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Comment by skrtskrt | Hacker News Reader

Are there any rumors about that?

That's the only change that my next laptop isn't a ThinkPad

They released a new keyboard with TouchID and no TouchBar. IMO, that means the TB is dead. Otherwise, it's a niche item that no one will ever make full use of.

I wouldn't take that as a clear sign. They still made an M1 touch bar 13" MBP, they bothered to refresh it and keep it when swapping from butterfly back to scissor and the MBA only has touchID too.

The touch bar is handled by the T1/T2/M1 chips in the laptops. It could be that just cramming a T2+OLED into a keyboard may have made it way too expensive for a keyboard. Plus does Bluetooth even have enough bandwidth to handle sending screen data that size reliably?

It is a niche item and it does suck but for some reason they keep tacking it on...

> They still made an M1 touch bar 13" MBP, they bothered to refresh it and keep it when swapping from butterfly back to scissor and the MBA only has touchID too.

That's because changing the chassis is too expensive, but when they redesign it, you'll see it most likely without a touchbar.

They already had a touch bar free 13" MBP in that chassis. In fact they put in extra effort to add the touch bar to the 2 port 13" MBP.

You made 2 great points. There's also a rumor Apple had to do things to hide the M1 from Intel. Could the added TB been a part of that? Hard to know.

I'm not a TB hater (more indifference), and I still think it's going away :)

Ah you're right, I forgot about the 13" without touch bar.

You hate the Touch Bar so much that if Apple's next round of laptops includes one you'll stop using macOS and start using Linux (or Windows) on your laptop instead?

Right now I have an Air. Besides price, the main reason for getting an Air was not having the touch bar. That's non negotiable for me.

I want to both beef up the memory/processing power of my laptop and switch to Linux (which comes with built-in performance bonus of native Docker). So I am headed to ThinkPad anyway, but there's a chance Apple could keep me locked in if they make a nicely-powered proper dev machine with no damn touch bar.

Migrating to Big Sur has been a pain in the ass even though I am still on an Intel model. Tons of Python language versions and packages are a total PITA to get built on Big Sur.

To be fair this seems to be a pretty Python-specific issue, but the inability to do much about it really has dug the feeling into me that I don't own/control my machine, Apple does.

Sadly not that much, but I for one really dislike their decision on keeping it. It adds no value at all to my workflow; quite the contrary - It distracts and disrupts me a lot. Would love to get rid of it; but I learned to ignore it. There are apps that can completely disable it (Nocturnal).

Personally don't care for the touchbar, but it is fun sometimes as I have an external keyboard.

The fact the OS runs a dozen network services without being able to deactivate them is (the final straw) the pushed me back into the Linux camp.

The image here

https://9to5mac.com/2021/04/21/apple-ransomware-leak-new-mac...

looks like it has physical keys.

I think that's the right side of the laptop, so from the bottom up, it is shift, return, \, delete, and the connectors for the fingerprint sensor.

hallelujah

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