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Comment by lostgame | Hacker News Reader

Unbelievably unimpressive compared to Microsoft's announcement yesterday, and 45 minutes into the keynote I still have no idea what the specs are.

I don't need some stupid touch strip on my Mac, I need a touch screen.

I haven't been this let down by product announcements ever as I have been this year with everything Apple's done.

Now we get all our standard USB ports removed, very little by way of actual hardware improvements, are we even going to get an upgraded Mac Pro that might meet the minimum 4GB gfx card requirement for Oculus, etc?

I've sworn by Apple products for a decade and a half. I'm done.

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Didn't think about the 'touch typing' thing others have mentioned...totally valid.

Furthermore, the lack of a Mac Pro update is just frickin' pathetic.

As a touch typist, I'm not sure this'd be an issue for me.

The distance between this Touch Bar and the monitor is minimal. With a bit of experience with a particular app, I imagine I'd be able to use my peripheral vision and muscle memory more often than not to achieve any particular function.

It's not like the distance between my desktop monitor and keyboard. That would be incredibly annoying as I'd actually have to take my eyes completely off the monitor to see the Touch Bar in that situation.

Try touch typing on phone before you start to believe that.

Admittedly not my phone, but I can touch type on my iPad. Not quickly (is there a way to switch it to dvorak? haven't checked), but it's doable. Probably 50-60 wpm with decent accuracy thanks to autoincorrect.

It feels weird as hell, though. Not getting any sort of finger travel as I press the keys.

EDIT: As well, on my phone (switched to a Nexus, not as familiar with it yet so still feeling it out), I can type pretty quickly without looking directly at the onscreen keyboard. My eyes see it, but my focus is on the text area itself. I imagine this touch bar will be like that for me, it's not so far out of my focal point that it'll totally disappear for me, and glancing at it won't require significant head or eye movement.

I mostly touch type without any serious errors at a pretty rapid clip on my phone. But that's with a pretty firm reliance on autocorrect. Which frequently makes stupid choices. But I wouldn't want to ever work like that.

Suggestion: don't think about touch typing.

What you are seeing is pure change resistance. It has no useful predictive power when evaluating whether the change will be good or bad overall, especially since the set of touch-bar use cases and the set of touch-type-heavy workloads does not seem to overlap much.

You would not be telling people "Oh we don't yet know if it's a good or bad change yet, we only know that it's a change" if Microsoft or any other company was introducing some strange feature no one asked for in order to avoid adding a feature a lot of people were asking for.

Telling people not to think about a skill they have probably used every day since they were near anything with a keyboard is a weird piece of advice

On the other hand, people wouldn't be complaining so much if it weren't Apple -- Apple is the company they associate with "change for change's sake", which isn't entirely deserved as a reputation.

But at any rate, yes, I would be telling people this if it weren't Apple, and had some fun with it:

https://twitter.com/ubernostrum/status/791720257505243136

Don't plug your twitter here to try and look smug... people are questioning the necessity of a piece of hardware, don't conflate that with not wanting to learn something new

Especially considering what they're charging for it.

I bought and still heavily use the most recent MBP model. I don't think I'll be upgrading for a long time. Retina + Force Touch + pretty good specs is more than enough for me.

I've never been a fan of touch screens on a computer, but this new macbook thing looks good.

I wasn't a fan of it about 3 years ago before I had to work with them daily at my job. Now when a user brings in a laptop that doesn't have a touchscreen I tend to smudge the display because touchscreens are so damn useful.

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