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Comment by lcnmrn | Hacker News Reader

They have to recover the money spent on TouchBar R&D. We won’t see a proper MacBook Pro until 2020.

It seems to me the touchbar was just a clever way to get their own processor into their laptops for some large scale real-world testing before they ditch intel and build the entire thing themselves. 2020 is a good guess I'd say.

I'm surprised this is the first time I've seen the "touchbar as a way to get the A-series chips into macbooks" take. It's the most sensible explanation.

Even without the Touchbar, using the T1 for securing the TouchID sensor (amongst the other duties it fulfills) would've been justification enough. So no, that's no excuse for the Touchbar.

Maybe the Touchbar was just a "clever" way to prepare all of us for sole touch-based input, which is going to be included in the MBP in 2020. ;-)

P.S.: I don't even think touch-only input is neccessarily a bad idea. All Apple has to do to make it work is to implement some kind of really good haptic feedback which also allows to feel individual keys. I even expected that for this iteration of the MBP for the Touchbar.

Re: your P.S.: If a touch keyboard could give haptic feedback that let us distinguish between a "correct" keypress and a missed one, it might work. Perhaps a pleasant haptic vibration in proportion to how close to center your finger strikes would work.

> Hypothesis: Apple's low-profile MBP keyboard is just a temporary stage that should prepare us for solid state keyboard.

> What is that? A non-moving keyboard where a feedback is faked convinvingly enough via localized haptic feedback.

> See iPhone home button and MBP trackpad.

https://mobile.twitter.com/keff85/status/1011350819210498050

Sure, there are downsides to the touchbar (I get it), but I'd suggest we ask this question: where does Apple want to go with the touchbar? Instead of focusing on where it is right now, think about what it could be.

With haptic feedback and perhaps different locations/placement, it has the potential to augment or even transform the ways we interact with the computer.

Put another way, the current problems are not insurmountable. Changing habits is not easy. What if there are better options than current keyboards? All I'm saying is consider what might be in the works.

To be clear, I'm not saying that we should blindly accept anything Apple does. But we should not blindly assume that their decisions are based on the worst intentions, either.

I kinda wish they were able to implement the touchbar in some sort of hybrid way, like those Art Lebedev keyboards we all saw hyped (but probably never in person) back in the day.

While I'll admit there are cool things you can do with embedded OLED displays, the keys they sacrificed for it are keys I actually need to press. Regularly.

I also think that part of there are economic and organizational commitment reasons the touchbar is still getting made. I do not think it is because people love the touchbar.

Color me optimisitic, but I'm hopeful a new arm-based mac will come earlier than 2020, though.

>They have to recover the money spent on TouchBar R&D. We won’t see a proper MacBook Pro until 2020.

The amount of money spent on the TouchBar has nothing to do with anything. Apple makes a new set of chips for each new iPhone, iPad and Mac; they have the in-house expertise and the budget to make whatever they want whenever they want.

It's not like the Mac division has it's own profit/lost statement it has to worry about.

The main reason why it's taken this long to get MacBook Pros to this level of performance is due to delays by Intel; simple as that.

That's the sunk cost fallacy. If the traditional function keys would sell better than the new touchbar, their best move would be to start selling the old ones right away, even if that meant "throwing money away" on r&d.

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