The MacBook Pro is powerful, well-designed, and in a rut

In every way that matters to Apple’s business, Macs are in the best place they’ve been in years. M-series chips made a meaningful change to performance, ports other than USB-C are available on Apple hardware, and the growth of work-from-home companies caused many people to reconsider their setup. It’s strange then, that Apple’s MacBook Pro already feels like it’s in a holding pattern.

With plans for a major revision to Apple’s pro laptops now reportedly years away, it seems like we’ll be stuck with current models for a while longer. And unfortunately, time is only going to put the boring state of Apple’s current laptops in perspective. As counterintuitive as it might seem given the popularity of the current MacBook Pro, something was lost when Apple transitioned away from pro laptops with a Touch Bar, and it’s not clear if it’ll ever come back.

The MacBook Pro is Apple’s best laptop — and a former disaster

For every premium addition, there was a weird compromise

If you bought a MacBook Pro in 2016, odds are you received an inherently compromised computer. While Apple’s aluminum “unibody” design allowed for the laptop to be as slim as ever with a larger trackpad and the same great Retina display (a 2,560 x 2,600 pixel resolution LCD), it was also saddled with features plenty of Apple fans disliked. That includes less than thrilling performance from Intel’s 6th generation Skylake chips, a port selection that began and ended with USB-C (how many ports were Thunderbolt 3 or supported displays varied), a Touch Bar that replaced the function row, and a “butterfly-mechanism” keyboard that was ridiculously easy to break.

The redesigned 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pros that launched with the M1 Pro and M1 Max in 2021 were seen as a breath of fresh air because they didn’t come with any of those limitations. There were multiple port options, including an SD card reader, an HDMI port, and the return of Apple’s MagSafe connector for charging. The new 120Hz Liquid Retina XDR display was brighter and smoother than any the company had sold previously. The Touch Bar was replaced with physical keys, and the M1 Pro and M1 Max chips offered speedy enough performance that there are professional artists who don’t need to upgrade to Apple’s latest M4 models.

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Beyond the chip refresh, the overall design of Apple’s 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro remains the same.

Apple won back many hearts and minds with the computers it released in 2020 and 2021 by focusing on performance and practicality rather than pie-in-the-sky ideas about where computers should go next. But, was that worth it for the boring and heavy laptops we’re saddled with now?

Apple’s Pro laptops used to be as experimental as they were powerful

Love it or hate it, Touch Bar was a novel idea

The company’s stubbornness made it stick with some bad ideas longer than it needed to, but there’s no denying that Apple’s MacBook Pro used to push boundaries. The product was the first place Apple experimented with new manufacturing techniques and the first place it tried to introduce an entirely new input method. Now, it’s just the portable home for the company’s most powerful chips.

The Touch Bar got a lot of hate for a good reason. After introducing the new touch interface, Apple appeared to do next to nothing to support it, including offering few incentives for developers to add support to their apps. The decision not to add it to any other laptops was as good a sign as any that Apple immediately gave up.

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But that doesn’t mean the Touch Bar couldn’t have been great. Apple at least had an idea about how the touchscreen experience of the iPhone could start to be introduced to a desktop operating system. It wasn’t perfect or as reliable as physical keys, but it was better than slapping a touchscreen on a Windows laptop and calling it a day. If the company were to return to the idea now, it would likely be received very differently, and probably more customizable.

That sense of ambition is all but gone from Apple’s current laptops — at least regarding hardware design. The MacBook Pro is heavy, thick, and in many ways, has more in common with Apple’s older PowerBook models than the five years of laptops released in the lead up to Apple’s transition away from Intel chips. The company gave up its portability and unique ideas in service of improving all the tech specs it more or less neglected for a decade.

Microsoft’s Surface Laptop Studio makes for an interesting contrast. The company is currently going all-in on light and powerful Copilot+ PCsin response to Apple’s M-series laptops, but before, AI was a reliable buzzword. Surface laptops were differentiated from Macs by having far more adventurous hardware — maybe not at the level of a Lenovo laptop with two screens, but still. The Surface Laptop Studio packs pro-friendly graphics into a laptop with a display that can be folded down and over your keyboard for using a stylus, or partially folded and used to watch videos or give presentations. It’s a much weirder device than Apple would ever sell, and much bolder than a MacBook Pro you can buy right now.

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There’s more than one way to make a great pro laptop

Apple is playing the hits

There’s nothing wrong with the MacBook Pro being an incredibly powerful, user-friendly computer. It’s worked for Apple so far, and the vast majority of creators prefer the company making something practical. Still, it’s hard not to wish that there was some grander vision for where these computers were going other than better chips, and at some point a thinner and lighter body.

M4 MacBook Pro 14-inch (2024)

Apple’s new M4 MacBook Pro’s are virtually identical to its previous laptops save for the new chip, and the option to have a matte nano-texture display rather than the glossy option you normally get.

Even if they’re not exciting, Apple’s latest updates to the MacBook Pro, Mac mini, and iMac do seem like excellent upgrades for anyone holding out on jumping on the Apple Silicon Mac. You might not want to wait the amount of time it will take Apple to actually redesign the MacBook Pro.

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