WTF Is Apple Thinking with the New MacBook Pro and Touch Bar?
medium.com
medium.com
What problem does the Touch Bar solve, the author asks? I'm glad you asked! As just a singular example of why I'd almost buy a new MBP just for this feature, I switch between Xcode and Android Studio multiple times per day. Now, is it F6 to step over? Or is that Xcode, and F8 is what I really want? Add to that the many years of burning Visual Studio shortcuts into my muscles and I can't keep track of which button to press just to step into a method. I ass-u-me this can be solved by instead putting "Step Over" in place of what used to be the F8 key. Now what I'd really like are OLED keycaps so that "F8" gets replaced with "Step Over" on a physical key. But I'll take the Touch Bar; close enough.
Other examples abound, but I'll leave it at that. The whole post struck me as "Apple made an announcement. Quick, write a contrarian post!"
Additionally, how many applications will end up supporting the touch bar in an intuitive and effective way? I use macs fairly rarely, and I've never used the touchbar, but the whole graphical buttons thing just feels like a toolbar pulled down from the screen onto my keyboard. We mostly learned shortcut keys to reduce the amount of looking at toolbars and moving mice. Now, we'll have to instead look for toolbar icons that every application has in a different order, with different icons, and move our hands way from the keyboard just as we used to with mice.
I think that the touch bar in reality does have a purpose. It serves a very small slice of users nicely, and the rest it will be a novelty. For most people, it doesn't feel like a net gain.
Oh, you bet; enough so that I'm tired of doing it. I don't know about you, but I can't touch type the function keys anyway (I can barely touch type the number row accurately), so looking down is what I'm going to do anyway (except when stepping through, then I rest my finger on the appropriate F* key).
Though I think I'll get some mileage out of Touch Bar, I also think it's one of those things we should at least try before rushing to judgement and firing up the blogging tool. I, too, once thought the iPad was just an overgrown iPhone, until FedEx dropped one at my door.
One guess as to my primary text editor for the last 25 years. A second guess as to how often I use the Escape key. (Hint: never.)
They kept the headphone jack because a huge amount of time is spent with the computer at a desktop plugged in to stereo speakers. Do you work at your desk using your laptop keyboard?
So, if the majority of time is spent using an external keyboard, did apple create an external keyboard with the touch functionality? Will developers built their apps to take advantage of this functionality if it is only available to the subset of users who have purchased this new device AND are currently not at their desk??
To me this touch bar actually seems almost like a no brainer as long as it gets proper support from apps. Removing the escape key I'm less thrilled about but can easily live with. And I say that as someone who lives and dies by vim.
I certainly wouldn't buy a new MBP just due to the touch bar, but I'd view it as a nice add on.
All the low hanging fruit is gone in the consumer electronics world. There isn't anything obvious that I would fix about my 4 year old rMBP. It is still fast, it does the job that I need it to do. The iPhone 7, while nice, isn't that much better in any measurable way than the iPhone 6.
So what do you do when you are a company that made its fortune by constantly innovating yet all the obvious ways to innovate are gone? You make the best incremental improvements you know how to (smaller and thinner, take any pain point you can find and try and fix it). Hopefully there is a skunk works team at Apple working on the craziest stuff they can think of and trying to figure out something that will actually be innovative, but that isn't going to come quickly, it isn't going to be easy and it isn't necessarily going to happen at all.
Maybe they should pay me to tell them some :/
I too can think of many things I think Apple should do but I realise they wouldn't be cost effective over millions of users.
I've been trying to think of things that are a) hardware based (OS X is another beast), b) doable with todays technology, and c) actually fix some problem that I have with my computer, or introduce some new paradigm of working with my computer that will improve my interaction with it.
The only things that I can think of fail (a) or (b).
edit: or fail to be useful to people who aren't power users like me.
A few other reasonably obvious things I can think of are the ability to run iOS apps in OS X, potentially even move an iOS app to OS X (there would be a hardware component involved here I would assume), pen input on the display or trackpad, quad core CPUs in the 13" model.
These whiny blogs get more pathetic every time - "I've been an Apple fanatic and Macbook owner since the Napoleonic Wars, but this is it, I'm done - this time, they've done something completely unacceptable".