What About the 13-Inch MacBook Pro? ⇥ 9to5mac.com

Chance Miller, 9to5Mac:

At this point, the 13-inch MacBook Pro is the only Apple laptop still sold brand-new with the butterfly keyboard. The 15-inch MacBook Pro was updated in November to become the 16-inch MacBook Pro with the new Magic Keyboard. The 12-inch MacBook was discontinued last year as well.

With the MacBook Air’s transition to Magic Keyboard now out of the way, the 13-inch MacBook Pro is surely next on the docket. Reliable Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo has said that Apple is accelerating its MacBook refresh plans, and that we should expect a new 13-inch MacBook Pro with the Magic Keyboard during the first half of this year.

I tend to think that the MacBook Pro range is comprised of laptops of similar purpose, available in two different sizes — but that’s not the case. The 13-inch model has long been a junior version of its bigger sibling in more ways than just size. It has never been offered with dedicated graphics memory, for example, and the first two generations of the Touch Bar model had two slower Thunderbolt ports. By that standard, it makes some sense that the 13-inch MacBook Pro was not updated at the same time as the 16-inch.

But, on the other hand, it now stands out as the Mac model nobody should buy. It is now the One With the Bad Keyboard — the only one that is sold, brand new, with automatic coverage from the company’s keyboard service program. There is certainly an update in this Mac’s near future, but it is awkward that it was not released alongside either of the new MacBook models.