It never made sense to duplicate actions that professional users already know the keyboard shortcuts for. You already have muscle memory for all of those, and even if you're learning a new app, it's faster long-term to learn the shortcut than to look down and hit a non-tactile spot on the Touch Bar every time.
For controlling other applications than the currently active one, however, the Touch Bar is great. I have BetterTouchTool set up to show my currently playing music, my next calendar appointment, and the weather, plus BTT's built-in clipboard management tool. I actually miss it when I'm working on my non-Touch Bar personal laptop.
They were looking to do away with the laptop screen entirely, and the keyboard would be the computer. You would always need to plug your laptop into an external display. Many people mostly just plug their laptop into external monitors anyway. The benefit is you could cut the cost of the laptop drastically and make it more robust.
But to do that, you would still need some display on the keyboard for various scenarios (mostly to resolve any connection issues with the display), hence the TouchBar.
But just a theory.
You mean like those F keys that have existed on top of keyboards for decades? Lol.
I know a lot of people (myself included) that would gladly pay for those types of upgrades.
Maybe that could be the differentiator for Apple Silicon. Keep x86 for devs who need compatibility. Creatives who need compute. Or they could just keep pushing iPad as creatives device even further...
Grow up
Creatives need to edit massive complex files with sophisticated real-time simulation of their contents.
Devs are editing text files...
I imagine a different keyboard would require space to accommodate both types in any chassis, otherwise making multiple processes for each chassis and keyboard. That gets expensive fast. It also increases surface area for problems, which is expensive in terms of customer support, preparing and fixing processes, reputation, etc.
Their limited options are partially to ensure quality, reduce price points, and decrease time to market. It’s a trade off. I’m personally content with their choice - it’s why I tend to stick with their hardware.
I could be wrong. This is just my uninformed take on it.
I can understand that Apple has a tradition of being an extremely streamlined company with a small lineup. That was essential to its grows in the early 2000ths. But it is now a 2 trillion company, so they should allow for a bit more variety (how many different iPads do they sell?) just to make more customers happy/able to choose Apple hardware at all.
- Choosing an emoji in WhatsApp Desktop.
- Pausing and seeing a podcast's listening progress in Apple Podcasts, even when the app is in the background.
- Compiling in Android Studio.
I have a physical ESC key, so I don't have a problem with the touchbar.
How do you have a background app's control in the TouchBar so that the foreground app's controls are not displayed?
Classic Keyboard ( Scissors, with decent Key Travel ), Classic MagSafe, Classic "Sane" Sized TrackPad ( so you dont get as much or zero false positives ), SD Card, HDMI.
Change the USB port to USB-C and upgrade the CPU. That's it. Dont touch anything else.
Pros:
- It doesn't have the new square styling I find ugly
- The trackpad is reasonably sized
- It already has the force touch trackpad
Cons:
- The bezels are looking a bit thick nowadays (though not preposterously so)
- The processor is getting a bit slow for heavy tasks
- It can't output 4k@60hz via HDMI (only realized that one recently)
- It doesn't have USB-C
This model with upgraded internals, ports (and upgradability, come on) would be a very solid offer.
I’m not criticizing your desire to want those things. But this feels like you are defining some ideal and then lamenting the company for not delivering you ideal, when their history shows they don’t believe in that ideal at all.
A Japanese supercomputer has taken the top spot in the biannual Top500 supercomputer speed ranking. Fugaku, a computer in Kobe co-developed by Riken and Fujitsu, makes use of Fujitsu’s 48-core A64FX system-on-chip. It’s the first time a computer based on ARM processors has topped the list
Their own ARM-based 64-core pro thermally optimized chip?
They'll know about Apple Silicon if Apple decides to drop support for Intel too early. But they've been pretty good about maintaining a 7 year support window for macOS.
This is precisely why I'm looking at buying a new MBP.
This is likely the last Mac I will ever buy so I maxed it out for maximum longevity--that's going to help Apple's quarterly numbers for sure. I have been gradually shifting to my Lenovo Carbon X1 running Linux over time.
Linux support is still not quite there for external thunderbolt docks and multiple displays, but it's really close.
This commentary was all over every Intel->ARM thread, until today, when suddenly every comment seemed to be that people were obviously buying Intel Macs to avoid having to buy ARM. Which doesn't really make sense -- you can always buy an Intel Mac up to and including the day the ARM machines drop. Probably at a steep discount, too. Probably some time after the ARM machines come out. There's no hurry.
You can, but when you know they're about to switch architectures, it's a pretty good guess that what they're not about to do is announce a whole new slate of devices using the old architecture. So even if they still sell them in two years, they'll probably still be the same specs, and without a price cut so as to discourage people from buying the existing one instead of the new one. So if you know you're going to buy the existing one, there's little reason to wait. Especially when they have a record of claiming they'll sell them for two years and then stopping after six months.
However, this quarter included back-to-school timing and with kids still doing school from home, there were probably a larger number of parents that bought computers for kids. Anecdotally, 2 of our kids used an 2013 11" MacBook Air (old, low RAM) and 2015 15" MacBook Pro (on-loan from employer) in the Spring. When they weren't going back to school, we were in a fortunate position to be able to purchase them 13" MacBook Airs to continue school at home. Other parents probably made due with what they had in the Spring and purchased something over the summer. When I purchased at end of July, there was 2-3 week wait time to get them.
I knew that Apple Silicon was coming later this year, but the timing didn't make sense to wait. Back to my first point, most consumers probably are not aware that Apple Silicon is coming or why it matters and could not have made informed choice to buy now vs wait.
I predict next year's sales will be flat or lower.
thanks you for mentioning that it is one of most annoying thing about the new mac!