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.
MacBook Pro with Touch Bar review: a touch of the future
61–68 of 68 posts
Re: MacBook Pro with Touch Bar review: a touch of the future
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
> The touch bar is the type of gimmick 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?
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Re: MacBook Pro with Touch Bar review: a touch of the future
#63One 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…
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.
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.
Re: MacBook Pro with Touch Bar review: a touch of the future
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
> The touch bar is the type of gimmick 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.
Re: MacBook Pro with Touch Bar review: a touch of the future
#65There'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…
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 pe…
Though I never use the function keys for setting shortcuts. Beside volume/brightness it is a largely ignored row of keys.
Re: MacBook Pro with Touch Bar review: a touch of the future
#66Earlier 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.
I think it's a great observation about journalism and an an apt comparison.
Apple rarely invents something new but they can consistently take the same box of Lego everyone plays with and build something much cooler.
Re: MacBook Pro with Touch Bar review: a touch of the future
#67Fine, 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…
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.
Yes. If nothing else, wider SIMD lanes and more expressive SIMD instructions matter a lot.
Re: MacBook Pro with Touch Bar review: a touch of the future
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
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"
As far as I can tell, Apple has never been afraid of cannibalization within their product lines - I've always admired them for that.
Yeah just this time iPad Pro was the one supposed to be doing the cannibalising but it never materialised