast majority of MacBook Pro customers?

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