Nyancat on the touchbar

From the reading I've done this morning on the 2014 X1 Carbon (the only model that had the Adaptive Keyboard replacing the function row), there was a lot of dissatisfaction with the keyboard and trackpad as a whole, not only the strip. Among others, they removed the physical keys from the trackpad, moved the Home and End keys to the Caps Lock location, and removed other keys entirely. I read a lot of complaints about all of these, and all of these were reverted in the 2015 version.

Yeah, people are discussing the removal of the ESC key on the MacBook Pro as well. I'm personally going to miss the dedicated volume and brightness keys, and I use the ESC key in conjunction with Command to trigger LaunchBar, which I use heavily. I also think I'll be able to get used to it. There was a time in my life when I didn't use LaunchBar, and before I had dedicated volume and brightness keys. I don't remember it being all that bad. I'll see, when I get around to getting a new machine. I'm sure there are those who use the function row much more heavily than I. In the absence of aggregate data, I really can't comment on much more than my own experience and read about others.

Lenovo's decision to revert everything could be seen as them deciding it wasn't in their best interest to determine which changes were worth keeping. This is all speculation, of course. And they could very well have determined that all of the changes were ruinous to some degree. It's really pretty impressive that Lenovo was willing to make so many changes to their keyboard, when, AIUI, the keyboard is one of the features that keeps people coming back to Lenovo in general.

In the MacBook Pro, they're only replacing the function row with the Touch Bar. From an experimental point of view, it's a much more focussed experiment. It'll be interesting to see what happens when it's actually had more use.

I read a lot of non-fiction. One nice feature that it has on WiFi is the ability to highlight a word or phrase and it will display a definition or a Wikipedia article/snippet right there on the device. Its an easy and fast way to get more information out of your readings, especially when I'm at the pub with only my Kindle.

Another strong reason why you probably need WiFi on a Kindle at least some of the time is because WiFi is the primary way it gets content. You can get a USB cable to load stuff on it, but chances are if you've bought a Kindle you bought it to use the Kindle store.

Also, I'm pretty sure it downloads a bunch of ads at once when it syncs, and then shows them over time. I've had it disconnected from WiFi for a few weeks before, and it still showed ads. So even if you only connected it for a few minutes to sync everything and then you disconnected until you wanted a new book from the Kindle store, you would still see ads.

I suspect most people are the same way, especially as keyboards have miniaturized and removed the 4-clustering.