I don’t understand Apple’s market positioning here.

Apple has always positioned the Pro as having the best display in a laptop. Now that’s no longer true.

Are we really moving to 3 tier of laptop displays: Air, Pro, and Pro with ProLED XDR?

That seems unnecessarily confusing for consumers.

“Pro” used to mean you were getting Apple’s best hardware, designed for "professionals".

Now “Pro” doesn't mean that anymore.

It seems to me like a transition year. Apple occasionally has these where the lineup doesn't make sense until they phase out the old and bring in the new. iPads in 2016, iMacs in 2021, iPads in 2022, Macbooks in 2011, etc.

It's really hard to maintain a perfectly positioned product lineup while managing underlying shifts in technologies. It's usually the availability and price of new components that cause this, along with needing to iron out issues before bringing a technology fully mainstream. Here the touchscreen is new, the hinge is new, and the screen tech is new to the platform. You can't always just drop something that on the mass market.

Your assertion hasn’t been true for a while.

You have the MacBook Pro with three tiers of SoCs, each with binning options.

There was already an option for screen coatings and now an option for a new screen type.

That’s not to mention storage and RAM choices.

Its still the MacBook with HDR display and active cooling and more inputs. I’m not sure why options are an issue

Coming from the company that simultaneously offered six(!) different models of iPad at once, this is not unsurprising at all. From 2022 to 2024, Apple offered: Two models of iPad, an iPad mini, an iPad Air, and two models of iPad Pro (11 and 13 inch).

For Apple, product & hardware come first, marketing and positioning is secondary.

It's been a while since Jobs' nice simple quad chart. I miss the elegance of that.

Where are they lacking?

Explain further what you mean. The displays are still best in class. What metrics do you have suggesting otherwise?