I hate glossy screens. I’ve tried them. I don’t like them. It’s true that it would probably be good for my eyes in some way, since I do a lot of reading on the laptop and things *are* sharper with the glossy screen. However, there’s just no way I can deal with having a glossy screen all the time, because I don’t have control over the lighting when I’m out and about at client sites or working from a coffee shop or something. If there’s a really busy background, or a huge window at your back, the screen becomes distracting and in some cases unusable due to its highly reflective nature.
Maybe this is a ploy by Apple to actually sell off all of their refurbs and clearance items in a hurry, and then they’ll offer the option on the new MBPs.
This experience has shown me something interesting about myself and my stance toward Linux on the desktop. I’ve run Linux on desktops for about 10 years. In the past 2 years it’s been less often, because that’s around the time I started making friends with the Mac. Over that time, I have apparently reached the point where I will sooner deal with the glossy screen nonsense than go back to using Linux on the desktop full time.
If Apple provides nothing else of value to the Linux community, they at least serve as a proof of concept that, if hardware compatibility is removed from the equation completely, UNIX-based machines can be extremely successful desktops.