Missing the Point ⇥ cultofmac.com

Buster Heine for Cult of Mac:

The new MacBook Pro is crazy. It’s mind-boggiling. But it’s not for most consumers because not everyone is a professional who needs to wring out every last drop of performance from a computer. Most of us use our computers for storing our pictures, listening to music, surfing the web, creating documents in Word or Excel, downloading videos, and creating a short video to post on Facebook every once in a while. For those types of tasks, Apple’s MacBook Air is the perfect answer because it’s fast, dependable, stylish and cheap.

The new MacBook Pro isn’t built for today. No, it’s built for five years from now, and to last until then. The performance parts (the SSD, the RAM, and the logic board) will all certainly last for that long, and will provide a fantastic user experience for the future. The Retina display will enhance all of the standard tasks Heine lists. The claim that the MacBook Air is the computer you should buy is short-sighted. No doubt it too will get an upgraded display within the next year or two.

Don’t spend $1200 now, and $1200 again in the next year or two—if you can afford the new MacBook Pro for $2200 today, it’ll last you for a long, long time.