Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Review: Touch Bar MacBook Pros give an expensive glimpse at the Mac’s future

arstechnica.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–76 of 76 posts

Re: Review: Touch Bar MacBook Pros give an expensive glimpse at the Mac’s future

#71

Post by dpark »

khedoros1 wrote: post #69
dpark wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are many reasons this is true, but the biggest one for me is that your finger obscures things on the display when you use it, and there is often very poor or no tactile feedback. This is a poor argument against touch interfaces on laptops/desktops. This argument applies 100% to every touch interface, and yet we use touch interfaces for phones, and tablets, and modern point-of-sale systems, and the decent car…

Tactile feedback isn't a compelling argument against touchscreens on laptops and desktops? The touch interface on my phone and tablet compromises some of the usability of the input to gain a ton of flexibility and portability. Laptops compromise some comfort and size to make it feasible to stick a keyboard and pointer device into a thin, portable computer. The various compromises are worth it in some situations and v…

No, I don't think "lack of tactile feedback" is, by itself, sufficient to demonstrate that touchscreens are a bad idea for laptops. There's nothing I can see about laptops that make the lack of tactile feedback a bigger concern than it is for other devices.

Lack of tactile feedback might be a bigger problem on laptops, but the reason it's a bigger problem is not self evident.

Re: Review: Touch Bar MacBook Pros give an expensive glimpse at the Mac’s future

#72

Post by thatswrong0 »

cletus wrote: post #45
jacquesc wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PC Laptop world is actually really competitive. Check out Razer, Alienware, Yoga line, and Microsoft Surface. They're innovating like crazy. Touch screens, OLED displays, external GPUs, different form factors, VR capable performance, etc. And many of those laptops integrated Thunderbolt 3 a while ago. Regrettably, Apple has us all locked into their ecosystem via software so it feels like they are the only ones innova…

See I don't see this as "innovating like crazy". I see it as "adding bullet-list features like crazy", which isn't quite the same thing. This is always where Apple has excelled eg not adding touch screens to laptops cos it's ergonomically terrible (as Steve Jobs IMHO rightly said). Apple has also historically taken technologies that have been in the market for awhile and made them not suck. Wireless is a prime exampl…

It would have hurt to have the USB-A ports because that would have led to slower adoption of USB-C. All USB-C means that device manufacturers can't ignore it for as long, esp. for manufacturers that want to have their products featured in Apple stores.

So it is a bit painful for the end user, but in the long run everyone benefits from quicker adoption.

Re: Review: Touch Bar MacBook Pros give an expensive glimpse at the Mac’s future

#73

Post by khedoros1 »

dpark wrote: post #71
khedoros1 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tactile feedback isn't a compelling argument against touchscreens on laptops and desktops? The touch interface on my phone and tablet compromises some of the usability of the input to gain a ton of flexibility and portability. Laptops compromise some comfort and size to make it feasible to stick a keyboard and pointer device into a thin, portable computer. The various compromises are worth it in some situations and v…

No, I don't think "lack of tactile feedback" is, by itself, sufficient to demonstrate that touchscreens are a bad idea for laptops. There's nothing I can see about laptops that make the lack of tactile feedback a bigger concern than it is for other devices. Lack of tactile feedback might be a bigger problem on laptops, but the reason it's a bigger problem is not self evident.

> here's nothing I can see about laptops that make the lack of tactile feedback a bigger concern than it is for other devices.

Agreed, there's nothing about it that makes it a bigger concern for a laptop than other devices. Touchscreens as inputs are suboptimal on other devices too. They're uncomfortable, slow, and imprecise.

I'm a huge fan of physical buttons. Sadly, it's impractical to have a phone with a screen large enough to be useful, thin enough to fit nicely in a pocket, and have it equipped with decent input.

Re: Review: Touch Bar MacBook Pros give an expensive glimpse at the Mac’s future

#74

Post by neotek »

ksk wrote: post #68
neotek wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I keep hearing this silly conspiracy theory, but the numbers just don't add up. Apple makes the princely sum of $4 per accessory on MFI licensing fees. Last year, those licensing fees made up less than one fifth of one percent of their revenue, a number so tiny that it doesn't even show up as a line item in their financial reports. It would be such a spectacularly stupid decision to jeopardise sales of the world's mo…

GP's point was that when Apple forces accessory makers to come to them for a license, they can arbitrarily chose to deny a license according to their whim. Apple (like many other companies, to be fair) uses product announcements as a way to force a positive press coverage bubble during product launches since only people who generally write nice things about them are given the products to review. It would be easy to s…

>GP's point was that when Apple forces accessory makers to come to them for a license, they can arbitrarily chose to deny a license according to their whim.

Well it's a pretty fatuous point then, since Apple could have been playing that game for the last 10 years if they wanted to given the iPhone has had a custom port since day one and nothing about that has changed whatsoever.

Re: Review: Touch Bar MacBook Pros give an expensive glimpse at the Mac’s future

#75

Post by MatekCopatek »

Selfcommit wrote: post #4

The comment "15-inch Pros have enough thermal headroom to fit in quad-core Skylake processors..." is interesting. While the current offerings don't meet expectations set for the MBP... maybe this is a long play by Apple? How quickly will the disappointment be forgotten when 32 gig / quadcore / nvidia GPU's are released?

Isn't this the norm? Most 15" top-range models (e.g. Dell XPS 15) are available with quad core CPUs.

Re: Review: Touch Bar MacBook Pros give an expensive glimpse at the Mac’s future

#76

Post by spronkey »

raarts wrote: post #51

Weird that I can't find a review anywhere that compares the battery life of the 2013 macbook air with the new $1499 macbook pro. Anyone know of one?

The 2013 Air has a the same size battery as the non-touchbar model, a lower power GPU, the same TDP CPU. The display is possibly more efficient on the new pro compared to the older display, but it's got many more pixels, so, I'd give the nod to the Air, but they ought to be close.
Post reply on HN