Apple VP Tom Boger on MacBook Pro weight, design, and the return of the glowing logo
Computerworld ·
Almost everyone in tech already knows about Apple’s new MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display, a light, bright, thin pro Mac notebook with a reference-grade touch responsive display, adding a touch of iPad to the Mac. It’s already being talked about as the future, at least of the company’s pro laptops. I spoke with Apple’s Vice President of Mac and iPad Product Marketing, Tom Boger, to find out more. The specs of the new MacBook Pro are written about everywhere — including here — so I wanted to get a feel for how Apple thought about building the system. We looked at the weight the team took out, the restraint behind its design choices, the illuminated logo it brought back, and why the Mac makes so much sense for the enterprise. Weight: a thousand small decisions The first thing people notice about the new MacBook Pro, Boger said, is how much lighter it has become. The 14-inch model is about half a pound lighter, and the 16-inch about 0.7 pounds lighter. This weight loss was not easy to achieve. The team looked at every single component used in the Mac to find opportunities to reduce its weight, Boger said. “It’s not one thing here, one thing there. It’s a thousand things.” The challenge is to reduce the weight of individual components while leaving each part as functional as it was. “You have to make sure you’re not compromising the integrity of whatever component you’re taking the weight out of.” I pictured engineers shaving away microns, milligrams, and grams from all the components used. “That’s literally what it takes,” Boger said. Of all the things Apple did with this product, he said, this was probably the one where “you really have to sweat every little detail.” Design: raise the bar, don’t change the Mac The display is the headline feature of this MacBook Pro, Boger said. It did not appear overnight. Apple’s display engineering team is “one of, if not the best in the world,” he said. Building a panel like this “takes years of development.” The technology is only half the job, manufacturing it at scale is another. He was blunt about the result: “There’s literally nothing else in the industry like this,” he said, pointing to the display’s 10,000,000:1 contrast ratio. In working on the project, the question the team kept asking was simple: “If this is the world’s best pro notebook, how do we make it even better?” Apple made it better with an astonishing display. The tandem OLED panel combines two stacked electroluminescent-emitting layers to deliver that extraordinary contrast ratio, up to 2,000 nits of brightness, and self-emissive pixels to eliminate the blooming and halo artifacts you see on other displays. I’ve been lucky enough to see one of these Macs in action alongside a higher-end Windows laptop with touch, and you can very quickly see the difference. Apple has published a helpful white paper to explain more on its display tech. The touch functionality supported by the display follows a similar logic of adding without disrupting. Drawing inspiration from the iPad and iPhone, which almost every MacBook Pro owner already has, the intention was to ensure that the expanded user interface did not fundamentally change the nature of the laptop. “The MacBook Pro is still first and foremost about a trackpad and keyboard interaction,” Boger said. The aim is familiarity from one device to the next. What is new, he said, is pairing touch with a far more powerful system than an iPad Pro, which “opens doors” for creative applications. He pointed out that Apple’s touch is more responsive than on other laptops. You’ll also be impressed at how little the display wobbles when you touch it. The new Mac comes as a new generation of professionals who have used touch all their lives graduate into employment. These digital natives use touch every day, and now they can do so with their Mac. The logo I recalled a conversation with Jony Ive many years ago about the care that went into a single component used in a previous MacBook Pro. Ive explained how simplicity reflects the care behind a product: making it not obvious how hard it was to build. I asked Boger if there was a small feature on Apple’s brand-new MacBook Pro in which the team who created it takes similar pride. “In fact, there is,” Boger smiled, twisting his demo Mac around to so we could both see the illuminated Apple logo that now sits once again on its lid following a decade-long absence. I’d already heard there were gasps and applause when Apple first revealed the glowing logo to the media on launch. “Reception so far has been great,” Boger confirmed. The magic this time, he said, is that the logo is also reflective, with the mirror-like finish intact. What that means is that when you close the Mac, the logo appears as a shiny mirror black logo. He would not explain how. “That’s something we’re going to let be the mystery and the magic of this implementation,” he told me. Pressed a second time, he said only that Apple has fantastic engineers and “it’s just magic.” He framed it as a gesture to the customer. “People’s lives are on their Mac,” he said, and they take great pride in it. Bringing the glowing logo back is one way to honor that relationship. Apple wanted to revive in “a much more elevated way.” The picture he gave me was of countless small design decisions like these made in pursuit of this product. Macs have never been more popular Analyst Horace Dediu this week shared analysis based on recent financial results that implied Apple may have outsold Dell in the last quarter. Boger declined to speak directly on that but told me the Mac has never been more popular than it is today and has never had a higher market share across its history. “We’re bringing the greatest number of new-to-Mac customers than we ever have in the 42 years that the Mac has been around,” he said. He credited the MacBook Neo as “a huge momentum creator.” In the enterprise, Boger pointed to the Mac being cheaper to support, more reliable, and better liked by the people using it. “It can save an enterprise money if they put a Mac in the hands of their employees,” he said. When you give employees Macs, they become happier and more productive, and support costs shrink. Those traditional advantages have been boosted by something new — the power of Apple Silicon. “One of the things that differentiates Apple Silicon from any other platform is the incredibly fast and low-latency unified memory and the capacity that it has.” “The Mac is, from our perspective, the best platform for running AI in an enterprise,” he said. “There’s now this concept of tokenomics , where if you’re using AI more and more, if you use cloud-based AI, you’re going to be paying for tokens, where if you can run those models on device, it’s essentially free.” For enterprise users, that cost savings delivers real benefits. Run a model locally instead of paying for cloud tokens, and “a Mac can pay for itself in a matter of months.” For creative people doing creative things What Apple has done is pair its real-world tested implementation of touch with a far more powerful system in the form of the MacBook Pro. For people using Macs, this means “higher-end applications and use cases can be combined with touch in ways that it hasn’t been combined before,” Boger said. This opens the doors to new creative possibilities. Why does that matter? “People literally change the world” with MacBook Pros, Boger said. The hope is that touch on the new MacBook Pro will help creative people do even more creative things, maintaining the platform’s long-held ethos once characterized by founder Steve Jobs as “a bicycle for the mind.” That’s not to say this bicycle comes cheap. The MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display costs from $2,899. Now please subscribe to my daily, human-curated Apple-related news headline feed at The Core , or follow me on BlueSky , LinkedIn , or Mastodon .