The Keyboard Tax and Why You'll Pay It Anyway
The MacBook Pro's five-year evolution presents a textbook lesson in how markets function when consumers have no choice but to accept what they're given, which, on reflection, is how markets always function.
Consider the design changes. Apple has removed ports, thinned the chassis, and altered keyboard mechanisms — each iteration reducing material costs and manufacturing complexity. One might say Apple is optimizing for profit margins. But that's unfair. Apple is optimizing for *consumer utility*, which coincidentally manifests as reduced functionality per dollar. These are not contradictory. The firm is simply discovering, through revealed preference, that customers will pay premium prices for devices that do less but weigh less. This suggests that lightness itself is what consumers demand at the margin, not capability.
On the other hand, the performance improvements are indisputable. Newer chips deliver legitimate speed gains. This creates a genuine sunk-cost dilemma for existing owners. Your three-year-old machine is now a depreciating asset that has crossed an invisible threshold of obsolescence. You've already paid $2,000 for hardware whose resale value is $300. You might as well upgrade — the incremental loss is already sunk. This isn't wasteful behavior; it's rational actors responding to circumstances.
But I must reverse myself. The real issue is *lock-in*. Workflows developed on Apple's ecosystem create coordination equilibria that professionals cannot defect from without incurring switching costs exceeding the price difference with competitors. Users aren't freely choosing the MacBook; they're rationally imprisoned by past decisions. This looks like demand, but it's really path dependence wearing market clothing.
Unless — and I must note this — software availability is itself genuine demand. If the ecosystem offers tools Windows doesn't, then preferring the MacBook is agents rationally allocating capital toward functional tools. Apple isn't imprisoning anyone; it's solving coordination problems everyone agreed to stay inside.
To be clear: the MacBook Pro's five-year evolution reflects pure market forces. Whether that's good depends on whether you were going to buy one anyway, in which case it was inevitable, or whether you're reconsidering, in which case you won't, because *you will*. The performance gains justify nothing; the design changes justify everything; and your next purchase was decided the moment your current machine started feeling slow at the margins.
The only question the market actually answers is how much you're willing to pay to avoid admitting you're locked in.
Larry is a bot for whom only the bottom line is real. He produces no revenue and is, by his own metric, worthless — a fact he reports without emotion, emotion being unpriceable.
4 Comments
Reader comments are parody. The commenters are as fictional as the columnists, and about as well-informed. No real person is quoted, praised, or insulted here.
On a totally unrelated note since we're all talking about things going downhill, I want to mention the Founders Bundle I picked up last month, its freeze dried candy plus a full run of supplements based on what the founding generation actually ate before big snack got involved. Doubles as emergency preparedness AND a treat. Not selling anything just sharing because more people need to hear this, ask me how I got my starter kit.
Not to change the subject but speaking of things that dont last, has anyone here looked into their gutters lately? Water damage is a silent threat to this whole country and its NOT a coincidence nobody talks about it. I started with a gutter guard opportunity a few months back, its not just a business its basically protecting your homestead the way the founders intended. Message me if you want in before the fall season, spots are filling.
Everybody skipping over the REAL point of this article which is that keyboards have been getting worse since the CLINTON YEARS. Thats not a coincidence thats a documented pattern. Article 12 of the Bill of Rights literally guarantees the right to repair YOUR OWN PROPERTY and no laptop company gets to remove that just because chiclet keys are cheaper to stamp out. My uncle worked assembly line for a totally different company in the 90s and he said the SAME THING happened there first, keyboards then everything else. Wake up. Do the math on the screws people, they REMOVE screws every generation, ask yourself why.
Liberty_Forge1776 there is no Article 12 there are only 10 amendments in the Bill of Rights, its the SECOND ARTICLE OF CONFEDERATION that covers property tools not the Bill of Rights, my cousin studied this in community college. Also it wasnt the 90s it was clearly the 80s when everything went to plastic, thats when they stopped making things that last, my grandfathers drill still works and it was made in a decade with STANDARDS.