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.

Comments

Re:No escape

[PvtVoid]

Apple Menu -> System Preferences... -> Keyboard -> Keyboard Tab -> Modifier Keys and select Esc for Caps Lock.

I mean, you had that mapped already, right?

PLEASE HELP I THINK I DID IT WORNG

Re:Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

Terrible company, they've been going out of business for decades now.

Re:No escape

[alexandre_ganso]

Don't forget the $80 adapter from thunderbolt 3 to normal thunderbolt so you can plug in your $200 thunderbolt-to-usb dock where you can have a usb-to-ps2 adapter, connected to a ps2-to-xt keyboard adapter, though! IT'S MAGIC

Re:Less Space than a Nomad.

[Yvan256]

And I was hoping for a new Mac mini. The poor thing hasn't been updated* since 2012.

* it was downgraded in 2014.

2016 marks the end of Apple brand loyalty

[Bueller_007]

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.

Re:2016 marks the end of Apple brand loyalty

[wickerprints]

I was ready to buy the 15" model sight unseen, but now I'm reconsidering. The fact that they put only USB-C ports in the machine, and then have the balls to charge $19 - $25 for each adapter cable, is what pisses me off the most, because they know full well that none of their previous products shipped with a USB-C cable. So Apple is basically giving their most loyal users a big "fuck you": $3000 for a 15" MacBook Pro, and they want to nickel-and-dime us for $40 worth of adapters that should have shipped WITH the machine because they decided to not make it backward compatible with their own products. Yeah. Fuck you Apple.

Re:Less Space than a Nomad.

[shmlco]

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!

Re:Less Space than a Nomad.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.)

Touch Bar is a disaster waiting to happen

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Touch Bar is a disaster waiting to happen

[jeffb (2.718)]

Wanted to give this one mod points, but figured I'll have too much to say in this thread.

In any situation where the display can change out from under an in-progress action -- for example, an Outlook reminder popping up in the middle of a standard Windows keyboard-and-mouse workflow -- the very first thing that a well-integrated system should do is to check the interpretation of the next user action (click, keystroke, etc) against the pre-existing interaction state, explicitly accounting for human reaction times. If I've just hit Return, and that event is going to a confirmation dialog that was displayed 0.05 seconds ago, there is no way that I've seen and read the dialog.

But I have yet to use any system that does this consistently. If anybody's going to lead the way on it, I'd expect it to be Apple, or Microsoft with the Surface stuff -- but I'm betting that they haven't, at least not yet.

Re:Less Space than a Nomad.

[shmlco]

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.