I suppose the era of PowerPCs was a little different, with Apple far ahead of PCs for a while, then well behind. Apple could have released Skylake 13" class laptops a long time ago. Possibly they thought there would be suitable Kaby Lake processors with Iris by now.
These MacBook Pros are expensive, but they really are not more expensive than similar machine with matching specs. Given that, here's what I think would have worked a lot better:
Release these MacBook Pros 3-6 months ago, but each model a couple hundred dollars more expensive. In the box for free include an adapter with power pass through, HDMI and a USB-A 3.1, another with mini DisplayPort, and one USB-C to Lighting cable. Make the power cable fully capable for 3.1 data transfer, rather than a potential source of confusion. Sell adapters in the store for close to cost. They should also have released the iPhone 8 and future iOS devices with USB-C rather than Lighting. And to complete the line, maybe a premium-priced dock, that doesn't crowd out other hardware innovators, but proves the market viable.
Presumably the cost of the OS is built into the computers, why not some of the add-ons that facilitate the transition to USB-C? USB-C is superior, but the transition with short-sighted nickle-and-diming seems like it is needlessly aggravating people.
I don't know that PPC Macs were ever far ahead of PCs, performance-wise at least. At best there was a relatively big leap from "much slower than what you can get in a PC" in the tail end of the 68040 era to "pretty close to what you can get in a PC" in the early PPC days. But then PPC performance stagnated and left Apple in the lurch again, which helped drive the eventual jump to Intel.
These MacBook Pros are expensive, but they really are not more expensive than similar machine with matching specs. Given that, here's what I think would have worked a lot better:
Release these MacBook Pros 3-6 months ago, but each model a couple hundred dollars more expensive. In the box for free include an adapter with power pass through, HDMI and a USB-A 3.1, another with mini DisplayPort, and one USB-C to Lighting cable. Make the power cable fully capable for 3.1 data transfer, rather than a potential source of confusion. Sell adapters in the store for close to cost. They should also have released the iPhone 8 and future iOS devices with USB-C rather than Lighting. And to complete the line, maybe a premium-priced dock, that doesn't crowd out other hardware innovators, but proves the market viable.
Presumably the cost of the OS is built into the computers, why not some of the add-ons that facilitate the transition to USB-C? USB-C is superior, but the transition with short-sighted nickle-and-diming seems like it is needlessly aggravating people.