A Design & Development Agency Responds to the New Macbook Pro
When Apple announced the new Macbook Pro, many creative professionals and software developers reacted with anger and bewilderment. The consensus seems to be that Apple is leaving their core of professional users behind, that the features like the Touch Bar don’t make sense, and, of course, that Mac users will soon be overwhelmed by a sea of dongles as they try to connect peripherals to the USB-C only laptop.
Like many agencies, the majority of our designers and developers at Checkmate use Macs for their work. The reaction around our office to the new Apple notebook is fairly mixed, but nobody is particularly enthusiastic.
Our Tech Lead, Rainer Paskiewicz, echoes a lot of the negative sentiments that have reverberated around the internet. “It’s a farce,” he says. “It’s got poor specs, bad design choices, and the need to carry around a few thousand adapters is just stupid.” He’s not impressed with the already-outdated processor featured in the launch specs, and doesn’t see much practical use for the Touch Bar. When I asked if he would ever consider buying it for either work or personal use, all he said was “No. Just…no.”
“No. Just…no.” — Rainer Paskiewicz on Apple’s recently-announced Macbook Pro.
Matt Cameron, our Chief Design Officer, had a considerably more positive take on the machine. Currently using a 2011 Macbook Pro, he says that while Apple’s latest computer doesn’t wow him, it’s still a significant upgrade to what he has now. His biggest complaint with the new Touch Bar is that it further inflates an already sizeable price tag. Ultimately, his preference for remaining within the wonderfully stable Apple ecosystem outweighs any concerns he has for this specific release. I suspect that many designers will feel the same way, especially as long as there is no Windows release of the indispensable Sketch app. No one iteration of the Macbook Pro line is too likely to swing loyalists away from an undeniably strong platform.
For my part, I’m not likely to get the new Macbook Pro, but that’s mostly because I’m still waiting for a new Apple desktop release. In my role as a content creator at Checkmate, I’m responsible for both copywriting and video editing. The former requires little more than a comfortable keyboard, and I’ve never been very fussy about that. Any functioning computer is sufficient for writing, in my opinion. But video editing and effects require some beefy hardware for reasonably quick rendering, and I’ll always go for tech specs over portability. As such, I tend to prefer desktop computers to notebooks which offer less performance at a similar price point, and I probably wouldn’t have purchased the new Macbook Pro regardless of the Touch Bar and lack of different ports.
However, I’m a little disconcerted by what I’m seeing in Apple’s newest release. Needing to use dongles isn’t really a huge stinking deal (and dongle is stupidly fun to say), but it’s the kind of minor inconvenience that’s supposed to be virtually nonexistent in the carefully curated world of Apple hardware and software. If Apple continues to introduce pointless complications in their designs, I’ll be tempted to switch over to a more affordable Windows-based machine for my video work (which I do entirely in the cross-platform Adobe CC suite), and I doubt that I’ll be alone.
Apple certainly hasn’t lost creative professionals yet, but it’s disappointing to see some careless design popping up in their newest creation. I’m hoping that the next Mac Pro (if it comes at all) will better reflect the design principles that made Apple so attractive to so many.
