I mean, I certainly didn't choose it over some other phone merely because WASN'T flashy, but I'm a lot happier buying something that doesn't advertise itself.

The MacBook, new Air, and 13 inch Pro are roughly priced the same with very few discernible differences. An average buyer would be very confused.

I think Apple's biggest question is what's next? The Apple Watch is really starting to hit's its groove and I think within the next few years will become a really fantastic product (even moreso than now) but what's next?

Two things better on the old model: keyboard and MagSafe.

I'm glad I own an older Macbook Pro Retina. I'd always have "keyboard anxiety" with any of the new models: is this the day my keyboard fails? And: do I dare take my laptop outside? Will airborne dust get into the keyboard mechanism?

Bah!

But at this point that's heavily played out. Progress is certainly not "done" by any means, and the slowdown is uneven (GPUs still scale more easily for example), but it's not exponential or essentially "free" anymore either. Bumping into harder physics means process shrinks keep getting harder and vastly more expensive for less gains, the low hanging frequency improvements and IPC has been picked, a lot of the trivial vectorization and parallelism done, hyper cheap mass labor utilized, the easy parts of the global market gobbled up, etc. There are also softer issues like inequality to deal with and in turn a wider spread in prices people might pay.

So tech companies are going to face a more "normal" world, where no a device from a year ago or two years ago or even 5 or more years ago isn't necessarily "obsolete". That means they'll need to figure out how to start raising prices over time just to keep pace with inflation let alone secure more growth when expanding marketshare or cutting costs is ever harder. But the public has been conditioned for a very long time to expect prices to always stay the "same" (which really means it's falling in real terms over time) or outright drops on the sticker price. Figuring out how to navigate that to a new normal without promoting undue backlash is something everyone will need to grapple with. One approach that Apple may be going for is to just take some pages from mature areas like cars, where there is a huge premium for "brand new", and large percentages of the population are fine getting used or "last year's that didn't sell" (let alone an "old model but newly manufactured" which isn't really a thing with cars) and will never buy brand new their entire lives. But "old" models still get support for a long time and to the basic job fine.

Other strategies of course include trying to shift more into ongoing services revenue, platform monetization (be it a cut of software sales or ads), premium support offerings, etc. Different players will try different mixes. But nobody will be able to avoid it anymore then other industries, at least not unless some other huge productivity shift (automation related perhaps) happens.

Meh, what a load of BS. I know a lot about technology and prefer the 12-inch. Form factor matters, both to professionals like myself and to "people who know nothing about technology".

and the original title is different.

Other than the outdated display, performance is perfectly adequate, and battery/trackpad/keyboard/SSD speed/ports are still doing great.

You're absolutely correct here, though I disagree with you on saying the "keyboard and MagSafe were better" is necessarily the reason. It's more fundamental, this is one of those "things everyone knows" that was a product of its time and is rapidly (or long since) obsolete but will no doubt linger for a while. When it comes to "computers" (as in traditional desktops/notebooks) that probably stopped being true at least a half a decade ago or more. It's not the 90s or 00s anymore, a decent 8 year old system can still be a solid performer (perhaps needing an SSD upgrade at that age, but SSD improvements have now slowed too). Getting an "old model" that meets ones needs at a significant discount will probably be how many people get their systems. The newest will carry a bigger premium.

Mobile systems are now going that way too. A 2-3 year old iPhone is still a fine device and can count on years more of software support from the mothership. That looks to be Apple's new plan for addressing different price points: rather then build new "entry point/midrange/high end" models each year, the "entry point" is simply "the model from 2 years ago", the midrange is "last year" and the high end is the newest.

For me the most interesting aspect here is knowing there's an upgrade path now for legacy MBA and Mini owners.

Legacy MBA owners don't generally want modern MBP laptops due to price/keyboard/etc but don't want the MB either as it looks like a toy.

I think the rate of price reduction in tech has slowed down enough that even though the prices are being reduced, the inflation offsets the perceived price reduction and ordinary people just get upset that Apple jacked up the prices yet again.

An iPhone cost $200 in 2008.

The combined rate of inflation in the US since 2008 is 17.2%. So an iPhone should cost less than $240 today, if inflation were the main driving factor.

The cheapest iPhone costs $450 now. The technological equivalent of that 2008 model costs almost 3x.

Inflation is not a driving factor. You could raise IT prices 5% YOY and nobody would bat an eyelid.

And less weight.

(I was going to say "and less volume", but one end of the Air is actually thicker than the MBP, so overall volume might not be that different in the end - even though it does look smaller.)