That's exactly it. That on top of the bling factor. Nobody buys MacBooks, all I see are MacBook Pros. Because of this Apple had to start catering the to consumers who care more about thinness and bling rather than utility. The pro device became a device for everyone.
I get why they'd like like to sell a pro device to more people. That's fine. It marketing world pro/professional seems to often equate to "better". If someone wants to spend an extra thousand to load the news a bit faster, sure. Apple will and should happily take their money, and they can repurpose product names in service of this all day.
I would like to imagine there's space in the market for a "pro" model that would feel markedly worse for the average consumer, and shouldn't be mistakable in its name for something that would serve them better.
I see this time and time again on Hacker News, and really don't understand why people seem to think that "pro" in any way equates to "developer" or to "someone who needs a lot of computing horsepower".
"Pro" means professional. The vast majority of working professionals, in the vast majority of professional fields, run Office, a mail client, a browser, and maybe a line-of-business app. Professionals regularly attend meetings, and like to be able to carry their laptop around without breaking their backs.
The needs of professionals are generally largely in line with the needs of the average consumer.
You can come up with 'professional' jobs that need more horsepower (people like traders who want to run 6 monitors, and software devs (although personally I don't understand why software devs really need more horsepower)) but those are most definitely the exception.
< although personally I don't understand why software devs really need more horsepower
When i build test and lint the smallish piece of software i work on it can take quite a while. More horsepower means quick turn around cycle from "make change see result". Also sometimes i am running multiple VM or containers.
