The Touchbar MacBook Pro is a Disposable Embarrassment

It’s a joke that the new MacBook Pro with a Touchbar is called a “Pro” machine. Perhaps Apple should call it the MacBook Exec or Edition. I won’t bother rehashing the many quibbles that others have already covered. Yet, once again, the punditry has failed to notice the biggest and most obvious flaw and are ranting about the wrong things. Let me rant about the right things for you. You’re welcome.

The Touchbar MacBook Pro is a failure because you cannot upgrade its storage capacity. Ever. Why? Because the SSD is a soldered-in and non-upgradable boat anchor.

A woman using Touch Bar on MacBook Pro

While some may quibble with the 16GB RAM limit, at least there were technical limitations to that. Namely it was limited by the particular Intel chipset. Furthermore, nothing stops you from maxing out the RAM when you order the machine. Generally speaking, Apple lets you buy a Pro laptop with the maximum addressable RAM for its given chipset.

However, that argument does not hold water with storage. The Touchbar MacBook Pro is limited to a paltry 2TB SSD. I have an old 2011 17” MacBook Pro with a 2TB SSD, and I can easily put in a 4TB SSD today, and 15TB in the not so distant future.

Storage Size Matters for Pros

The reality is, professional users need and use lots of storage, and those storage needs change with time. A pro machine needs to be adaptable. By limiting and freezing the machine to 2TB, Apple ensures that professionals who need more storage space need to look elsewhere. Further, it totally makes the machine a ‘disposable’ device for those that buy it today. Once they run out of space, for example, a year later, the only option is to get rid of the machine, and hope there is a new machine with more storage available. That’s nuts!

There is no excuse for Apple making storage non-upgradable (other than greed or gross incompetence). They put an upgradeable SSD slot in the non-Touchbar, entry-level MacBook Pro. So whatever marginal idiot reason they trot out for not including it on Touchbar models is total BS. Talk to the hand; I don’t give a $#*%. The machine’s battery or thinness would not have been compromised in any serious way with the inclusion of the slot, again, as evinced by the entry level model.

This storage lock-in has no business on any machine with a “Pro” moniker. It just further shows how heinously out of touch Apple has become with its core professional and creative user base. Let’s pray that Apple has woken up, and the next revision of its MacBook Pro will avoid this critical mistake. Otherwise, Apple will continue to bleed its pro users to companies that are not tone deaf to their needs.

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