Review: Touch Bar MacBook Pros give an expensive glimpse at the Mac’s future
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
Apple is probably the only consumer tech hardware company out there that can do this. I almost think it's their responsibility to push the boundary.
People make fun of the term "Courage" and I thought that was funny at first too. But the more I think about it the more I get what he's trying to say. Right now NO ONE other than Apple has the "courage" to make this decision. Do you think Dell would do it? Samsung? Only Apple has enough influence in the industry to be able to do something like this and NOT lose all their users. If Samsung got rid of all their ports, people would probably ditch them and buy a Lenovo or something. So Samsung cant' do it. Coming back to Apple, I'm an apple user and I have to buy it because it's just much better for me as a developer. And honestly speaking, I don't care about all these dongles arguments and "it's not for a pro" arguments. I'm not buying a device whose primary purpose is to stick in my USB cable. And pros don't complain about their tools.
Anyway Apple knows that if nobody makes this decision, laptops will just stay as some stagnant genre of devices that are only able to do things that people used to do in the 2000s.
In other words, if Apple didn't do this, I think the entire laptop category will just stagnate and be cannibalized by other platforms. See TV as an example.
They're innovating like crazy. Touch screens, OLED displays, external GPUs, different form factors, VR capable performance, etc. And many of those laptops integrated Thunderbolt 3 a while ago.
Regrettably, Apple has us all locked into their ecosystem via software so it feels like they are the only ones innovating.
For example, it would be an idiotic move for Microsoft Surface to remove USB cables and headphone jacks because as far as hardware is concerned they're an underdog.
That doesn't track with history. Apple was a huge underdog when they released the iMac and removed floppies and many non-USB ports.
This is always where Apple has excelled eg not adding touch screens to laptops cos it's ergonomically terrible (as Steve Jobs IMHO rightly said).
Apple has also historically taken technologies that have been in the market for awhile and made them not suck. Wireless is a prime example. Anyone else remember the days where you had to setup a wifi connection by specifying encryption type and trying to figure out if you were WEP, WPA1, WPA2 or WPA2-Enterprise? Apple came long and simply let you enter a password. OSX will figure out the rest.
The problem with the new Macbooks (IMHO) is that it represents a change in philosophy. As one review said "USB-C is the future but we're living unfortunately still living in the present" (paraphrased from The Verge IIRC).
How much would it have hurt to have 2 A and 2 C ports?
This rush to market has also led to some compatibility issues between TB3 devices.
A comment I read online (on HN IIRC) went something like "we've moved from a world where if the cable fits, it works to where the cable fits and nothing works". It's a salient point: the cost of a universal connector is putting us in cable hell.
PCs have long been a case of marketing pinheads building incoherent bullet lists (ie throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks). You're seeing negative reaction because people expect more from Apple.
So it is a bit painful for the end user, but in the long run everyone benefits from quicker adoption.
A lot of their headline features gimp the user experience in some way.
Touch screens on laptops means you have to customize the UI so that each element is large enough to be tapped by a finger. So either you have to hide features to make room for these larger elements or pack the screen edge to edge, leaving a pretty cluttered interface. I'd rather have a better touch pad for precise input and without having to lift my arm from the keyboard.
Packing gaming-class hardware into a laptop leaves you with pretty terrible battery life, weight and heating issues. Something has to give. The metrics manufacturers should consider when building a portable device is performance per watt and durability vs weight. You'll always be better off money and performance-wise building a desktop PC for gaming.
Apple went with class leading storage speeds, an adaptable touch interface that's integrated with the keyboard and doesn't mess with the system UI, brought touch ID with the secure enclave, made a much larger touch pad which was already class-leading, made a considerably brighter screen - aiding outdoor use. It's a strong refresh with a premium price-tag, but you know you're buying quality when buying Apple.
You have to nail the fundamentals before you start thinking outside the box. Surface Book, for example, had an innovative form factor, but it shipped with major bugs (heating up during sleep, screen refusing to detach from the base, etc.) Shipping a neat-o feature before it's ready for prime time is pointless. E.g. OLED is a disaster for battery life right now on typical white-screen desktop workloads.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legacy-free_PC
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMac#Influence
And again with the removal of the CD drives and Ethernet ports. Does anybody really miss any of those things? I'm sure the loss of RS-232 ports and floppy drives caused some people pain during the transition, but the world moved on and it will move on again.
Yes? I take it that you don't? I have a few hundred CDs, DVDs, and Blu-rays that I like having access to. Generally, I'll access a floppy once, and just store an image on a USB drive for later use. My building is so jammed with wifi signals that sometimes the best option is to string an ethernet cable across the room, and the access point can't be configured over a wireless interface anyhow. I use serial and parallel connections (DB9 and DB25) to access various little hardware projects and pieces of network hardware I've got around.
I've got USB-based hardware for most of those. For others, I keep around some older computers. It feels "clean" to have a computer with fewer ports, but sometimes I wish I'd chosen a machine with a few more of the connections that my previous machine had.
Personally, I don't think touch interfaces are progress - for laptops (or desktops). There are many reasons this is true, but the biggest one for me is that your finger obscures things on the display when you use it, and there is often very poor or no tactile feedback. The touchbar idea is not entirely new. I think HP or Dell had some laptops years ago that used touch slider interfaces to adjust screen brightness or volume. Adding a display to that touchbar doesn't help that much as your finger just obscures whatever you are touching. Knobs, switches, and dials are better suited for this kind of work - which is why people complain about shallow keystroke movement on keyboards. The less and less key movement there is, the closer you are to a touch display.
The only reason that Apple is pushing touch interfaces like that is so they can reduce the unit cost and (maybe) improve the water/ingress resistance. It's the same reason they are removing ports. And yes, removing external physical interfaces may improve things like water resistance - but they make it harder for humans to use.
I am ready to listen to you if you come back after you use it for a month. But I think it's funny to make all these conclusions about something when you haven't touched it.
This is a poor argument against touch interfaces on laptops/desktops. This argument applies 100% to every touch interface, and yet we use touch interfaces for phones, and tablets, and modern point-of-sale systems, and the decent car navigation systems, etc, etc.
There are compelling arguments against touchscreens on laptops and desktops, but this doesn't seem to be one.
The touch interface on my phone and tablet compromises some of the usability of the input to gain a ton of flexibility and portability. Laptops compromise some comfort and size to make it feasible to stick a keyboard and pointer device into a thin, portable computer.
The various compromises are worth it in some situations and very out-of-place in others. I don't really see the point of a touch interface for general desktop/laptop use.
Lack of tactile feedback might be a bigger problem on laptops, but the reason it's a bigger problem is not self evident.
Agreed, there's nothing about it that makes it a bigger concern for a laptop than other devices. Touchscreens as inputs are suboptimal on other devices too. They're uncomfortable, slow, and imprecise.
I'm a huge fan of physical buttons. Sadly, it's impractical to have a phone with a screen large enough to be useful, thin enough to fit nicely in a pocket, and have it equipped with decent input.
Pros, in every industry, complain about their tools more than anyone else.
>See TV as an example
The TV industry, from both the physical panels to production and distribution of content, look drastically different than 10 years ago. I can't tell if you're trying to credit that to Apple or not? But it's hardly stagnant.
Are you talking about loosing ports? A lot of people think it's not progress but something limiting their options.
> I'm not buying a device whose primary purpose is to stick in my USB cable.
People don't stick cables to laptops just for the sake of sticking it, no? People work with lots of devices with different interfaces. People travel to different offices and need to "stick" a cable of a device which they don't own, don't have a dongle ready and maybe won't see that interface for months or years again. Having all possible dongles for all the devices you come across is impossible for some use cases.
> .. if Apple didn't do this, I think the entire laptop category will just stagnate...
Oh, come on! Will just stagnate because of too many ports?
Apple makes the princely sum of $4 per accessory on MFI licensing fees. Last year, those licensing fees made up less than one fifth of one percent of their revenue, a number so tiny that it doesn't even show up as a line item in their financial reports.
It would be such a spectacularly stupid decision to jeopardise sales of the world's most profitable smartphone just to try and add squeeze a minuscule amount of extra revenue out of MFI fees, it completely beggars belief that anyone is even considering it as a possibility.
Regarding DRM, Apple is the company that forced music labels to abandon DRM on their distribution platform the moment it became clear that Apple held all the power in that relationship. What possible conceivable benefit could there be for them to sneakily try and add it back now?
>What possible conceivable benefit could there be for them to sneakily try and add it back now?
They have always been pro DRM. For e.g. They force you to be on a constant iOS update treadmill, where they have made it impossible to downgrade iOS, and almost impossible to avoid updating it with the constantly popups to update.
Well it's a pretty fatuous point then, since Apple could have been playing that game for the last 10 years if they wanted to given the iPhone has had a custom port since day one and nothing about that has changed whatsoever.
Why wouldn't they complain? Because it's unprofessional? Nonsense. If a tool isn't up to it's designed task (especially if it used to be),complaining is certainly in order.
Thus, it is disappointing that there is not replacement for the version that uses only the integrated graphics. Also, the Intel 530 graphics of the 2016 rMBP 15" appears to be lower performing than the 2015 rMBP 15" integrated graphics. While there were benchmarks for the battery life of the iGPU, there were no performance benchmarks comparing the rMBP 15" 2016 iGPU vs. the 2015 iGPU.
I've looked online and it appears that the 530 is about 20% slower than the 2015 rMBP 15" iGPU.
EDIT: Source for Iris Pro 5200 vs. HD 530: 5200 about 20% faster than 530 for same resolution.
http://gpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Iris-Pro-HD-5200-...
This is probably due to the increased screen resolution. If you make the resolutions of both models the same I suspect it will be comparable or faster in benchmarks.
(2015 MBP default resolution of 2880×1800 vs new, 3360×2100)
Something similar happened with iPads came out with retina displays. Pushing lots of pixels consumes more performance.
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/11/lenovo-yoga-910-revie...
It even has a 4K touch-enabled display.
For a while, I thought it would be useful if the screen was detachable as in the MS' Surface device, but realized that I'm also not using my iPad that much to justify the use case.
It's also worth pointing out that the 910 can't be a MacBook replacement with that nonstandard keyboard layout.
[1] https://www.microsoftstore.com/store/msusa/en_US/cat/categor...
[2] The Yoga, for example: https://www.microsoftstore.com/store/msusa/en_US/pdp/Lenovo-...
If so, then I agree - that's by far the best way to get a Windows laptop. I'll pass on the recommendation next time someone asks me.
It does seem to be a bit more expensive, though; at least for Canadians. I'm seeing a $700 delta between what I'm seeing there and on the Dell store. Is that usual?
There also is a case that some of the manufacturers do get enough advertising kickbacks from the junk they bundle with the computer that you do see some of that "savings" passed back to you as a consumer with the premium added to the Signature Editions.
So far as I'm aware (merely as a consumer) Signature Edition does seem to require a clean EFI image as well. I've seen reports that things like Lenovo's EFI problems are things the Signature Edition team screens for (for instance this PC Mag article specifically mentioning Superfish [1]), but I can't tell you how thoroughly they check, just that I feel sure they try.
[1] http://www.pcworld.com/article/2887213/microsofts-signature-...
[1] https://developer.apple.com/library/content/releasenotes/Dev...
is interesting.
While the current offerings don't meet expectations set for the MBP... maybe this is a long play by Apple?
How quickly will the disappointment be forgotten when 32 gig / quadcore / nvidia GPU's are released?
http://www.macrumors.com/2016/11/14/late-2016-mbp-amd-gpus-s...
And it would probably require rewrites of high-performance apps and games to be something closer to client/server setups to manage communication between the CPU/memory and GPU.
There is really no difference for anything but the most demanding applications though.
Apple is awfully good at knowing just when to extract that little bit more from their customers. And I suspect that similar to the USB-C MacBook the concern over ports will just be from a vocal but tiny minority.
I can't find hard numbers for MBPs, but here's a list of prices over years for Mac Pros; from a consumer perspective, the changes are essentially random.
I do think it was a big misstep that their flagship, brand new phone can't connect to their flagship, brand new laptop without an adapter that has to be bought separately. I also think they could have done it in a more phased approach without losing anything. But ultimately it will turn out to be a good decision.
No idea how common this is but I feel like it's common enough that it should have been handled better.
How hard could it really be to make a basic Linux desktop environment work sorta close enough to OS X to make enough people switch to finance further development? My quick and dirty estimate is that 50 good people could pull off a great first release in 18 months.
(I do have relevant consumer UX software design management experience and feel that I can do reasonable quick estimates based on that.)
What this means is that the very first model released with a new case is usually underpowered, because the chips are not quite as powerful and power efficient as the (upcoming) chips the case was optimized for.
For this and other reasons I tend to not buy the first version of a new Apple product.
Stopped reading the review at this point.
The 'thinner, lighter' perspective just doesn't fit well with my particular requirements.