In 2019, I bought a 27-inch iMac that I still use every single work day. It’s come with me from my old apartment to my current one where I still continue to use it. At one point I had this and a gaming PC as well as a MacBook Pro from maybe 2016 or so. I ended up giving the PC to a friend and the MacBook Pro has long since died. Since the pandemic, I even bought an iPad and thought that maybe it would be a solid replacement for a laptop. That idea fell flat on its face like a drunken man child in a dark parking lot. To this day, they never got the serious touchscreen right.
What Apple kept giving us is a device with a single USB port, a big screen, and a ton of apps that are supposed to be a larger version of the iPhone and iOS.
Instead, what photographers want is Mac OS designed to be used on and iPad. But at this point, I think that it’s way too late for the touchscreen experience. Photographers don’t really need it at all.
Sure, you can edit on and iPad or an iPhone. But most people who make videos or photographs really don’t want to do that. As a journalist who mostly works in the office, I can attest to even during the days that I’d be out in the field and working with a laptop, I needed a proper SD card, power, USB ports, a headphone jack, and good Wifi. The last thing I ever needed or wanted was the dongle life that so many photographers embraced.
It’s been years and years since that culture became a thing — I want to say that it’s been a decade or so. And none of us have changed. We still want fast USB ports, fast SD cards, etc. The processing power that you’ve been putting out for years has been really nice. But honestly, no one needs more at this point in history.
It took you folks a while to make something sort of like matte displays for us on the MacBook Pros. But honestly, it was way too long.
So here’s what I’m frustrated about: you keep just making things faster and better. But these aren’t really features that photographers need and want necessarily.
What features am I talking about:
- Even more USB ports. Three on a 14 inch Macbook Pro is kind of sad. 5 or 6 would be ideal in so many ways.
- A good bluetooth mouse. The key word in that statement is “good.” Apple, your mice have sucked for years. Why was it never modernized?
- We don’t really need a touchscreen product because Wacom is the industry standard in many ways now.
- Ethernet ports. They’re so insanely important as many photographers use NAS drives and connect to them using a hardwired connection.
- Why does your menu system change so drastically and annoyingly whenever the wind blows?
If I really sat here and searched, there are lots of reasons why I’d never give up my iMac. It’s such an insanely good device before you folks ruined it.