On the Much Improved State of Macintosh Hardware ⇥ weblog.rogueamoeba.com

Quentin Carnicelli, of Rogue Amoeba:

I’m not sure who exactly deserves the credit at Apple for all these improvements, but my hat is off to you, whoever you are.¹ In 2018, we couldn’t recommend buying a single current Macintosh model. Now? You almost can’t go wrong. That turnaround deserves a round of applause.

2018 was a bad year to be in the market for a new Mac. I would know: I was last in the market for a new Mac at that time. I do not know how much of that is attributable to Intel’s woes and how much blame should be placed on Apple, but it resulted in a compromised Mac lineup.

Today’s line is the exact opposite. There are simply no bad Macs — other than, perhaps, the still weird 13-inch MacBook Pro.

I see some people attributing this to Jony Ive’s retirement — including in the footnote of this article — but I still think that is overly simplistic and probably inaccurate. There was always a team working on Apple’s products, and Ive has been involved in those launched after he left the company. Put it this way: if Ive still worked at Apple, I bet the MacBook Pro models announced this week would be exactly the same.