Walt Mossberg, The Verge, reviewing a 13-inch Touch Bar MacBook Pro:

Apple is realigning its familiar laptop line, dramatically reshaping and in some ways merging the favorite options for both heavy-duty “pro” users and everyday customers. And the poster child for this more muddled future is the pricey new MacBook Pro

And:

The Pro, once mainly aimed straight at people who do especially taxing work like professional video editing or serious design, is now being stretched to suit a much larger audience.

Thus the term “tweener”.

Walt noted that the MacBook Pro’s battery life was wildly inconsistent:

On my rigorous test, which I’ve used for years, the machine actually exceeded Apple’s claim of up to 10 hours of battery life. The test involves setting the screen at 100 percent, keeping it on and undimmed constantly, playing an endless loop of music, and leaving Wi-Fi on to collect email, tweets, and Facebook posts in the background. Result: 11 hours and 38 minutes.

But then:

I ran a second test with all of Apple’s default energy-saving settings on, the screen at 75 percent and a perfectly normal (for me) mix of tasks like web browsing, email, a few short videos, Twitter, Facebook, some light writing, and Slack. The Pro died at 8 hours and 22 minutes.

To make things worse, Apple’s built-in prediction of how much time the battery had left before dying fluctuated a lot and was mostly wrong (Apple says this is a known problem caused by the fact that modern processors can power up and down rapidly over a much wider range than in the past, making estimates much more difficult.)

Interesting. Hopefully, this will get better over time as Apple collects usage data, gets their arms around the problem.