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Apple Unveils New MacBook Pro Featuring OLED Touch Bar, Touch ID - Powered By Intel Skylake Processor (arstechnica.com)
At an event on Thursday, Apple unveiled the new 2016 MacBook Pro. The redesigned MacBook Pro comes with "incredible extreme" all-metal body. The main attraction of the new MacBook Pro is an OLED touch strip at the top that Apple is calling the Touch Bar. The Touch Bar comes with a fingerprint scanner Touch ID that users can tap to log-in quickly to their computer as well as make online payments. The touch strip offers on-screen button that changes according to the application you're running. Schiller, Apple SVP, said it was time Apple gotten rid of the dedicated function keys. The new MacBook Pro is thinner and lighter than the existing model, and it is powerful too. It comes in two screen sizes: 13-inch, which weighs 3 pounds and measures 14.9mm -- down from 18mm from older MacBook Pro. The trackpad is larger too, Apple says, twice as larger than the older one. Also, it's Force Touch trackpad. ArsTechnica adds: Both laptops are still recognizably MacBook Pros, but in keeping with Apple's design priorities they've got slimmer profiles and smaller footprints. This is made possible in part by the move to USB Type-C ports like the one in the MacBook, all four of which support Thunderbolt 3. All four ports can be used to charge the system, too. Compared to the measly one port in the MacBook, the MacBook Pros are much more appealing to people who plug lots of stuff into their computers at once. Apple has also made the cowardly decision to retain the headset jack. Both systems include new Intel Skylake processors -- dual-core chips in the 13-inch Pro and quad-core chips in the 15-inch model, just like before. The 13-inch Pros ship exclusively with Intel Iris 540 GPUs, while the 15-inch models ship with Polaris-based AMD Radeon graphics at the high-end.The 13-inch model MacBook Pro starts at $1,799, whereas the 15-inch model starts at $2,399.
And I don't see an escape key. :(
You've introduced the capacitive touch bar my wife's 10 year old HP Pavilion Media laptop has been rockin' forever!
(I really do to this day think that part of the laptop is really cool, except when I swipe to change the volume and it doesn't work the first time)
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I can see some interesting use cases for that TouchBar, but dear God, when that Photoshop lady was demonstrating using the mousepad & TouchBar at the same time, I cringed. I mimicked it on my keyboard in front of me and my wrists cried out in pain -- I can't imagine how it'd be if the keyboard was in my lap (i.e. on a laptop).
Wood Shavings!
- Godai
You are doing it wrong. "Siri, press the escape key" :-)
Waited years for an update and this is it? Seriously? A touch bar? That's what they added? It took years to add something that other manufacturers added and abandoned?
What I'm most pissed about is that they are offering a "pro" system with a max of 16GB of RAM.
I'll be looking elsewhere and seeing what better, truly "pro" laptops can be hacked to run MacOS.
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Terrible company, they've been going out of business for decades now.
And I was hoping for a new Mac mini. The poor thing hasn't been updated* since 2012.
* it was downgraded in 2014.
The Touch Bar comes with a fingerprint scanner Touch ID that users can tap to log-in quickly to their computer
The courts have said a few times that compelling someone to unlock their phone with their fingerprint is not a 5th amendment violation (forcing them to tell a password would be).
So don't plan on using this laptop for anything you're not willing to show to the authorities....or anyone else who can mock up a dummy fingerprint, which is surprisingly easy to do. They can probably just lift a print from the case...
2016 marks the end of Apple brand loyalty. We have quite clearly reached the point where the roadmap Steve Jobs laid out has ended, and now Cook and Ives are on their own, screwing things up as they go.
The outrage about today's keynote at AppleInsider is palpable. Among the common complaints are:
- These computers are overpriced and underwhelming. The price of the entry-level MacBook Pro was bumped up hundreds of dollars, and all they did was increase the price and remove ports from it. (The entry-level model only has two Thunderbolt ports (USB, etc. have been removed), and one of the ports has to be used for charging! What kind of "Pro" computer is that???)
- The mind boggles that they removed the "esc" key from a supposedly "Pro" computer.
- They removed the MagSafe connector, which is arguably one of the greatest features of Apple's laptops.
- The only connections are Thunderbolt 3, meaning that you will need a dongle for ~anything~ you want to connect. Do you own an iOS device? Better hope you have a USB-C adapter for it.
- Removal of the SD drive.
Apparently Apple has also been sending out emails to some of its customers asking if they use features such as the headphone jack on their laptop. (Because of course, they're going to remove it from there as well.)
This company has lost its mind.
Well, I just got back from Apple's website where I found out that the new MBP 15" still maxes out at 16GB RAM. Arrrgggghg!!!!
I refuse to upgrade until they give me 32GB, minimum!
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
10 hours is under "normal" workloads. My 2015 MBP lasts anywhere from 4 to 10 depending on what I'm doing. I'd much rather have it be double that so I don't need to plug it in as often.
The Surface Book looks very intriguing right now as it has an advertised 16 hours of battery life. The first gen Surface Book managed to get 13 in tests so that's actually believable.
As long as I'm complaining, I also don't understand why the 13" MBP is limited to 8 Gig of Ram
It's not.
I would be happy if they did NOTHING but give it a matte display option, even for a few hundred dollars more. Actually, that would be preferable to what they did produce.
OK, I'll bite.
Macbook Pro, 15-inch (just announced):
- Intel "Skylake" (6th gen.) processor
- New! Improved! USB Type-C with Thunderbolt 3 support!
- AMD Radeon "Polaris" GPU
- $2399
Dell XPS 15 (available since November 2015):
- Intel "Skylake" (6th gen.) processor
- USB Type-C with Thunderbolt 3 support
- nVidia GTX 960M GPU
- $1699 ($1749 with Windows Pro instead of Home edition)
Seriously, Kaby Lake has been out and available at retail for 2 months now, with a focus on mobile. OEM's have already started selling laptops with Kaby Lake CPU's. Apple, however, cheaped out on the core part of their system, so what makes you think they won't cheap out on everything?
Then you have the puffery about USB-C and TB3. My Dell has had that for nearly a year. Marketing is one thing, but don't insult me with your lies, Apple.
Then there's the pathetic AMD GPU. Just make a goddamned nVidia driver for macOS already.
And finally, we have the enormous price difference. Now, granted, Dell has jacked their price up since I got mine, but it's only about $200 more, not $700 more like Apple is reaming their customers for.
This is why I'm not a Mac guy anymore. Well, this, and Windows is just as good as macOS these days. (And that's an opinion that is likely to piss off the cultists something fierce.)
My early 2011 has 16 GB of RAM, and it is approaching six years old! What a complete joke for something that has Pro in the name.
Did you catch in one of the videos where the Touch Bar changed to show the Accept/Decline buttons of an incoming Facetime call? Imagine being in the middle of an important workflow, and as you move your finger to touch a virtual key, it suddenly changes its meaning, and because you shouldn't have to keep moving your eyes from the display to the keyboard, you end up affecting that call by mistake? The user should *never* have to look at the keyboard to confirm they are typing what they think they're typing. Hell, the way that Touch Bar works, even looking at it isn't good enough if the keys can change meaning right out from under your fingers.
And years of using the escape key as it was is going to retrain my poor pinky (or in my deformed case, left ring finger) to stop all that in favor of caps-lock?
I'm not anti-touch bar I think this needed to be done for a while. I disagree that function keys were particular to an ancient mainframe (I use mine all the time), their meanings are obscure and app specific and the touch bar design is actually a good way of implementing something like that.
However I am also pro-escape key. It seems to me they could have sandwiched the escape key between the power button with the touch-bar in the middle and made it look pretty damn good and lost only a few pixels on either side. Escape and Power are the only two functions in that row that are common to all apps and all needs. Both are used (frequently) to mean "stop your bullshit": on your left you have the persuader and on the right you'd have the enforcer. The persuader stops modal bullshit and does a good job of telling applications "fuck you and the horse you rode in on". The power button is there for delivering the same message to the OS, it's used far less frequently, but when you need it, you really need it.
One note: The Skylake chips used in the high end MBP are quad-core. The Kaby Lake chips that are shipping are dual-core and apparently Intel won't be shipping quad-core chips for several months.
You can't ship what you don't have.
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
You did a survey of what most people want?
Most people bitch about their cell phone battery life but that hasn't led to Apple doing anything but making their phones thinner and their batteries smaller.
Maybe what most people want has nothing to do with it and it is more a matter of advertising thinnest and lightest works even though people end up disappointed about things that actually matter like battery life.
Good luck with that 10 hours of battery life doing more than watching videos, at low brightness with WiFi turned off.
No new desktops at all. A laptop that has no video ports, no magsafe power, no SD card slot... just 4 stupid thunderbolt ports that will require a rats nest of dongles to make usable.
And Apple wonders why their revenues are nosediving?
I've been an Apple user since 06 when they went Intel (strictly *nix for 22 years before that other than a brief, self abusive period using Windows in the late 90s) and I don't understand why the retina, multi-touch tech of the TouchBar isn't implement in the screen as well.
I've been an Apple user since 1985, using Unix most of that time -- UniPlus+ on a Lisa, then A/UX on a Mac II, then a bit of a hiatus running terminal programs to get into remote Unix systems until OS X came along. (And, let me tell you, it wasn't always fun.)
I was a happy Fingerworks TouchStream user during the last decade. I'm still sore at Apple for shutting them down when they bought out their multi-touch technology. I want all that cool gestural technology back.
I do not want it on my desktop displays, though. I don't want to look through grimy fingerprints to see my main display. I don't want to try to point and gesture precisely while I'm holding my arm in the air. I don't want to move my arm through large distances as I move between selection and typing.
I'd like to think that Apple's stayed away from desktop and laptop touchscreens because they understand the ergonomic issues. I actually think it's more likely because they don't want unsightly fingerprints befouling their sleek designs.
What a complete joke for something that has Pro in the name.
Don't worry, that'll be changing next summer when they bring their product names into line - like they did with their OS offerings this past summer.
iPhone will become Apple Phone.
iPad will become Apple Pad.
MacBook Pro will become Apple Laptop.
Looking further out... they'll probably consolidate their naming scheme further to be consistent with what they did with their retail outlets.
Apple Phone will become Apple.
Apple Pad will become Apple.
Apple Laptop will become Apple.
And you, the Apple Customer, will also become Apple.
So Apple will take your Apple to the Apple to be repaired, er, reAppled. It's like the Smurfs, but with Apples!
#DeleteChrome
I'm with you. I just can't see a good use for Touch Bar ... at least not yet. I don't look at my keyboard when I type, why would I want to start? If there had been a massive spec upgrade, I'd be all over it ... but other than faster RAM and SSD, the maxed Skylake number cruncher is benchmarks about the same (some benchmarks even mark it slower) than the existing maxed Haswell in my MBP. I personally don't see a compelling reason to fork over $3500 for something that isn't going to be noticeably faster than what I already have. If I was a photographer I might be swayed by the wide gamut display, but for coding in black and white text, gamut just doesn't buy me anything. It's disappointing Intel CPUs got stuck at the 3Ghz ceiling. Give me 8 cores, dual CPUs ... anything to alleviate my CPU bottleneck.
Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws-Plato
There are quite a lot of USB C to USB A adapters available according to Google. Both from Apple and other places.
That was one seriously weird thing about that part of the demo. Autocomplete suggestions down in the new touchbar? Do they think users are staring at the keyboard as they type rather than at the screen?
Of course people like Ive and Cook, who designed and approved this move, almost certainly don't do much of their own typing. But it seems like a breathtakingly brain-dead idea from a company that used to obsess over the end user experience.
#DeleteChrome
Here you go.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Not only that, but you'd have to start, inasmuch as there is zero tactile feedback, and you don't know what's up there until you look.
Funny thing... if they'd have gone with a touchscreen on the main laptop monitor, they wouldn't have needed to do this and it would have been a metric fuckton more capable and it would be where you're already, you know, actually looking (but then again, since there's nothing really good about this thing, and there are a lot of things that aren't, I guess they really needed something to confuse the potential buyers.)
But hey. No touchscreen for you.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Ok but I wouldn't buy the Dell system if they paid me. Or HP. There isn't a good notebook vendor other than Apple, and now we're stuck with whatever Apple chooses to give us. Yay world.
Most people who hate Dell or HP base their opinion on low cost low quality systems ($500 to $700 range) which tend to fail more often due to cheaper components. Both HP and Dell have very nice high end quality systems, but you have to pay for the higher quality. I love my Dell XPS 13 laptop and I have several HP Workstation class desktops (Z640) running, all of which have been very reliable.
Not only that, their entry level model has TWO, count em, TWO total USB-C ports! One of these ports will be probably utilized by the charger, so that leaves ONE ONE ONE open port.
This replaces a Magsafe charger port, two thunderbolt ports, HDMI port, and a SD card slot!
Even their so called wide gamut display uses the P3 color space, and is usually used for projectors. If you want to create content, the display should be a Adobe RGB based gamut. This laptop must be designed for consume only purposes, not to create content.
Really Apple? You must either be attempting to drive your fan base away from laptops or turning your laptops into consume-only devices like your iPhones. Which begs the question why is this laptop labelled "Pro"? Pro what?
Most people bitch about their cell phone battery life but that hasn't led to Apple doing anything but making their phones thinner and their batteries smaller.
Well WTF do they expect? If they bitch and complain, and then run out and pay top dollar anyway for a device they bitch and complain about, why would the vendor bother listening to their complaints?
OEM's have already started selling laptops with Kaby Lake CPU's. Apple, however, cheaped out on the core part of their system, so what makes you think they won't cheap out on everything?
You've got your facts backwards: Apple is the one that went with the more expensive, more powerful part, and it's the other OEMs who are cheaping out by using the chips they are.
The Kaby Lake chips that are available today are the dual core models. The quad-core Kaby Lake chips that would be suitable for use in a MacBook Pro won't be available for another few months. Moreover, even if they had waited, it wouldn't have made much of a difference. The performance gap between the generations is minimal (which seems to be the general trend for CPUs these days), whereas the dual core to quad core performance gap is substantial for the types of work you expect pro users to be doing. Sticking with Skylake was definitely the right call because it allowed them to release a more powerful machine without the wait, and it was definitely not the cheaper route.
Then you have the puffery about USB-C and TB3. My Dell has had that for nearly a year. Marketing is one thing, but don't insult me with your lies, Apple.
You accuse them of puffery and lies without citing examples of either. They said it has Thunderbolt 3 via USB 3.1 Type-C. They never claimed it was first laptop to offer it (nor would they, since they launched one earlier this year that had it), though they're definitely the first to embrace it to such a degree by putting four of the ports on one machine, making them the only ports the computer has, and making them equally usable for all tasks (i.e. you can plug any cable--including the power cable--into any of them).
Then there's the pathetic AMD GPU. Just make a goddamned nVidia driver for macOS already.
It's the not-yet-released Radeon Pro 460 (i.e. the mobile version of the RX 460), and the Polaris architecture has been going head-to-head with nVidia's latest architecture (Pascal) in terms of both performance and power efficiency. But facts be damned. It's apparently "pathetic" because an Anonymous Coward has declared it so.
There are certainly valid reasons to go from Mac to Windows (I'm even planning to do so myself before the end of the year) or vice versa, but it sounds to me like you're just grasping for any reason you can find to rationalize the decision you made.
You did a survey of what most people want?
I don't need to because I can just look at sales data. Thin laptops outsell laptops with big batteries. Same with phones. Few people buy auxiliary battery packs, although they are cheap, reliable, and work well. So people are just complaining about battery life because they like to complain, not because it is a real need or even desire.
Why do you need 32 GB?
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
Why do you need 32 GB?
Google Chrome.
What, you think anybody uses Safari? On purpose?
I went from being a researcher and developer to being in technical management. I also spend much of my time on the road and on the go. I switched to Mac from dual-boot PC's shortly after OSX. It had everything I needed. It just worked. I closed the lid when the plane was about to land, and an hour later, voila. I could be in a terminal running screen on multiple servers, and 'alt-tab' to MS-Outlook to accept a meeting invite. I could go from coding in vim and compiling in a Unix environment to, *gasp*, editing a power point. I even run multiple VM's, and with a simple USB hub could have a complete office on the go. Even iTunes didn't use to be all that terrible. I'd laugh at all those PC people enslaved to the one bank of power outlets at the airport, while I was smugly charging both phones from my computer, confident I'd still have juice for the next flight. And it didn't hurt that the thing looked like a luxury car, and didn't feel like something that looked like it was trying to be a luxury car. Oh and lasted more than a year under substantial use. And lastly that my whole setup weighed less than the power brick for many other machines (I'm looking at you, HP).
Sadly, I feel those days coming to an end, and I'm honestly not sure what will be next.
It's hard to tell the cool to chill, my favorite hotel room has a view to an ill.