Comment by alberth
2 hours ago
I don’t understand Apple’s market positioning here.
Apple has always positioned the Pro as having the best display in a laptop. Now that’s no longer true.
Are we really moving to 3 tier of laptop displays: Air, Pro, and Pro with ProLED XDR?
That seems unnecessarily confusing for consumers.
“Pro” used to mean you were getting Apple’s best hardware, designed for "professionals".
Now “Pro” doesn't mean that anymore.
It seems to me like a transition year. Apple occasionally has these where the lineup doesn't make sense until they phase out the old and bring in the new. iPads in 2016, iMacs in 2021, iPads in 2022, Macbooks in 2011, etc.
It's really hard to maintain a perfectly positioned product lineup while managing underlying shifts in technologies. It's usually the availability and price of new components that cause this, along with needing to iron out issues before bringing a technology fully mainstream. Here the touchscreen is new, the hinge is new, and the screen tech is new to the platform. You can't always just drop something that on the mass market.
Your assertion hasn’t been true for a while.
You have the MacBook Pro with three tiers of SoCs, each with binning options.
There was already an option for screen coatings and now an option for a new screen type.
That’s not to mention storage and RAM choices.
Its still the MacBook with HDR display and active cooling and more inputs. I’m not sure why options are an issue
You're talking about the number of CPUs, I'm talking customer segments.
Up until today, Apple's positioning was:
* Consumer = Air (light workloads, no pro use cases like video where you need best display)
* Professional = Pro (heavy workloads, need best display for color correctness)
After today, it's what exactly? Is it:
* Consumer = Air
* Business = Pro ???
* Professional = Pro with PROLED XDR
Macbook Pros have had at least two segments in them for a very long time: the base level smallest pro and the 'real' MBP.
The base level has fewer ports / less beefy cpu / less features; right now the 14" M6, but previously dual core, two thunderbolt 13" intel MBPs without touchbar. These are popular with corporate fleets.
The 'real' MBPs have all the ports / beefy cpu / best features / optional bigger screens.
Apple likes its market segmentation but it's not precious about it in the face of big technology shifts. If there's hardware they love and want, they'll try to ship it and sort out the segmentation after.
Coming from the company that simultaneously offered six(!) different models of iPad at once, this is not unsurprising at all. From 2022 to 2024, Apple offered: Two models of iPad, an iPad mini, an iPad Air, and two models of iPad Pro (11 and 13 inch).
For Apple, product & hardware come first, marketing and positioning is secondary.
It's been a while since Jobs' nice simple quad chart. I miss the elegance of that.
But those quadrants still had options for upgrades. I think people vastly misunderstand that chart. It was about reducing product lines down because the Apple of the 90s had too many models that all varied very subtly.
Or are you forgetting that you could choose display types on the old PowerBooks and MacBooks , or choose drive options for a premium etc?
There’s nobody confusing the Pro for the Air or the Neo.
Nobody is confusing the iPad base, air and pro. They’re all strongly segmented.
Yeah quadrants are just a first level sorting mechanism to get people in the door and focused on something. The real genius of Apple's segmentation is that there's always a next step up just $100-300 away. So you might start in the consumer side, but then walk your way up to pro because your consumer laptop is now optioned out enough to be within spitting distance, so may as well make the jump.
Where are they lacking?
Explain further what you mean. The displays are still best in class. What metrics do you have suggesting otherwise?