To be fair though, emojis are not central in their marketing messages. People like you and me can view it as a passing gimmick. Remember Ping? The belly-up mouse? We can forgive a few flops, right?
Or how do we know emojis are not the new language of some sort?
There is still a lot of good stuff going on. Logic Pro X now includes Alchemy (acquired by Apple recently) and to many music producers this is huge. The fingerprint scanner on laptops is also huge I think. "Huge" is on a relative scale of course. And most importantly, the macOS is still UNIX we know and love, with added security and a seriously good GUI.
In the '00s it felt like Apple was designing hardware just for people, like me, for whom Unix was important.
Now it feels, to me, that Apple has moved to prioritising a new niche.
That new niche is people for whom social media is a top priority, hence the focus on emojis as a headline feature of macOS and now the MacBook Pro.
Maybe I'm just angry because I'm in an aging demographic and Apple is just not chasing after me anymore.