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Apple kills the non-Touch Bar MacBook Pro

engadget.com

41–50 of 397 posts

Re: Apple kills the non-Touch Bar MacBook Pro

#41
Is there any way to essentially lock the touchbar in a fixed configuration? Like I'm a programmer and willing to write a mac native app if that's what I have to do, but I want the same set of things there and I don't want other programs to be able to hijack the buttons I have locked there.

If I could do that, then I can live with it, since then it is just a massive battery drain instead of being a massive battery drain as well as extremely inconvenient.

Re: Apple kills the non-Touch Bar MacBook Pro

#42
post #22

I will never ever buy a MacBook Pro if they don't get rid of the TouchBar. The sheer arrogance of Apple to think they know better than their customers infuriates me. I only use a 2018 MacBook Pro because work supplied it, and because my 2015 MacBook battery was dying and the only option the IT department gave me was to upgrade to the 2018 model. I may simply go back to Windows at home if that's the case, and will use…

I'm still salty about the magsafe.

Same. When I bought the MacBook, that was one of those things I noticed as “of course it makes sense. Why doesn’t everybody do this?” Then Apple went ahead and took an axe to it. This was truly an idiotic move. Don’t add usbc if you can’t find a way to make it MagSafe!

Re: Apple kills the non-Touch Bar MacBook Pro

#43

99%+ of my usage of the touchbar is pressing escape, adjusting screen brightness, speaker volume, or accessing music controls. All of these worked flawlessly when I had physical keys, but now it's hard to know what I'm pressing without looking, and sometimes the controls become unresponsive to touches or drags. I'm a programmer/business owner, so perhaps it's useful for other sorts of creative professionals, but it f…

Why on earth do I need to tap twice to adjust the screen brightness? I couldn't find a way to just have two increase/decrease buttons. Why can't I adjust how long the touchbar stays active for? Why does it disappear at all? I can't imagine the touchbar would exist in its current form if Steve were alive.

You can touch and slide the finger to adjust brightness and volume.

Re: Apple kills the non-Touch Bar MacBook Pro

#45
post #20
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t know where to start... I hope you’re never in a position to design something that people have to use.

I'm legitimately curious. Please help me understand. Again, I don't see how its worth all the hassle and surely extra cost for Apple to push it, but really don't see how it's any worse than the previous bar.

Even if it isn't worse, users aren't familiar with it, so you're telling them to get used to a new interface even though it offers them no benefit. That's poor design.

Re: Apple kills the non-Touch Bar MacBook Pro

#46

99%+ of my usage of the touchbar is pressing escape, adjusting screen brightness, speaker volume, or accessing music controls. All of these worked flawlessly when I had physical keys, but now it's hard to know what I'm pressing without looking, and sometimes the controls become unresponsive to touches or drags. I'm a programmer/business owner, so perhaps it's useful for other sorts of creative professionals, but it f…

I blame this mostly on Apple's human interface guidelines:

https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline...

Scroll down to "Design Considerations": "Use the Touch Bar as an extension of the keyboard and trackpad, not as a display."

But what I really want is for the touch bar to be a display and input device for things normally elsewhere: time, date, maybe CPU usage, etc. This to me is not a hardware problem, but one with policy.

Edit: what I really want is for Apple to let people experiment with new hardeware, rather than impose their vision on how it should be used. Unlike many others I don't actually hate the touch bar and see some potentials, but not if Apple restricts its use.

Re: Apple kills the non-Touch Bar MacBook Pro

#47
post #14

Is the baseline MacBook Air sufficient for a CS major? I don’t want to spend extra for the pro.

I don't think you even need a MacBook Air. I've always used Linux for development. If you're not tied to MacOS, get a Thinkpad with Ryzen + Radeon. It will run better on Linux. If you want the MacOS experience, get a Air.

Irrespective of what you get, you cannot do serious compute on a laptop. Because actually using it at full power kills your battery.

Re: Apple kills the non-Touch Bar MacBook Pro

#48
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why on earth do I need to tap twice to adjust the screen brightness? I couldn't find a way to just have two increase/decrease buttons. Why can't I adjust how long the touchbar stays active for? Why does it disappear at all? I can't imagine the touchbar would exist in its current form if Steve were alive.

If you hold the brightness button on the Touch Bar you can slide your finger left and right to adjust the brightness so it’s one (long) press. Same with volume.

And if you don't want to wait for a long press, you can do one or more quick swipe to the left or the right, and it do the same as a press on the previous buttons.

Re: Apple kills the non-Touch Bar MacBook Pro

#50

This thread is going to dissolve into a pile-up on the Touch Bar, so I wanna jump in front of this. Readers of this site are mostly “hackers,” however mutated or dumbed-down that term has become over the years, correct? Everyone here has their windows and spaces just so, a full complement of shortcuts and trackpad gestures, and if they're serious about the Macintosh tools like TextExpander. As standard as GUIs are, w…

There are two huge low-hanging fruit that Apple could do to make the Touch Bar better and appease (some of) the haters.

First, add half a centimeter of clearance between the touch bar and the number keys. I've never once accidentally hit the Touch Bar, but one of my close coworkers does all the time, after years with this, so I can't deny that it's an issue.

Second, allow users the ability to map any keyboard shortcut or menu item to a Touch Bar button. This would work similarly to how any menu item can be mapped to a keyboard shortcut in the System Preferences.

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