> THE SHIFT
MATT BOLTON just took a trip back to the MacBook Pro of 2014, and it’s not making the 2020 model look so hot…
ON A RECENT weekend, I was cleaning out the storage cupboard in my home that contains my collected computer ephemera from over the years. I’ve resisted getting rid of as much as possible, but there comes a time when one must concede that you simply won’t use a FireWire 800 lead again, that your OS X Leopard upgrade disc has run out of things it can update, and that the 30–metre ethernet cable you bought when Wi–Fi couldn’t be relied on to cover three floors has met its match at the hands of a mesh router system.
The box for a 13–inch MacBook Pro, bought in 2014, gave me pause for thought. The computer is still going strong, but eyeing up the specs, two jumped out at me: 8GB of memory/ 128GB of flash storage. If you’ve recently looked at the 13–inch MacBook Pro, perhaps these specs stand out to you as well: they’re currently the amount of memory and storage you get with the base–level MacBook Pro. (In fact, the memory only increases if you configure one to order.) For years, reviewers like myself have bemoaned that these amounts are pretty miserly, but that for a lot of people (especially in a world of cloud computing) they’re still fine for general use. And that remains true.
But looking at this box from 2014 in contrast to 2020 makes me realize that my frog has been well and truly boiled into accepting that this as the norm now, when I (and reviewers like me) should have been kicking up much more of a fuss.
Are we to believe that the prices of flash storage and memory haven’t come down in those intervening years? No, of course they have — the cheap cost of SSDs is why we criticize Apple for the ridiculous cost of its upgrade packages.
Now, it’s worth pointing out here that the 13–inch MacBook Pro model I’m referring to here cost $1,299 in 2014, and the equivalent model costs $1,299 now. The price tag should have risen due to inflation in that time, so it’s possible that the lowering of parts’ costs has been absorbed into not increasing the sticker price. In some ways, that’s fair enough, though certainly other components will have come down in price too.
But I won’t lie to you. This really feels like someone has handed a thermometer to the frog inside me and he ain’t very happy, especially in the context of these being “pro” machines. If we take the name at face value, 16GB should be the minimum memory we’re talking about, and I really don’t think Apple’s bottom line would crack under that pressure. And if its competitor Dell can put 512GB of storage into a thin pro laptop that’ll cost you $1,408, then you have to believe that Apple can put 256GB into a $1,299 one. These specs were acceptable back in 2014, but I really do think a harder line needs to be taken in 20-damn-20.