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Apple Said To Plan First Pro Laptop Overhaul in Four Years (bloomberg.com)
It's been a while since Apple upgraded most of its computer lineups. It has come to a point, where it's being advised that the Cupertino-based company should stop selling the dated inventories. But the wait will be over later this year, says Mark Gurman, the reporter with the best track record in Apple's ecosystem. Reporting for Bloomberg, Gurman says that the company will be overhauling its MacBook Pro laptop line for the first time in over four years, packing it with a range of interesting features. From the report: The updated notebooks will be thinner, include a touch screen strip for function keys, and will be offered with more powerful and efficient graphics processors for expert users such as video gamers, said the people, who asked not to be named. The most significant addition to the new MacBook Pro is a secondary display above the keyboard that replaces the standard function key row. Instead of physical keys, a strip-like screen will present functions on an as-needed basis that fit the current task or application. The smaller display will use Organic Light-Emitting Diodes, a thinner, lighter and sharper screen technology, KGI Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo said earlier this year. Apple's goal with the dedicated function display is to simplify keyboard shortcuts traditionally used by experienced users. The panel will theoretically display media playback controls when iTunes is open, while it could display editing commands like cut and paste during word processing tasks, the people said. The display also allows Apple to add new buttons via software updates rather than through more expensive, slower hardware refreshes. [...] Apple is using one of AMD's "Polaris" graphics chips because the design offers the power efficiency and thinness necessary to fit inside the slimmer Apple notebook, the person said.
Now how about a Mac mini overhaul? The last change was two years ago and it was actually a downgrade from the 2012 models.
There's something really wrong at Apple for still selling computers in 2016 with 5400RPM hard drives and only 4GB of RAM.
The updated notebooks will be thinner
Fuck off
Who cares about thinner lighter for a _PRO_ notebook PRO means expandable. They should make it thicker and heavier, if it means I can install updated drives and memory a few years from now.
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It is also very easy to hard reboot a device with a removable battery and to ensure it is unpowered when opening it up to troubleshoot or upgrade.
Laptop batteries are capable of producing dangerous electric shocks, and it is the most basic safety measure to isolate all sources of energy before working on any equipment.
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According to the latest ruleset, this post should be modded as Vorpal Flamebait +5.
Wow. Are there really that many folks out there who touch-type with their function keys? I mean, I honestly don't know -- maybe there are, but I certainly haven't seen them.
Think about how awful Apple's current scheme is, where fkeys are overloaded for brightness control, volume control, keyboard backlight control (really?), and whatever else.
Now picture mapping those controls onto a touch-strip with a display. A small cluster of controls to the left (right, whatever), one for screen brightness, one for volume, one for keyboard backlight (again, whatever).
Touch one, and a slider control expands out from it. Slide left to decrease, slide right to increase. Maybe, if extensive user testing supports it, "drag off the bottom" to commit your new setting or "drag off the top" to cancel it. Or maybe just lifting your finger commits it, and cancel isn't needed; we certainly don't get "cancel" with the current up/down key controls. Maybe touch detection only gives an x-axis value, but if I were sitting on Apple's patents, I'd certainly add at least a rudimentary y-axis measurement, and multi-touch detection.
Double-tap (or "mash") the volume control to mute or unmute.
Double-tap or mash screen brightness to blank or restore the screen.
Don't want controls? Map a simple out-of-band gesture (again, drag-up or drag-down seems ideal) to move between fkeys, system functions, and application functions.
I don't have any idea what Apple will actually do with this strip, but I hope it's less of a disappointment than their touch keyboard and multitouch stuff so far. I used the FingerWorks Touchstream keyboard for years, and I'm still bitter that Apple hasn't used more than 30% of the gestural technology they got when they bought out and shut down that company.
Their only useful purpose in OS X, realistically, has been for controlling volume and screen brightness anyway. Maybe this will cause companies to come up with more interesting uses for them. I'm not holding my breath.
The bigger concern is that they're making it thinner yet again. That probably means:
Both of those are deal-breakers for me. We've already gotten to the point where my battery lasts for an average of only 2.5 hours on essentially brand new hardware because the battery capacity hasn't kept up with the CPU's non-idle power consumption, and several mission-critical apps that I run almost every day are horrible battery hogs (in no particular order, Chrome, Finale 2012, Lightroom 6, Photoshop CS6).
Want to know what would make me happy?
I couldn't care less about function keys. I couldn't care less about making the laptop thinner. I want the laptop to be more capable. And I think I speak for basically 100% of Mac laptop users when I say that. Absolutely nobody outside of Apple cares about making laptops thinner at this point. We passed the point where that matters at the point where it dropped below the thickness of a small paperback book—basically with the most recent pre-Retina MacBook Pro. Every bit of thinness after that is widely seen as engineers doing something solely because they can, rather than because it improves the product. And for the most part, the excessive thinness has made the product functionally WORSE with each generation.
If Apple is really serious about retaining actual pro users, they need to stop actively making the pro machines less functional and start moving in the exact opposite direction. What I'm seeing described here sounds like a MacBook, not a MacBook Pro. As far as I'm concerned, the last truly pro Macbook was discontinued about two years ago. Just saying.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
The only reason 90% of users have to look at the function keys to use them is because on 90% of laptops, some idiot accountant or designer decided that spacing the function keys equally was cheaper or looked cleaner than breaking them into groups of 4 like on a real keyboard. The few laptops which split the function keys into groups of 4 (the Thinkpads for one), I can use all day without looking at the keyboard.