Apple's MacBook Pro launch was lame — get used to it

Apple announced new computers Thursday, and they sure weren't what everyone wanted.

The company will release three new versions of the MacBook Pro this year. They contain the requisite internal upgrades making them more powerful than last year's units, but the most significant change is the addition of a slim touchscreen above the keyboard. We're being pretty loose with our definition of "significant," because this upgrade hardly revolutionizes the laptops. Apple doesn't even include the so-called Touch Bar in the cheapest version of the new MacBook Pro, which isn't that cheap.

The Touch Bar displays app-specific functions while you're using your Mac. If you're in Safari, for example, it can display your favorite websites. If you're in Messages, it can turn into an emoji keyboard. It can also read your fingerprint to enable Touch ID functionality.

But the improvements Apple introduced to the new MacBook Pro are modest at best. They also lose a number of things from previous models: They won't have an SD card slot, the HDMI port is gone and there's no USB 3 port. You'll need a lot of USB-C dongles to make your old equipment work.

Critics including Mashable's own Lance Ulanoff say the Touch Bar works well, but no one claims it'll fundamentally transform how we use computers — because it won't. Professionals rely on mechanical refinement for their work that the Touch Bar cannot provide, and it otherwise appears to offer minor conveniences for functions you could handle with a normal mouse and keyboard.

Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable

People on the internet are not happy. Let's take a quick look at reactions on the Mac subreddit — a gathering place for Apple fans:

The consensus is that this isn't a meaningful upgrade over last year's version — the computers are lacking in raw power and the Touch Bar isn't impressive, nor is it even included across the entire MacBook Pro line.

Why is anyone surprised?

An unending cycle

Consumers demand new hardware from Apple multiple times a year. More accurately, we expect the company to introduce new iPhones, new MacBooks, new iPads and more on an annual basis, and we expect those products to be different in some obvious way than everything we've seen before.

Frankly, we're kidding ourselves. These are complicated, expensive machines (duh) that cannot fundamentally evolve like clockwork.

When we demand updates from companies like Apple near-constantly and obsess over leaks, every change we see is going to be an incremental one.

Let's put the MacBook Pro's incremental changes in a more familiar context. Overall, there aren't a lot of MacBook Pro owners, but there are a ton of people buying iPhones.

In 2015, Apple introduced 3D Touch in the iPhone 6S, which barely set it apart from the previous year's iPhone 6. 3D Touch is a fairly underutilized feature that allows the phone to respond to different types of touch — you can press the screen hard to cause a different reaction than a lighter tap. The expectation was that the 6s was giving us a little sneak peek at more substantial updates to come in the iPhone 7.

Then, the iPhone 7 rolled around this fall, and its updates over the 6s were pretty modest: Yep, we kept 3D Touch, but what else? The form factor was streamlined and we lost the headphone jack. iPhone 7 Plus owners got a cooler "dual camera." Things changed, but this wasn't a quantum leap forward.

Back to the MacBook Pro, Apple slapped a Touch Bar onto the thing to make the product stand out to the layman, and it purged the ports we're all used to. There's nothing revolutionary here.

Launches will feel this lackluster until they slow down. And that won't ever happen, because companies like Apple need constant launches to remain competitive. (Hurray for e-waste, right?)

So, adjust your expectations: We may never be surprised and delighted by a MacBook again.