Many Mac users, including myself, feel that the new MacBook Pro is inferior to the MacBook Pro it replaced. And for Mac desktop users, the situation is the Mac Mini hasn't been upgraded in two years, and the Mac Pro hasn't been upgraded in three years. And, once again, the current Mac Mini is a downgrade from its predecessor (and some may even argue that about the current Mac Pro over its tower predecessor). Sure, we can keep chugging on with our old hardware, but eventually our hardware will fail, and our options will either be to replace it with overpriced, deliberately crippled hardware if we want to stay in the OS X ecosystem or to switch away from OS X and deal with the inconveniences of Windows and/or desktop Linux. We can work with and deal with either option; heck I could get my work done with an old Pentium II laptop running Windows ME if I had to, but it's just not the same and is worse than what we had before. That's what we're lamenting.
How is the hardware deliberately crippled, though? You keep saying things like that as if they're objective facts. The new Macbooks can run exactly the same software and hardware as the old ones. The only difference is that you may need an adapter unless you have newer devices that can use USB-C. There's no way you could say that any of these are a downgrade from their predecessors when they have faster processors, more storage space, and better displays than any of the old machines. Again, you're bemoaning something that is entirely your decision. You expect the one of the biggest computer manufacturers in the world to cater to your specific workflow rather than verifying that your workflow is adaptable and extensible. That seems backwards to me and your lament seems completely misplaced.
Let's agree to disagree regarding the value proposition of today's Macs. I personally and strongly feel that soldering RAM and storage to the motherboard is crippling the machine, but you feel differently about it, and I'm not going to argue further.
Honestly, the USB-C situation is the least of my problems with the MacBook Pro and Apple these days. It's the entire philosophy of Apple and their stewardship of the Mac since Steve Jobs passed away that I take strong issue with. The problem is there is absolutely no manufacturer on the planet who has a philosophy toward personal computing that is aligned with the pre-2012 Apple, before Apple started soldering RAM to their motherboards and before Apple started dramatically lengthening the frequency of updating their Macs. We had a great run of no-compromise personal computers from 2001-2013ish or so, and it's over, not because it got supplanted by superior technology, but because Apple can't make as much money off the 5-10% of power users rather than the masses. Maybe it's just a "c'est la vie" type of thing, but it's a shame that nobody seems to care about the personal computing needs of power users anymore.
