When I bought my MacBook Pro 14, I was coming off a Thinkpad. I’d used the USB-C only MacBooks for work, and I definitely loved having a SD card reader and HDMI port on my personal machine. I accepted that I needed to pay the Apple tax to get those features on a “pro” body, even if the performance boost wasn’t strictly needed.

So it’s interesting to see Apple effectively giving me what I would have wanted with the new base model MBP. It’s their consumer grade chip, but the niceties of a great display and the dedicated IO. It’s what I said I wanted. So why do I feel like I still would opt for a M3 Pro version today? I guess because for that money, I would pay a little more for the extra RAM as future proofing.