MATT BOLTON…

A fresh view on Apple, from our desktop to yours

Has Apple abandoned the high-visibility pros who make its products look good, or has the definition of ‘pro’ simply changed with the times?

In the great MacBook Pro Brouhaha (Late 2016), some stalwart Apple pros pointed out that 16GB of RAM isn’t enough for their use. Often this argument came with discussion that these high-end pros are halo users, and that Apple should support them because the fact that this 1% of pros are very visible Apple users in their field helps the other 99% either feel good about buying Apple, or maybe even makes them choose Apple in the first place. The argument itself is an admission that the needs of that 1% are too niche to support: provide for us because we make you look good, even though you don’t make big money from us directly. (I make this latter claim confidently because, if Apple did make big money from the 1%, we wouldn’t be having this discussion. We’d all be using 32GB MacBooks.)

Visible Mac-using pros have historically given Apple a cachet that helps the whole price/value proposition. It helped me personally choose a Mac for video editing work, which is how I got into Apple in the first place. However, like so much in our new truth era, it’s possible for this point to be both right and wrong. These long-time visible pros might say they will have to abandon the Mac, harming Apple’s marketing. But marketing is fickle. What if having the right visible pro users is still important, but that these long-term pros aren’t the right ones?

‘Creative pro’ is a much more flexible term than it’s ever been, because the options to make money from being creative are more flexible. The money to justify a MacBook Pro isn’t just in well-resourced positions at large companies – anyone can sell their art online, or get adverts on their videos, or put an ebook onto the Kindle Store. And with the right following, they can turn it into real money to make it their full-time job. A big-money, high-prestige creative job? Maybe not. A pro? For sure.

Consider the YouTuber: young men and women who are able to produce slick videos from anywhere. They are flexible in their production, because popularity comes from frequent engagement, not lengthy creative gestation. They don’t even really need 16GB of memory for their video work, let alone 32GB, but they do need portability and good battery life. They need something powerful enough, but light so they can work anywhere and at any time. And for a new generation of teenagers getting ready to go off to university and study digital creative arts, they and their peers in other disciplines are the visible pros, not motion graphics editors or web back-end developers who need 32GB of memory.

I have sympathy for people who feel that Apple is leaving them behind when it makes compromises like those in the most recent MacBook Pros. But I don’t think the problem is that Apple is abandoning us by changing its approach. I’d say its approach is consistent – it’s the world it’s addressing that changed.

‘Creative pro’ is now a much more flexible term than it’s ever been