Modern Era

This stretch of Mac history is defined by extremes, some more successful than others: the radically redesigned cylindrical Mac Pro of 2013, the ultra-thin 12-inch MacBook with its single USB-C port, and the MacBook Pro's Touch Bar, an OLED strip meant to reinvent function keys that never quite won over the professionals it was aimed at.

Thinness and minimalism were the guiding obsessions of these years, sometimes at the expense of the ports, keyboards, and expandability that longtime Mac users had come to expect. It's the era that set up the loudest customer pushback in the Mac's history — and, not coincidentally, the one right before Apple started walking several of these decisions back.