Apple is expected to refresh the MacBook Pro again soon, reportedly with the next generation of its M-series chips and the kind of battery life that makes a cross-country flight feel like a rounding error.
For the small slice of Americans who buy one, it will be a genuinely great machine.
For everyone else, it arrives as an accusation.
Walk through any coffee shop in this country and count the laptops.
You will find 2021 models doing spreadsheets.
You will find 2019 models editing podcasts.
You will find machines with dented corners and sticker residue that still boot in nine seconds and still hold a charge through a full workday.
The problem is that "fine" stopped being a selling point somewhere around 2016.
The modern gadget economy does not run on broken devices.
It runs on devices that are still working, just not as nicely as the one in the ad.
This is the quiet business model of American consumer tech, and it deserves to be named.
Companies don't need your old machine to die.
They need you to feel the gap between what you own and what was just announced.
A slightly brighter screen, a chip that renders video a few seconds faster, a new color that reads as "this person is current." None of it is a need.
The moral cost is not the money, though the money is real.
A new MacBook Pro can run well past two thousand dollars, which is a used car in most of this country.
Every two years we teach ourselves that working things are disposable, that loyalty to an object is sentimental, that the correct response to satisfaction is upgrade.
Then we wonder why landfills are full of aluminum and lithium, why repair shops are fighting for the right to fix what we own, and why teenagers feel poor for carrying last year's phone.
The refresh cycle isn't a technology story.
It's a values story, and the values are not flattering.
Here is the uncomfortable part: the new MacBook Pro will probably be worth it for the people who genuinely need it.
Video editors, developers, anyone whose livelihood is measured in render times.
That's not the group the marketing is aimed at.
The marketing is aimed at the rest of us, the ones whose current machine quietly does everything we ask.
We are the target because we are the majority, and because we can be moved by nothing more than a keynote and a slightly better screen.
So before you preorder, do the honest math.
Is your current laptop actually failing you, or is it just failing a comparison you didn't ask to make?
Final Thoughts
The most radical thing an American consumer can do this year is keep using something that works.