I expect that Apple's long-held approach of supporting things for quite a long time will start to fade away.

For example, they need to kill touch ID, because Face ID is the new iOS authentication hotness. They need to kill support for Macs with GPUs that rely on OpenGL, because Metal is the new macOS graphics lukewarmness.

Apple absolutely is not interested in supporting actual pro users - actual pro users are annoying and demanding and whiny and finicky, and they want boring unsexy shit like a zillion legacy ports on their computers, 4-hour on-site warranty service, and a new GPU every year, and a relentless increase in the amount of local storage and memory, and a pony.

People who like to think they're pro users, on the other hand - Apple loves them. $5000 iMac where you can't replace anything without going through the vast fragile screen and which thermally throttles itself at the drop of a hat? $3000 MacBook pro that doesn't have an SD card slot? Mac Pro at $4000 that's four years out of date? Step right up, Apple has you covered.

I'd love to have a Mac. I really, really would. Had Apple computers of varying stripes from Panther through Mountain Lion. Loved them all. (Although I maintain that in 30-odd years, Apple is yet to make a mouse that isn't several different flavours of dogshit :D)

But Apple and its customers dance to the beat of a different drum these days - from the high price of their products, to their decidedly meh performance for my workload, to their lack of repair- and upgradability - so it's rorschach and prozac and everything is groovyWindows on a home-made fast-but-commodity PC for me.

That particular vintage of MBP, which as you rightly observe was likely the ne plus ultra of Apple's mobile computing experience, cost roughly twice as much as a respectable Windows laptop. Of course it was superb. It was designed and executed properly, and priced accordingly. That's the Apple I loved. Premium pricing for premium kit. The Apple Cinema Display was a thing of wonder (although we should note that high-end panels from other manufacturers are now as good or better than the panels you get in iMacs and MacBooks, but at the time this certainly was not the case).

People will say "oh get a dongle for your sd card" but pro photographers are the sorts of people who carry multiple multi-kilodollar cameras to avoid fucking about changing things as far as possible. Any dongle is a massive "eh, fuck you and your workflow, we gots to make it thin!" to them.

It's not like macOS is free from things that drive you mental.

And the multi-monitor thing is fixable in software. Ain't no-one can code me up an SDXC slot. Not even with the most kanbaniest, scrummiest, agile-iest web 3.0.js frameworks there are.

And this:

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/yw9qk7/macbook-pro-software-locks-prevent-independent-repair

This is some spectacular bullshit, right there. And Apple solders your fuckin' hard disk to the motherboard. Say that out loud.

I'd switch to Linux, but...

...fuck. Have you USED Linux lately? You got two choices of desktop: some weird shit that makes no sense (oh hai Ubuntu, didn't see you there) or a Windows XP knockoff (KDE, how ya doin? Been a while!) or some reductionist thing that lets you 'pute like it's 1995 (Open/flux/blackbox! My MAN!) or another Windows XP knockoff (Cinnamon, you're looking well!). And then you get to use a CLI that was designed in 1970 and looks like it.

Computers are all shit.

Burn them all to the ground.