With several major hardware releases in the last week, that is what I’ll focus on. Apple (finally) updated their Macbook Pros with a touch bar and, possibly more interesting, Microsoft introduced a completely new input device to match their new desktop.

The role of PCs

Before diving into the details of the new hardware, let’s have a quick look at the role of PCs in the current day and age. What I’ll say here was brought up by Ben Thompson in a Stratechery subscriber only article¹, as well as in this article on the Verge, but it rings true to me.

It doesn’t seem that way to those of us who use them every day, but the PC isn’t as important anymore as it used to be. The hardware has been sufficient for casual use for a long time, which means that people don’t tend to upgrade any more than necessary. How many people are still using computers that are 5 years or older? Of course, there are always some people who want the latest and greatest. Whether that’s for gaming reasons or because it saves on compile times. Other than those reasons however, in most cases there is no reason to upgrade. Most things are online, and browsers work fine on old hardware and every OS.

And of course, that doesn’t even take into account the mobile market. For a lot of people their phone has become their primary device² so they don’t even need to use a computer. And if it’s not a phone, they have a tablet. While the declining sales figures show that iPads aren’t exactly taking the world by storm as much as Steve Jobs predicted, there is still a large base of older models and cheaper tablets are often good enough.

All of this is basically to say: PCs are becoming a niche market. Which means that manufacturers aren’t making as much by volume, so they have to make it up by price. Which is something we definitely can see with the announcements from Microsoft and Apple. Both of them introduced innovative new features³ which probably cost a lot of money to develop. And they seem less aimed at everyone, and more at specific groups of users. Users for who the extra costs are worth it.

Does all of that mean I think it’s a good thing these prices rise? No, of course not. Please don’t confuse an attempted explanation with approval. Obviously I’ll probably buy a computer again at some point and I’d prefer to spend less money for the same hardware. But it does explain it a bit. Luckily there are always alternatives to those who focus on the high-end. These might not have all the fancy things, but are a good option if you have a budget or refuse to spend this much money.

And whether the more expensive computers work out for these companies is something we’ll discover over time. They’re big companies that do what’s best for the bottom line and if it turns out they miscalculated they’ll adjust.

Surface everything

It seems clear that Microsoft is going all in on the Surface brand for their hardware products, and so several new products came out under this name.

The big thing to come out was the Surface Studio. This iMac-like⁴ computer looks in my opinion really nice. With a 28" touchscreen and the ability to swivel it into various angles, including horizontal, it seems like something that professional designers find very interesting. To be honest, even I think it looks very interesting and my design skills are pretty much nonexistent. Now, personally I’m not interested in buying this computer and that’s not even because of the price. It’s simply that I’m just not a Windows user and that’s probably where the Surface Studio has its biggest challenge.

For a long time, creatives have been using Macs. Now, in recent years Apple hasn’t exactly been doing a great job with keeping their professional customers happy. Not only did they neglect updating their hardware, they have slimmed down their own professional tools to make them less focused on pro. This hasn’t endeared Apple to a lot of these users, so Microsoft seems keen to take over there. Is the Surface Studio enough to do so? Maybe, it’s a hard sell to switch OS and especially tools for your work. On the other hand, Microsoft also threw in another new input device to make the switch more attractive.

The Surface Dial is a dial. You can place it on the screen and, if the app supports if, can turn it for different functionalities. Whether that is color selection, tool selection, panning, anything the app makers can think of. For a touch device it seems to be a very useful tool, which is why it works with the Surface Studio, Surface Book, and the latest Surface Pro. As you can see in the promo videos, one use case is that you use it to select what you want with one hand while the other is for example using a Surface Pen.

Macbook Pro

At long last, there is an update to the MacBook Pro line. And as always, it’s controversial. The usual stuff happened with upgraded specs and, almost as common, the decrease of ports.

Let’s start with the ports. The move to all Thunderbolt 3⁵ is a good forward looking move that is clearly aimed at the future. While also causing a lot of issues in the short to medium term for the people buying these MacBooks. Thunderbolt 3 can run anything that’s available on USB-C, but is a faster and can support some additional things. Like the previous iterations it’s developed by Intel and incorporated into their systems. So it’s something that’s theoretically available to every PC.

It’s great that every port on the machine uses an industry standard (well, 2 standards), but it will mean a lot of dongles for everyone to start with. There will always be demand for peripherals, and until you have a USB-C version you’ll need a dongle to use them with these MacBooks. Nobody will like that, and I’d suggest buying a dock instead of having a separate dongle for everything. The MacBook and Pixel led the pack with going USB-C only last year and while there will always be some devices that feel they should have every port built-in, I suspect most new laptops are going to be like this soon enough. So, it’s going to be annoying for a while, but then we’ll all enjoy having only a single type of port. At which point a new standard will probably be introduced.

The major new thing is of course the touch bar. This thin OLED strip is fully customizable and replaces the fn keys that I at least hardly ever use. As a user you can set these up however you want, and applications can take advantage of them as well. As they aren’t available yet there isn’t all that much known about how well they work. The idea sound really interesting though and I’ll honestly say that if it becomes available as an external keyboard I might be tempted to switch to an Apple keyboard⁶.

Let’s not forget about TouchID either. The way it’s integrated looks really good, and it’s a far better experience than using your iPhone to use Apple Pay. Of course, I suspect that while the user switcher is great, unlocking your computer with an Apple Watch is still easier⁷. It’s really nice to see how people have started looking into the possibilities here as well, with for example 1Password already building in support.

So, when you look at these fancy new features everything seems fine. However, the specs themselves aren’t quite as good. There aren’t any proper reviews yet, but we can look at what it says on paper. And that is lacking in some places. First and foremost is how it’s impossible to upgrade the amount of RAM. Not just impossible to do yourself, but there is no option available for more than 16GB. Which is an arbitrary limit many professionals won’t like.

And of course, the price. For example, the price for the 15" base model has gone up by 400 USD[^currency]. I’ve given a possible reason for that in the first section of this article, but additionally there is something included that wasn’t before. In the old models you had to upgrade to get a discrete graphics card, which now comes standard. Of course, improvements are expected so that’s not necessarily a good reason for a price hike. Let alone justify doing so by 20%. And not everyone wants or needs that discrete card either.

So in conclusion, it’s faster and better specced than the previous model, but that wasn’t a very hard thing to achieve. But it’s also more expensive and you will have to calculate in the prices for the dongles as well (hint, don’t buy the Apple ones), which makes the price even higher. Compared to the ones they sold a week ago, this seems like a good upgrade but as I’m not in the market it’s easy to spend other people’s money.

And Apple isn’t the only company selling laptops, so you might want to consider alternatives. Because while these are the laptops that Apple will be selling in the next few years, it’s up to you to decide if you’re willing to pay this price. Or have your company pay for them by reminding them that Apple hardware is actually cheaper in maintenance.

[currency]: Depending on where you live this might be more as it coincides with Apple’s currency adjustments. Which means that especially the U.K. is hit hard.

Holiday

That was a longer note than I planned on. I guess that’s what happens when you’ve got two major releases of interesting hardware in the same week. However, this coming weekend I’ll leave for a holiday in China so it’s very likely I won’t be posting weekly notes during these two weeks as I’ll be focused on enjoying myself instead of the news.