As someone who was forced to pick a new laptop about two weeks ago, i.e. just before the new Macbook Pros were announced, I have to confess that I’m a little pleased that the new machines don’t blow my current machine away. But, for all the pissing and moaning on the interwebs about Apple’s underwhelming new laptops, people seem to forget that PC performance has pretty much stagnated for the last eight years.
My 2012 Mac Pro (which was, effectively, a 2009 Mac Pro) still seems perfectly decent compared to the latest and greatest, and if I gave a damn it could be upgraded to give the 2013 Mac Pros a run for the money (in CPU benchmarks at any rate, the 2013 Mac Pros have stunning throughput).
The problem here is that CPU speed has hit a wall, pixel counts have gotten ludicrous (so that people are complaining about game performance on 4K displays), the benefits of GPUs for everyday computing haven’t really materialized, and 8GB of RAM is probably still plenty for most people’s daily use, and 16GB is ample.
Still, what happened last time Apple was forced to release an underwhelming upgrade after a long pause? The Intel transition. So, I’m willing to bet that the “let’s switch Mac OS  — oops macOS — over to our ARM architecture” faction within Apple is now winning a lot of arguments it was losing two years ago. (I suspect that the Macbook is the form factor of the first ARM-based macOS device.)
We’ll see — my predictions are often correct but wildly premature.