Apple announces new MacBook Pro with touch strip

That being said, I have to admit that I am at least intrigued by the Surface Book. I recently tried the Linux subsystem on Windows and was pretty impressed, it's literally just Ubuntu running with file access. The fact that I CAN pop off the tablet portion, and if I'm so inclined for art, have Photoshop, Illustrator, ZBrush actually available to me is pretty tempting. The OS differences between OSX and Windows for me have always existed only in the command line, so as long as Windows gives me bash and Linux, that pretty much disappears.

Conclusion is, I don't think Apple is suffering from a lack of innovation in the laptop department. I don't understand why people assume that we haven't yet converged on the optimal form factor. Why I chose an MBP for my current laptop wasn't because it offered anything totally innovative. It was already derivative of 30 years of laptops with the same form factor. I chose it because of the Unix development environment and the great build quality. I've never used a Surface Book, but it seems like Microsoft has stepped up their game in the build quality department. If their trackpad is as good as Apple's (I have yet to use a Windows laptop where this is the case), then I'd start to consider it a serious competitor. If the two have comparable build quality and Unix, then their form factor innovation is going to be the only thing left distinguishing them (for which Microsoft is obviously currently ahead).

Touch ID is sweet though.

I wonder if, as the concept further evolves, the bar might become larger or migrate locations. The comparisons they made to the original PowerBook were interesting, in that it really showed how constant incremental changes really add up in the long term.

Edit: Another possibility is to integrate an OLED display into the trackpad too, so then you have haptics as well, and could interact with both mouse and touch bar with one hand.

I've been looking for a good 15" laptop laptop for some time, and all other manufacturers only offer 15" models with numpads, which is just awful. The discrete GPUs are just a rather useless nuisance for me.

So I wonder whether there's more detailed info about the exact models they'll offer, somewhere.

I know that some have mentioned that you can map the escape key to the caps lock key, however, I've already mapped my ctrl key to the caps lock key for more accessibility. vim problems :/

One of the frustrating things about my various keyboards is that the function keys are located in slightly different places. I already have to look down to use a specific function key.

Emacs, by default, uses so many of the possible key chords using control and alt and even command modifiers on the Mac keyboard that users are expected to bind their own functions to some of the function keys. I'm wondering if the touch strip will be capable of simplifying my interaction with a complex interface like that presented by Emacs.

Will be most interesting to find out how the security is working, and if they're making using any of the Intel security features on these new machines. To date, they have been woefully bad at doing so, which is interesting given the security push on iPhones and the controlled hardware platform.