My potential issue with the Touch Bar is that I never look at the keyboard when I type, so if I need to adjust the volume / screen brightness I would have to change my behavior.
If only these were actions I took more often than using the F keys for various other applications, it wouldn't bother me as much as it does currently.
Honestly, I'll get over it; I'll set up other key chords to take the place of the various F keys I use today. It still bothers me that I'm the one who has to make these adjustments to support something that I have no need for. It's a short term productivity hit, combined with a long tail of annoyance as my hands use their muscle memory and will incur some random state change on my computer.
So, I guess you lose iTunes control keys while another app has control of the Touch Bar? Or maybe some controls can be global? This is a big issue in media apps
> The one exception to this is ESC, and I use it gratuitously.
macOS has a built-in option to remap caps-lock to escape. I haven't used it yet (I'm not a VIM user, so I mostly just use it to cancel dialogs), but I've ordered the new MBP and it's the first thing I'll do. Should take care of that issue and even improve ergonomics.
I should have remapped caps-lock ages ago, I never use it, but haven't had the incentive until now.
It looks like Apple is trying to find an alternative to touchscreens just because Steve Jobs once said they're bad.
For me, touchscreens are perfectly useful on laptops, since directly tapping something is much quicker than moving my hand to the trackpad, locating the cursor, moving it around and finally clicking something.
I love tablets but hate touch screens on laptops. More often than not, it doesn't work that well (edit: although last time I tried a touch laptop is now 1.5 years ago). And, oh god, the smudging.
It frustrates me that almost every Windows laptop with a nice screen is now touch. I assume you can turn it off, but you do pay more for a touch screen. This just reenforces my (outdated?) notion that it's a consumer, not professional device.
>> It frustrates me that almost every Windows laptop with a nice screen is now touch.
As someone who's just started researching to buy my next laptop, I don't find that to be very true at all unless you're only looking at ultrabooks.
One of my almost-gotta-haves is a touch screen, and for any models with an HQ/HK level processor plus a discrete GPU, there only seem to be a handful of models with touch screens (and when they are there they are usually optional) at the highest end configurations.
I was a bit afraid of smudges too, but it's really not an issue. Under normal conditions, they're not visible while the screen is on. And when it gets too dirty, a touchscreen is much easier and safer to clean than a standard one.
As a power user, you probably use the keyboard most of the time and occasionaly a single mouse operation (like moving focus somewhere). For that, it's quite intuitive to tap.
Think it's more a case that a Surface-like MacBook Pro would completely cannibalise the iPad Pro and Cook is more fond of the iPad Pro than the Mac line.
The touchbar as a design decision makes a lot more sense when the brief is "Add touch to the Macbook Pro line... but under no circumstances step on the toes of the iPad Pro"
> Think it's more a case that a Surface-like MacBook Pro would completely cannibalise the iPad Pro and Cook is more fond of the iPad Pro than the Mac line.
I think it's more that retrofitting touch to a desktop OS - any desktop OS - is painful. Microsoft started it with Windows 8 and it's nearly - but not completely - done years later with Windows 10.
I suspect Apple has probably started retrofitting OS X privately, but released the touch bar as an interim solution.
I've used my iPad as a remote display into OS X (now macOS) and it's painful.
The OS would need an interaction overhaul to make it work with touch - the hit targets are all the wrong size and a lot of behaviour relies on hovering over something. Couple that with the fact that the screen is at the wrong angle (I find it makes my arm ache just using an iPad with a keyboard and having to reach over to touch the screen) and I think Apple aren't too far wrong.
However, as someone who likes drawing, the way the Surface Studio folds down to an angle that is better for touch and pen does look pretty good to me.
> I have little doubt that in a couple years, the technology Apple has been waiting for will arrive and this vision, or something closer to it, will be complete. Apple just released this machine too soon, or was too aggressive in the decisions it made.
This summary makes sense to me. Luckily, I put 8GB of RAM in my Macbook Air five years ago, and it'll probably do another year.
That said, does anybody use a Macbook for development? If I need to use dongles anyway, I think I could live with one port.
In fact I do use a 12" Macbook for development (C++). It does alright; certainly no worse than the 2011 13" Air it replaced. I should mention the CLion IDE makes it get hot and drains the battery unless you turn off certain IDE features. Code::Blocks does fine on it performance-wise, but initially the UI was too fuzzy to read due to incompatibility with Retina display. I can't remember if that's fixed in the latest version or if I found a work-around. I haven't tried to use XCode. My favorite thing about it is that the taller aspect ratio of the screen reminds me of older 4:3 monitors and IMO is a better layout for programming.
Edit: I have yet to plug anything into the single USB-C port except the charger. I don't own any dongles. I just use WiFi and bluetooth.
One thing I got from this review is that the touchbar brings keyboard shortcuts to people who wouldn't normally bother to learn keyboard shortcuts.
I personally won't buy one because I've very picky about my keyboards (the squashed arrow keys are as much of a problem for me as the missing escape key). But for average users, I think Apple has managed another UX win here.
I just wish they had made the bar a bit smaller and kept the physical ESC key. I'm not a VIM user so don't care about frequency of use. My biggest issue is how do you CMD+ALT+ESC if an app crashes, locking up the touch bar?
From what I read, the touch bar is a separate system, with its own processor and running watchOS - effectively a remote display - so an app crash shouldn't affect it.
I would certainly guess that the OS gets pre-emptive access to it in much the same way as it can trap system key interrupts before they go to applications, but I'm still wary until there's a lot more information available on this. Another case is what if the app decides to replace the ESC key altogether? If that's prohibited somehow then what's the advantage of removing the physical key?
TBH, a separate OS sounds like one more thing to go wrong, which is also worse, not reassuring. I'm also not keen on the idea of someone remotely rooting my touch bar - also not a problem I currently have to worry about.
Just read the Ars review - it looks like the bar is divided into three, with only the middle area fully under app control (the left hand area showing dialogue box controls or escape). It does say that the bar slows down under heavy load though.
Hm, so what happens when an application locks up with a dialog open? Sounds like you may need to CMD+TAB first to get the ESC key back, which is at best going to be a nuisance (and I'm not sure exactly which OSX shortcuts are non-maskable in the way that CTRL+ALT+DEL is in Windows).
Sure, but there is a whole separate piece of newish software (watchOS? touchBarOS?) that Apple will no doubt develop, enhance and update regularly. It is perfectly capable of having its own crashes and issues.
> the squashed arrow keys are as much of a problem for me as the missing escape key
Could you elaborate on this aside? To me, it looks like a strict improvement on the arrow keys since the up/down keys are identical and the left/right keys have simply been embiggened (stretched upwards). Or do you think the negative space above the left/right keys gave important touch feedback?
Yes, the inverted T arrangement makes it a lot easier to rest your fingers, or quickly find the correct key without looking when moving between the cursors and the other keys/touchpad.
The keys are already big enough, so it's not a strict improvement and even if bigger keys are better, why are the up/down ones less important than left/right? If anything I use up/down more, because I use them for both reading and writing, whereas left/right are almost exclusively for writing (would be more so were it not for the lack of consistent PgUp/PgDn shortcuts on OSX: these are sometimes bound to left/right and sometimes to up/down depending on the application).
Having used both types of key arrangement (and others) on various cheapy Windows laptops, I know that for me at least, the inverted-T (without extra keys crammed into the spaces) is absolutely essential to being maximally productive at the text-related tasks I spend 95% my time doing. I can adapt to a 3/4 size keyboard more effectively than I can adapt to a full-size one without the inverted-T.
There's nothing in this review that convinces me that the touch bar is improving anything. If anything, paragraphs like these convince me it's at best on par with just regular keys:
> you no longer have one-touch access to brightness and volume adjustments; instead, you need to tap the button and then dial in your changes on a slider that pops up beside — not beneath — your finger. I’d be annoyed by that, but fortunately you can move the slider without actually touching it, by keeping your finger held down on the bar. It’s surprisingly inelegant, in that you end up controlling a slider that you aren’t actually touching. But it is efficient, and I got used to the new control scheme within a day, able to operate it by muscle memory the same I would a physical key.
They don't seem to have integrated this themselves, even. Why introduce something that you can't even use reasonably yourselves?
For the power users, those of us who learn and have hotkeys streamlined into our work environment, the Touch Bar doesn't add much to us, except perhaps a new medium of fine controls (think sliders)
However to the users who aren't savvy, or who don't know hotkeys, this brings controls that would otherwise be in deep within the menu bar, right in front of the user. I think that could be incredibly useful to a lot of people.
While that's probably true, there used to be a time when the MacBook Pro was specifically aimed at power users. Which is likely why these features are being viewed from that perspective.
The hardest pill for a lot of people to swallow with the latest generation is that Apple has moved on from these "power users" and are selling premium mass market computers while keeping the "Pro" suffix.
The easiest solution to keeping both power users and the other users would've been to keep the function keys and the escape key as they were and add the touch bar located one row above.
The touch bar is the type of gimmick that Apple loves though, because that's what sells hardware.
When OS X was released, the Dock was that gimmick. It added "curb appeal" and demoability according to Bruce Tognazzini, an ex-Apple employee who wrote the first five editions of the Apple Human Interface Guidelines - http://www.asktog.com/columns/044top10docksucks.html
Sorry if this comes off as rude, but what's the difference on HN between a gimmick and a feature? In dictionaries, it says that a gimmick is a feature that exists to get attention. However, doesn't that describe most new features in technology?
I think you explained it perfectly. A gimmick is a feature to get attention. It's not an indispensable future. It's not a necessarily very useful feature. It's just there to get attention.
Steve (quite probably imo) wouldn't have allowed this to happen!
I have little doubt that in a couple years, the technology
Apple has been waiting for will arrive and this vision, or
something closer to it, will be complete. Apple just
released this machine too soon, or was too aggressive in
the decisions it made.
While I agree with you here, I do think that using Steve Jobs as a consistent counterpoint to new Apple developments isn't always useful. Sometimes we forget that Steve was behind the Lisa and the original Apple TV. And the Magic Mouse original.
I'm not old enough (and certainly wasn't in a household wealthy enough to afford it at the time) to know what's going on with the Lisa, but there was nothing with the Apple Tv, or Magic Mouse. For those products, we're simply not the audience. I know plenty of casual mac users who were doing fine with those things. People in tech circles love to go on about Apple's mouse deficiencies but from my experience around casual computer users, PC users too, is that most people barely know about the second mouse button and the very concept of a "context menu" is alien to them. I keep having to remind my stepfather how to do things like copy and pasting in some apps because he always forgets about the context menu and even remembering something as simple as Ctrl+C + Ctrl+V is something he's not willing to do for a reason I can't even fathom myself, it literally makes no sense to me, it's just how it is.
So, from my point of view, Apple insistence on mostly forgetting about secondary functions on mouses is the right thing. The Magic mouse doesn't have a middle click? Most people don't even know how to right click. The only thing a mouse for casual users needs to do right, is left click and scrolling and the magic mouse has perfect touch scrolling.
For the same reason Apple has hidden functionality like Cut&Paste from the finder. You need to hold the option key to activate the "move item". Apple wants you to drag&drop instead. The "default" in Apple land has always been to serve the need of the common, not the expert. So there's no traditional CTRL+X CTRL+V. Instead you need to do CMD+C as if you were copying, then CMD+OPT+V to "move". Everything advanced tends to be hidden into OPT key. It also changes the behavior of various menus to show things Apple doesn't want to show to the commons.
The touchbar is actually a very, very clever thing, we're just not the audience once again. I firmly believe it will never have much use among professionals who have nothing against learning many keyboard shortcut combinations or who even do things like customizing them (Karabiner to the rescue!). The touchbar is for people who didn't even use the mouse right click, and who don't understand concepts like context menu that change based on, gasp, context. It's actually going to be a boon for these people. Even exposing basic functionality like copy paste is going to help average users be slightly more productive with their devices.
The only issue is the MBP audience having a lot of techies and audio/visual professionals. The touchbar would be more sensible on something like the iMac and Macbook.
Can we just stop the "Steve would never..." stupidity, please?
1: He's gone. It doesn't matter anymore.
2: We'll never know what he'd have done in this situation.
Seriously. Everyone keeps pinning every single mistake Apple does to Steves absence. Have people completely forgotten that Apple made mistakes with Steve at the helm as well?
There are too many to count, but in this specific case, it could be reasonable to compare to the original Apple TV. Also something which wasn't timed right at all, and was kind of a "meh" in hindsight. In fact I'm not sure their vision for TV has really arrived yet, even now.
What about the original iPhone? What we consider now to be an absolutely essential element for smartphones was not present in the original: (third-party) apps. I remember how many people complained about that.. I'm sure they would've blamed it on Steves absence if Apple did that now.
Fine, it has a new keyboard thing that you may or may not like, we are going to buy it anyway. But how does the verge not address what everyone really cares about: the CPU!
The MacBook without the touchbar has a MacBook Air class CPU while the one with a touchbar is in another class.
How do the non touchbar models compare with the previous air models and how do the touchbar models compare with the previous pro generation?
If the CPU is mostly the same performance wise as the last generation you are better off going for a refurb of the last gen if you don't care about the keyboard thing or having the new new.
As far as I have seen in some benchmarks the new non-touchbar model (with the lower TDP CPU) is as about the same speed as my last-gen (2015) MBP 13" with the 28W TDP CPU.
So it's a lower speed CPU class but due to the newer CPU generation the performance is the same.
You can see it in a positive way: It didn't get slower
Or in the negative way: You get an actually worse CPU class for more money than the previous gen was.
Does anyone care about the CPU? In any case, Intel laptop CPUs are basically thermally limited since Sandy Bridge or even before. Skylake isn't a major advance in that regard, neither will Kaby Lake be.
I think the touchbar is the way to go for desktops and laptops. You can imagine Apple rolling out a touch bar enabled desktop keyboard. But touch screens are totally impractical for use when your computer is docked, which means you can't really incorporate them into your workflow.
The battery life point is really depressing. Every MacBook since the original has been improving on that front and this is such a huge regression. If I wanted just 5-6 hours of battery life I'd buy a PC.
One major let-down for me in macbook pros is the lack of a nvidia GPU. You can't do serious machine learning on those laptops. I actually had to buy a previous-gen macbook pro
I'm not sure what to do if I had to get a new laptop. On one hand, I have a few iOS projects, and on the other hand, it's always nice to run locally and quickly a few deep learning algos.
There're some external GPU enclosures with Mac-Compatible Nvidia cards that connect via USB-3. None of that is officially supported, and it is expensive, but based on cursory searches I did, it seems to work for people. It's still expensive and can only be used when you're at a desk, but those are imho fair compromises.
Now, I'd love for Apple to release an official external GPU (like Blazer did with the Blazer Stealth) but I highly doubt they'd do it.
With Thunderbolt 3 (via the four USB-C ports), you could quite easily run desktop class GPUs in a relatively small enclosure. There's a couple of them previously available on Amazon, but I'm sure the offerings will skyrocket after the first of the year given the new laptop.
(not claiming the two are similar in some way, just following the idea back to where it was born)
I remember when this laptop was being sold I considered it since was "small" for that time, but ended up buying something else since I didn't like the touch panel below the screen.
This is like the Creative Nomad vs the iPod. HP was first to market with everything that's in the new MBP but it's incredibly unpolished and downright cumbersome to the point that it's hard to tell that these products do mostly the same thing. This how Apple captures the market, when they release a product it's so polished and functional, and they commit 100% to it that it almost always succeeds. HP and others don't spend much time if any refining ideas, they just throw sh*t against the wall and hope it sticks.
I'm using a touchscreen Windows laptop and can't imagine going back to non-touch. Windows bit the bullet and reworked their UI for touch. It cost them some time, but it seems like they are in a much better position now in that regard, than Apple.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 116 ms ] threadI do, however, always look at my keyboard when I adjust the screen brightness or volume, or control iTunes (pause, next, previous).
The one exception to this is ESC, and I use it gratuitously.
Honestly, I'll get over it; I'll set up other key chords to take the place of the various F keys I use today. It still bothers me that I'm the one who has to make these adjustments to support something that I have no need for. It's a short term productivity hit, combined with a long tail of annoyance as my hands use their muscle memory and will incur some random state change on my computer.
macOS has a built-in option to remap caps-lock to escape. I haven't used it yet (I'm not a VIM user, so I mostly just use it to cancel dialogs), but I've ordered the new MBP and it's the first thing I'll do. Should take care of that issue and even improve ergonomics.
I should have remapped caps-lock ages ago, I never use it, but haven't had the incentive until now.
http://appleinsider.com/articles/16/11/14/review-apples-late...
http://arstechnica.co.uk/apple/2016/11/macbook-pro-touch-bar...
For me, touchscreens are perfectly useful on laptops, since directly tapping something is much quicker than moving my hand to the trackpad, locating the cursor, moving it around and finally clicking something.
It frustrates me that almost every Windows laptop with a nice screen is now touch. I assume you can turn it off, but you do pay more for a touch screen. This just reenforces my (outdated?) notion that it's a consumer, not professional device.
As someone who's just started researching to buy my next laptop, I don't find that to be very true at all unless you're only looking at ultrabooks.
One of my almost-gotta-haves is a touch screen, and for any models with an HQ/HK level processor plus a discrete GPU, there only seem to be a handful of models with touch screens (and when they are there they are usually optional) at the highest end configurations.
As a power user, you probably use the keyboard most of the time and occasionaly a single mouse operation (like moving focus somewhere). For that, it's quite intuitive to tap.
The touchbar as a design decision makes a lot more sense when the brief is "Add touch to the Macbook Pro line... but under no circumstances step on the toes of the iPad Pro"
I think it's more that retrofitting touch to a desktop OS - any desktop OS - is painful. Microsoft started it with Windows 8 and it's nearly - but not completely - done years later with Windows 10.
I suspect Apple has probably started retrofitting OS X privately, but released the touch bar as an interim solution.
The OS would need an interaction overhaul to make it work with touch - the hit targets are all the wrong size and a lot of behaviour relies on hovering over something. Couple that with the fact that the screen is at the wrong angle (I find it makes my arm ache just using an iPad with a keyboard and having to reach over to touch the screen) and I think Apple aren't too far wrong.
However, as someone who likes drawing, the way the Surface Studio folds down to an angle that is better for touch and pen does look pretty good to me.
This summary makes sense to me. Luckily, I put 8GB of RAM in my Macbook Air five years ago, and it'll probably do another year.
That said, does anybody use a Macbook for development? If I need to use dongles anyway, I think I could live with one port.
Edit: I have yet to plug anything into the single USB-C port except the charger. I don't own any dongles. I just use WiFi and bluetooth.
I personally won't buy one because I've very picky about my keyboards (the squashed arrow keys are as much of a problem for me as the missing escape key). But for average users, I think Apple has managed another UX win here.
I just wish they had made the bar a bit smaller and kept the physical ESC key. I'm not a VIM user so don't care about frequency of use. My biggest issue is how do you CMD+ALT+ESC if an app crashes, locking up the touch bar?
TBH, a separate OS sounds like one more thing to go wrong, which is also worse, not reassuring. I'm also not keen on the idea of someone remotely rooting my touch bar - also not a problem I currently have to worry about.
Could you elaborate on this aside? To me, it looks like a strict improvement on the arrow keys since the up/down keys are identical and the left/right keys have simply been embiggened (stretched upwards). Or do you think the negative space above the left/right keys gave important touch feedback?
The keys are already big enough, so it's not a strict improvement and even if bigger keys are better, why are the up/down ones less important than left/right? If anything I use up/down more, because I use them for both reading and writing, whereas left/right are almost exclusively for writing (would be more so were it not for the lack of consistent PgUp/PgDn shortcuts on OSX: these are sometimes bound to left/right and sometimes to up/down depending on the application).
Having used both types of key arrangement (and others) on various cheapy Windows laptops, I know that for me at least, the inverted-T (without extra keys crammed into the spaces) is absolutely essential to being maximally productive at the text-related tasks I spend 95% my time doing. I can adapt to a 3/4 size keyboard more effectively than I can adapt to a full-size one without the inverted-T.
> you no longer have one-touch access to brightness and volume adjustments; instead, you need to tap the button and then dial in your changes on a slider that pops up beside — not beneath — your finger. I’d be annoyed by that, but fortunately you can move the slider without actually touching it, by keeping your finger held down on the bar. It’s surprisingly inelegant, in that you end up controlling a slider that you aren’t actually touching. But it is efficient, and I got used to the new control scheme within a day, able to operate it by muscle memory the same I would a physical key.
They don't seem to have integrated this themselves, even. Why introduce something that you can't even use reasonably yourselves?
However to the users who aren't savvy, or who don't know hotkeys, this brings controls that would otherwise be in deep within the menu bar, right in front of the user. I think that could be incredibly useful to a lot of people.
When OS X was released, the Dock was that gimmick. It added "curb appeal" and demoability according to Bruce Tognazzini, an ex-Apple employee who wrote the first five editions of the Apple Human Interface Guidelines - http://www.asktog.com/columns/044top10docksucks.html
Sorry if this comes off as rude, but what's the difference on HN between a gimmick and a feature? In dictionaries, it says that a gimmick is a feature that exists to get attention. However, doesn't that describe most new features in technology?
So, from my point of view, Apple insistence on mostly forgetting about secondary functions on mouses is the right thing. The Magic mouse doesn't have a middle click? Most people don't even know how to right click. The only thing a mouse for casual users needs to do right, is left click and scrolling and the magic mouse has perfect touch scrolling. For the same reason Apple has hidden functionality like Cut&Paste from the finder. You need to hold the option key to activate the "move item". Apple wants you to drag&drop instead. The "default" in Apple land has always been to serve the need of the common, not the expert. So there's no traditional CTRL+X CTRL+V. Instead you need to do CMD+C as if you were copying, then CMD+OPT+V to "move". Everything advanced tends to be hidden into OPT key. It also changes the behavior of various menus to show things Apple doesn't want to show to the commons.
The touchbar is actually a very, very clever thing, we're just not the audience once again. I firmly believe it will never have much use among professionals who have nothing against learning many keyboard shortcut combinations or who even do things like customizing them (Karabiner to the rescue!). The touchbar is for people who didn't even use the mouse right click, and who don't understand concepts like context menu that change based on, gasp, context. It's actually going to be a boon for these people. Even exposing basic functionality like copy paste is going to help average users be slightly more productive with their devices.
The only issue is the MBP audience having a lot of techies and audio/visual professionals. The touchbar would be more sensible on something like the iMac and Macbook.
1: He's gone. It doesn't matter anymore. 2: We'll never know what he'd have done in this situation.
Seriously. Everyone keeps pinning every single mistake Apple does to Steves absence. Have people completely forgotten that Apple made mistakes with Steve at the helm as well?
There are too many to count, but in this specific case, it could be reasonable to compare to the original Apple TV. Also something which wasn't timed right at all, and was kind of a "meh" in hindsight. In fact I'm not sure their vision for TV has really arrived yet, even now.
What about the original iPhone? What we consider now to be an absolutely essential element for smartphones was not present in the original: (third-party) apps. I remember how many people complained about that.. I'm sure they would've blamed it on Steves absence if Apple did that now.
The MacBook without the touchbar has a MacBook Air class CPU while the one with a touchbar is in another class.
How do the non touchbar models compare with the previous air models and how do the touchbar models compare with the previous pro generation?
If the CPU is mostly the same performance wise as the last generation you are better off going for a refurb of the last gen if you don't care about the keyboard thing or having the new new.
http://arstechnica.com/video/2016/11/the-2016-13-and-15-inch...
A relatively marginal increase in Single-Threaded CPU performance in the touchbar model.
So it's a lower speed CPU class but due to the newer CPU generation the performance is the same.
You can see it in a positive way: It didn't get slower
Or in the negative way: You get an actually worse CPU class for more money than the previous gen was.
This years "MacBook Air" like model is as powerful as last years MacBook Pro? Money should be flying out of our wallets.
The battery life point is really depressing. Every MacBook since the original has been improving on that front and this is such a huge regression. If I wanted just 5-6 hours of battery life I'd buy a PC.
I'm not sure what to do if I had to get a new laptop. On one hand, I have a few iOS projects, and on the other hand, it's always nice to run locally and quickly a few deep learning algos.
The limited connections are also a let down
Now, I'd love for Apple to release an official external GPU (like Blazer did with the Blazer Stealth) but I highly doubt they'd do it.
https://bizon-tech.com/us/bizonbox2s-egpu.html/
(not claiming the two are similar in some way, just following the idea back to where it was born)
I remember when this laptop was being sold I considered it since was "small" for that time, but ended up buying something else since I didn't like the touch panel below the screen.
Apple rarely invents something new but they can consistently take the same box of Lego everyone plays with and build something much cooler.