dig48109

Bring back the 17" laptop with either a HIGH end ATI or nVidia card. Needs to have BOTH options, since there are still many shops and vendors that dont' have time to recode in OpenCL and still have most of their codebase in CUDA for the graphics pipeline. 

64GB should also be an option since I can forsee a lot of people would like to use a VR headset. Like using a HTC Vive. 

Currently, this affects a lot of VR development on the Mac platform. they need a more hefty laptop to drive VR 

IMHO most people don't like using heavy laptops. Except for a small group, which might not make financial sense for Apple to have a heavy duty laptop line. 
Which is why the 17" killed off years ago

-Diganta 

A new upgradable Mac Pro is too late. Many professionals have given up on Apple's pro line, as the company focused more and more on consumers and prosumers. 

Death of Pro products 
- xserve  (killing this, harmed the 1U render farm) . I used to run a render farm using these 1Us . 
   Also another VFX company with 500 artists used 1U supermicros with PCoIP cards to display their linux/Windows workstations to Vancouver. 
   Not having a 1U also hampered the ability for PCoIP options for VFX houses. 
- xsan 
- xraid  
- MacPro , upgradable graphics card  silver chassis with 4 bays  
- MacOSX server 
- Aperture (killing this was fine and ceding this market to Adobe) 
- The debacle from FCP 3 to FCPX (they didn't listen to their pro customers when removing features in the first iterations). Many move to 
   Avid or Adobe because of this. 
- Apple Cinema Display.  Not replacing it with a Pro display that can use a Thunderbolt3 bus, have 10/1 gigabit ethernet (pseudo-docking station) 
  Not having a matte display option for professionals. Lack of fine control (RGB sliders) on the hardware monitor to color calibrate, not just in software. 

Speaking from experience from an all Apple VFX shop in 2010-2012. After that it was hard to convince ANY VFX shop to be all Apple. It was nearly impossible. 

What a terrible decision. We buy high end Macbook Pros in our company. We buy lots of them and we max it out with 1TB SSD and a discrete graphics card. Many of our users are video editors for 360 video and our developers need more RAM for their needs. I need more RAM for running virtual machines. This is clearly a case of Apple not listening to their customers. Most of the time our laptops are plugged in. We can live with a USB type C connector as long as there are enough of them. To Phil Schiller. Give us Apple customers the choice in the Pro series between 1. More RAM sacrificing battery life 2. Choice of AMD/ATI graphics vs nVidia. Sorry but a lot of 3rd party tools still only support CUDA and not yet OpenCL. Typically many small developers who tools we use will write for nVidia only. This throws a monkey wrench in our pipeline development This is frustrating. We've been stuck at 16GB for too many years. There is no excuse for the top end Macbook Pro (w discrete graphics card) to be limited to 32GB. At another former company (500 artists) many of our users using Foundry's Nuke or Mari would be using 128GB or 64GB systems from a 1U system with a PCoIP graphics card. Computers were in Los Angeles and the artists were in Vancouver (BC govt subsidies lured the companies there). Apple time to listen to your customers. One shoe , or one max RAM size does not fit all. Sorry. Don't care what the limits are for the Macbook Air or Macbook (which by the way we never buy, has only one port and that too it has to be used for power, why couldn't he Macbook have two USB-C ports?)

The lack of ports make this business unfriendly. Just like the first gen Macbook Air (which was later corrected). 

There needs to be a 2nd USB type C on the other side before I consider buying one or getting one for our company. 
Also Apple could easily make a Power supply that has HDMI, mini-Displayport Thunderbolt out, classic USB Type A out as an upgrade option to the Macbook charger 
but they haven't. It's this kind of decisions that drive me nuts regarding trying to keep the company Apple based from an IT standpoint. Consumers may not care as much, but from a personal consumer stand point this upgrade for the Macbook fails. 

We will be sticking to our Macbook Pros and the occasional Macbook Airs, honestly we need Apple to support nVidia cards. Too many of our artists are using visualization tools and graphics programs that need CUDA acceleration. Only  Adobe Premiere and After Effects and DaVinci Resolve uses OpenCL. Many of the programs we need to use on the Mac also need CUDA . That's a separate point from the Macbook which don't have a discreet graphics card.