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Those of you who share my passion about the Mac and its improvement should consider sending feedback to Apple here:

https://www.apple.com/feedback/macbookpro.html

Here is a single paragraph condensed version of my previous post that perfectly fits the character limit of Apple's feedback form, which I actually just submitted to Apple only moments ago:

Thinness leads to thermal throttling. Stop thinning the MBP. The 2015 MBP is about the thickness-limit for reasonable cooling and a big battery. Use only high quality thermal paste. The MBP must be Pro in terms of cooling, thermal performance, battery size, USB-C&A, an internal SD card slot, and thick enough for a keyboard with sufficient key travel to (a) satisfy pretty much all users and (b) to avoid harm by dust under the keys. Keys should be removable like the 2015 MBP. These key considerations need to be made more serious by Apple engineers. Vanquish ports and use a butterfly keyboard on the MacBook, but put the beefy stuff and good keyboard in the MacBook Pro. Make the MacBook Air a hybrid of the two, yielding 3 product lines that can please every Mac notebook buyer. Thank you.

Feel free to copy, tweak and paste it into your own feedback submission.  Do it even if you think "it won't happen."  I didn't think anything would happen some years back when I wrote to Tim Cook's email about my 2009 iMac's video card dying only a couple weeks after my AppleCare ended.  Long story short, he got his people on the ball and I was able to get a free video card swap at a local Apple store in Japan (where I currently reside).  As a result, I send feedback to Apple all the time through their official feedback form.  I'm never discouraged by the fact they continue to ignore my suggestions.  At some point something very bad will happen and they will start to Think Different once again.  Optimism allows you to make your own dent in this universe.  Don't hold back!

I could have told you that, even before Mr. Lee's findings.  A lot of people who embrace butterfly keyboards and impossibly thin designs don't give much consideration to thermal throttling.  But it is a reality.  Another sad fact is that it has been shown that Apple uses vastly inferior thermal paste between GPU and CPU chips and their heatsinks.  It would only cost them pennies more to use a half-way decent thermal paste.  So in addition to the fact that the thermal cooling in super thin designs like the 2016 and later MBP is inadequate to prevent throttling, thermal paste used does not transfer heat as well is it could.  Here's a SnazzyLabs Video that might help convince some of you.

I've long called for the thinning of the MBP to end.  The thickness of the 2015 MBP is quite thin yet not too thin.  It allows for a good sized battery and for better cooling.  And while I think Apple should continue to strive for thinness, that doesn't mean it has to be the MBP.  Supreme thinness and lightness is what the MacBook is for.  Butterfly keyboards too.  But the MBP needs to be "Pro" all around in terms of cooling, thermal performance, battery size, ports-a-plenty, an internal SD card slot, and thick enough to accommodate a great keyboard with sufficient key travel that (a) will satisfy pretty much all users and (b) won't be harmed by specs of dust under the keys.  Indeed, on my 2015 MBP 15" I can remove the keys.

These important considerations need to be made more serious by Apple engineers in future designs.  Take everything you want away on the MacBook, but put the beefy stuff in the MacBook Pro.  Make the MacBook Air a hybrid of the two, and then you have 3 product lines that can please every Mac notebook buyer.  Seriously.  It's not that hard.  It's just a matter of Apple rethinking its design decisions.

k2kw said:

You are a PC hobbyist.   The middle class wants the iMac, laptops, and iPads which they don’t upgrade. You would be happier with a Dell.

You are perhaps one of the greatest mind readers I’ve ever seen this forum.  A diehard Mac lover like me since 1984 who has refused to buy a single Windows PC during all of those years somehow is a “PC hobbyist who would be happier with Dell”!  

I’m obviously being deliberately sarcastic here. But the point is that if you’re so wrong about me, and your certainly are, you are definitely just as wrong about what you think regarding “the middle class buyer who wants a pro level Mac.“  

Middle-class buyers of Macs, in terms of sheer numbers of people, are often happy with an iMac. But this thread is discussing the Mac Pro. And yes there are all categories of people who would want to Mac Pro for the purpose of being able to expand it overtime and thereby getting more life from that Mac, which they know they cannot do with an iMac. 

We cannot talk in terms of “the majority of people,“ for like I said in my previous post, “the majority of people“ use silly Windows PCs!   And to extend that logical thinking further, no one can defend Apple’s decision to target only the wealthy with a new Mac Pro costing $10,000 or more, seeing Apple would be limiting their own marketshare for such a machine by pricing it so high. That goes against the iOS device marketing philosophy of pricing it low enough that “most people“ can afford it.   And even though I will admit that a Mac is not an iOS device, the point is that Apple is in business to make money and you make money by selling more devices.  You know you’re not going to sell more devices if you price them too high. 

Saying this another way, to come out with a Mac Pro that is utterly unaffordable to most people in the middle class who otherwise would want to buy an expandable Mac (not a silly Dell running Windoze) is to aim for one thing and one thing only: to profit off the super rich, and from professionals who have contract jobs and can make their money back from that Mac purchase after a single contract, and from rich YouTubers who review these Macs all the time and make millions of dollars a year from YouTube or Patreon.   But at the end of the day, the number of these “rich” people who could afford such a Mac Pro are teensy tiny compared to the number of middle-class Mac buyers who would buy such an expandable Mac if the price point of such a Mac was substantially lower like the PowerMacs of old. 

Why would a large number of Mac only computer buyers want an expandable Mac? Because if the price is low enough, it’s more frugal to buy that Mac because you can expand it overtime and get more life out of the Mac and keep the computer in tiptop shape performance wise through those years.  That’s really what the Power Mac was all about.  That’s why my own father purchased a power Mac G5 back in the day. 

I honestly don’t know why some of you throw rocks at us Mac-only buyers who want and affordably priced Mac Pro. I just don’t understand it.  Again, Apple really isn’t going to make a lot of money off of the Mac Pro anyway in terms of global numbers because Macs are not a significant share of the global PC market. And if they price a Mac Pro into the stratosphere, the share of the market they’re going to get for such a luxury item is even smaller. So it only makes logical sense that Apple come out with an expandable Mac for the masses, not only to sell more Macs but also to spread goodwill to the Mac faithful. There’s nothing wrong with bringing back the glory days of the Power Mac. Nothing wrong with it at all!   This isn’t me simply being nostalgic. It is common sense. 

No surprises that this article on "AppleInsider" is very pro-Apple regardless of what Apple introduces to the market  But as an exclusively "Mac" user since my 128k in 1984, I believe I have a voice and a voice that matters.  

The article starts off with the experience of the author saying that few people (at that point in time) performed their own upgrades.  That surely holds through to this day, now that Apple makes it nearly impossible to perform upgrades even by those who want to.  That thinking in the article is then extended with this: "Apple knows this better than we do. They have all the data, back to the dawn of Apple-certified service departments."  So the premise of the article is that "Apple knows best, and nobody cares about your needs because you are just a miscreant Apple product lover who will likely keep buying Apple products anyway."  

The fact remains though that the current Mac Pro is a niche product not only because it is a Mac but because of the way it is priced -- into the stratosphere!  Certainly, some "pros" justify the cost, but the pros that do are flush with cash and can earn that cash back by working on high dollar commercial products.  But think about this.  Just how many of those pros are out there versus prosumers?  Answer: very few.  Yet we prosumers want many or most of the things the pros want, just at a price point we can afford.  

In years past, the Mac Pro was purchased even by non-Pros.  I'm 47, but even my father purchased a PowerMac G5 (basically an older style Mac Pro) when it came out because he already had a display and wanted to keep using it.  Sure the old Pro Macs were big and bulky, but they offered the Apple II appeal of expandability.  

Expandability at Apple has always been a war between the memory of Woz and the memory of Jobs.  I still feel that one of the best compact vintage Macs in existence is the SE/30 -- machine that came out after the ousting of Jobs.  That's not to deride the critical importance of Apple's founder.  Without Jobs returning with NeXT tech in 1996, there would be no Apple in existence today.  And while the Apple of today is very much a company of smartphones and tablets (profit-wise), it's heart is still very much tied to the Mac, and that is unlikely to ever change.  But the argument is over how the Mac is changing.  I believe the Mac should and must evolve, but does that mean removing all user customizability?  Does Macintosh evolution justify removal of the SD card slot on a 15" MBP with more than enough space to accommodate that technology, which still is very much alive and well today?  Does evolution of computing technology dictate yet another non-expandable Mac Pro, priced so high "the rest of us" can only sit back at laugh at how ridiculous the price tag is, all the while we drool over the specs like we did back in the day when the Mac IIfx was on the scene selling at $10,000?

At the end of the day, I love Apple but...  When Steve Jobs was at Apple, Apple really seemed to know what I wanted before I knew I wanted it.  But after Jobs' departure to the land beyond, Apple has been merely refining existing products (Apple Watch excepted) based on what they think is the Jobsian ideal of minimalism.  What drives Apple though is the Johnny Ivian ideal of minimalism, which is basically so minimal that one day we will end up with a round metallic sphere with no buttons or obvious means to know how to use it.  In other words, minimalism taken to an extreme is fascinating (like alien tech from space) but not necessarily practical.  And even though Jobs was far to minimalist for my taste (I prefer the SE/30 over the Mac Plus), even Jobs had balance in his thinking, which is why he retained Scott Forstall to balance out Johnny Ive.  Steve also loved the rivalry between the Apple II and Macintosh camps back in the day.  But today Jobs is gone, Forstall is out, and everyone is pushing the Johnny Ive design aesthetic far more than the Steve Jobsian ideal of balance.  Remember that Steve was a fan of skeuomorphism and Ive eliminated that from the iOS UI.  Steve Jobs was a big Ive fan, but Steve still had balance.  Remember also that Ive was at Apple long before Steve returned, yet Ive did not revamp the company, and no, I don't believe that was due to Ive not having the power he has today.  Steve was the man who led Ive to create greatness by Steve guiding Ive in a particular direction, while at the same time listening to other voices in Apple, which included Ive rivals like Scott Forstall.

I think it would be great if Apple replaced the Mac Pro with an upgradable machine that was very powerful out of the box but which could be made much more powerful through upgrades, both from Apple and from third parties.  It would go against the minimalism of Johnny Ive, so many would say that is not what Apple is working on today, and they are probably right.  But it would be a machine that would appeal to more people than the niche product Apple is likely concocting now but speaking secretly to ultra-high-end pros who have very specialty use cases for a computer.  

I like upgradable Macs because you can get more life out of them.  At the prices we pay for Macs, we ought to expect more, and I personally expect 10 years of life from any expensive Mac I buy.  In the past, such as was the case with my Quadra 650, you could get that many years from it, or more.  But modern Macs are not built as well.  They need repair, and after about 4-5 years, they need accelerators to stay current.  Imagine buying an iMac Pro for $5k or more today.  Five years hence, you want to upgrade it but you can't.  You can't use it as an external display either.  And if you are in Japan like me, you cannot trade it in for a discount on a new Mac like you can in the USA.  No, you have to pay $50 equivalent to dispose of your old Mac!  Insane!  Selling it online might be an option, but it's not always easy or safe to do that, even here in Japan where the buyer is God and picky as hades.   The promise of a modular Mac is that you don't really need to worry about it becoming a paper-weight over time like an iMac, because by definition it is upgradable.  At some point it will not be able to be upgraded further, but by then (10 years or more later), the electrolytic capacitors are likely drying out or leaking to the extent that you'd want to get a replacement machine anyway.

Citing data and telling us how "Apple Inc" thinks vs "Apple Computer" does not persuade people like me from thinking like I already do.  I know what I want and what I can afford.  I want a module Mac Pro, but not if it's $5000 or more, and not if expandability is artificially limited for the sake of maintaining the Johnny Ive ideal.  Macs are already a tiny segment of the PC market anyway, so Apple is not losing or gaining much by offering the buyer what the buyer wants, as opposed to offering a product that Apple and Johnny Ive want.  In the end though, it makes good PR sense to, at least occasionally, give the buyer what they want.  And that is a modular Mac that doesn't look like a trash can and which is affordably priced and will last (with upgrades) 10 years.  Nothing is impossible when you put your mind to it.  Hopefully, Apple keeps "the rest of us" in mind like it once did.