MacBook Pro with Touch Bar review: a touch of the future

Post by ihuman » Mon, Nov 14, 2016, 4:17 PM UTC

WayneBro wrote: post #50

59nadir wrote: post #12

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 fortuna…

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

Post by rz2k » Mon, Nov 14, 2016, 4:20 PM UTC

reacharavindh wrote: post #40

59nadir wrote: post #12

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 fortuna…

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.

Post by tbrock » Mon, Nov 14, 2016, 4:22 PM UTC

Matthias247 wrote: post #33

tbrock wrote: post #21

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 genera…

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…

Post by jsjohnst » Mon, Nov 14, 2016, 4:39 PM UTC

pawadu wrote: post #56

cptskippy wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Again, I am not trying to compare the two. Just to provide some history, something tech journalists are seemingly very bad at.

Post by robert_tweed » Mon, Nov 14, 2016, 4:50 PM UTC

rahoulb wrote: post #36

robert_tweed wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 lik…

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.