Apple MacBook Pro with M1 Review

I've been wondering about that. I have a suspicion that the sales volumes don't justify the effort Apple needs to put into a device like that.

On the other hand it would be nice to see a slightly more grown up MacMini, something with expansion in mind.

Once they remove the touch bar and add back normal function keys I'll switch back from my ThinkPad to a Macbook Pro.

“Apple’s insistence that reaching up to touch a laptop screen is too burdensome is just getting silly, especially when that is not a problem on the iPad and across the universe of Windows laptops, and most especially when these laptops can run iPhone and iPad apps natively.“

In a way Nilay is right - ultimately it makes no sense not to allow touch interaction.

However Apple is also right in a different way. If apps are designed to work primarily with touch, reaching up all the time will negate the value of keyboard and touch pad and will be needlessly fatiguing.

Apps need to be designed to accommodate both kinds of usage.

Windows gets away with this because most apps are designed as laptop first.

By delaying the introduction of the touch screen, Apple is pressuring developers to make their Apps work in both contexts.

When they introduce a touch screen they’ll say something like “Back in 2020 most touch apps weren’t designed for the kinds of uses laptop and desktop users expect. Since then developers have done an amazing job of giving all our our users a great experience. Thanks in part to their hard work, today we’re proud to introduce the first computer that truly combines what we have learned about how to build great touch apps, with the decades of understanding that has gone into making MacOS into the worlds most advanced desktop operating system.”

I think the Mac Pro exists for reasons independent of directly making a profit. Though Apple would always like to make a profit, of course.

It's a combination of a halo car and a triple whopper.

A halo car is a statement of intent from a car company. It's showing off "here's all our coolest stuff, and the direction we think things should go", while being impractically expensive and bought by almost nobody. By putting out the fancy new Mac Pro, Apple reassured professionals that it cared about them, and presumably that's making people less likely to nervously shift away from the platform even if all they actually need for their own work is a laptop or Mac Mini.

The triple whopper, famously, mostly existed to be a conspicuously more-excessive product that made the double whopper look more reasonable in comparison. If the Mac Pro exists at $6k base, buying a reasonably specced out iMac suddenly looks downright responsible!

Both of these things are good for Apple's bottom line.

Rust's Apple Silicon support is tracked here: https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/73908