
WTF Is Apple Thinking with the New MacBook Pro and Touch Bar? - mysticlabs
https://medium.com/@trentlapinski/wtf-is-apple-thinking-with-the-new-macbook-pro-and-touch-bar-a9a094af1e0b#.xf3x89oxd
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mikestew
Yes, let's write a blog post about something I haven't even used yet. I, too,
have memorized "every key on the keyboard". I've even gone as far as to
memorize keyboard shortcuts! (Which imagine is the wording the author was
really going for.)

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!"

~~~
abstractbeliefs
Do people not rebind their keys any more? As it stands, I have the same debug
shortcuts for VS, PyCharm, and gdb (with some dirty hacks).

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.

~~~
mikestew
_Do people not rebind their keys any more?_

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.

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spott
All these "OMG the latest Apple hardware sucks" posts, while annoying, do have
a pretty simple picture to paint:

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.

~~~
spronkey
There are soooo many things I can think of that Apple could do to 'innovate'.

Maybe they should pay me to tell them some :/

~~~
spott
I'm genuinely curious: what could they do to improve the laptop?

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.

~~~
spronkey
Well, the obvious one is to move back to upgradable hardware. Why they feel
the need to keep reinventing M.2 I don't know. Even for non power-users, an
extra year or two out of your machine, or the remote chance to get your data
back if e.g. logic board dies is definitely handy.

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.

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PopsiclePete
So this dude seriously thinks that because the "mega-hurtz" didn't change,
it's "the exact same specs"? Oh God, man. Welcome to 2003.

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".

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pmelendez
Funny... having a touch screen is terrible for Apple but a tiny touch bar is
the edge of innovation...

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proyb2
It take 2 steps and 2 fingers to navigate on keyboard compare to 1 touch on
Touchbar.

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draw_down
I mean, it seems manifestly better than a row of function keys.

~~~
mobiuscog
Not really. Function keys are always the same size in the same place -
consistency.

