MacBook Pro

> - 7th generation Intel chips. Skylake (6th generation) is from August 2015.

Nonsense, 45W Skylake are from April-May, 45W Kaby is not expected until February-March.

edit: oh I just remembered they didn't use Iris Pro parts in the 15" so you are correct that these are 2015 parts. The corresponding KL parts still aren't out though.

So if I compare the base model (13", no touchbar) with my current-gen 13" pro I see exactly one advantage:

Thunderbolt 3. Seems nice to have for future docking stations and monitors. Don't care if only used as a notebook

And lots of disadvantages:

No Magsafe connector, no HDMI (which most current-gen monitors have), no SD Card, probably a worse keyboard if they adapted the 12" Macbook key style and 300€ more expensive.

The touchbar might be a nice gimmick for some casual users which never used the function keys anyway. But I guess for most folks here that use their notebook for programming it will cause more trouble than help. It's not like most IDEs will support for the touchbar anytime soon if at all. And without special support it can be only worse then physical keys. They should have probably offered at least the 15" version without a touchbar too.

Apple's price points are no longer attractive anymore for the laptops. Previously you could buy a current gen MBA 11/13 for decent prices relative to what they offered. You could also buy MacBook Pros for less - for a 15" the starting price is now $2399!

I've got the mid-2012 13" mbp as well and it has been great! I have the RAM maxed out to 16GB and replaced the CD drive with an internal SSD adapter. Now it has 1TB of space across two Samsung 850 Pro 512GB SSDs. It's still very fast!

With that said, I'm leaving it on El Capitan. Nothing in Sierra tempts me to upgrade and pay the price of configuring everything again and being left with worse performance. It's sad, I truly believe this is the last Apple laptop that I will purchase as they continue down a path of adding things I don't care about.

I never said the on-screen version would support touch (I wouldn’t want it to). The orientation doesn’t have to be horizontal (my Dock is vertical). For that matter, it doesn’t even have to be one-dimensional. Every aspect of Touch Bar is constrained by where Apple wanted to put it, and not what would be the best experience.

They should have started in pure software, and then they would have figured out just how many possibilities there really are. Some examples:

- What if I want my “system-wide ever-changing functions pad” to be a 4x5 grid of icons located in a window at the bottom-left of my screen?

- What if not every action/status item is ideally laid out in a bar? Maybe some items are vertically rectangular, some are horizontal, or some are shaped like triangles. Maybe I want lots of space between things. Maybe I want 4 different contextual areas, all over my screen, instead of being confined to one region. (This is a PRO laptop...)

- What if I want complete control over the show/hide mechanism? Examples: Floating, non-floating (can layer documents on top), sliding in from the side of the screen, popping up only while a certain key is pressed, attaching to Dock...

- What if I want my ENTIRE laptop screen to become a contextual display while doing working primarily on an external monitor?

Any one of these scenarios could come up when doing real work on a laptop and none of these can be handled by an expensive Touch Bar control. Conversely, we already have context-sensitive commands mapped to the keyboard and status mechanisms (menu bar, window toolbars, other application functions) and the Keyboard preferences pane lets you map commands any way you want.