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'The MacBook Pro's One-Year-Old Signature Feature Touch Bar Has No Future, But Users Are Required To Pay a Premium For It' (chuqui.com)
Chuq Von Rospach, a former Apple employee and commentator, has criticized the MacBook-maker to force consumers to pay extra for the Touch Bar -- a signature feature of the last year's MacBook Pro lineup -- in order to have the highest-end MacBook Pro currently available. He writes: The current [MacBook Pro] line forces users to pay for the Touch Bar on the higher end devices whether they want it or not, and that's a cost users shouldn't need to pay for a niche technology without a future. So Apple needs to either roll the Touch Bar out to the entire line and convince us we want it, or roll it back and offer more laptop options without it. [...] So what's the future of the Touch Bar? I don't know. I'm not sure Apple does, either. I was fascinated that when Apple released the iMacs earlier this year not one word was mentioned about the Touch Bar or Touch ID and support for them via an updated keyboard or trackpad was nowhere to be found. I'm taking that as an indication that after the lackluster response to this with the laptop releases, they've gone back to the drawing board a bit before rolling it out further.
...The current [MacBook Pro] line forces users to pay for the Touch Bar on the higher end devices whether they want it or not...
Apple has always made its customers pay for high-end features that they did not want. Why do you think Apple's products are marketed more as a fashion statement than something that is useful? You can get more people to pay for unwanted features when they are "fashionable."
I actually really want a 15-inch MBP, but I can't swallow the significantly reduced battery life. The 13-inch drops a whopping 10% of its battery capacity to cram that stupid touch bar in. I'm simply not buying a macbook pro with worse battery life than the last one, and certainly not because they sacrificed it for a stupid touch bar.
It's not just the touch bar, they FUBAR'd the entire keyboard. I'm nearly a year into using a MBP 2016 model daily and still make repeated typos due to low keyboard stroke depth. It's like typing on a piece of flat plastic.
I would like the touch bar a hell of a lot better if they didn't cannibalize the goddamn F-keys or most importantly the Esc key. It's not like they don't have enough surface area to keep both. The trackpad is as big as your whole hand. This is a Pro machine where those keys are actually important. They obviously realized that when they had to introduce the option to purchase the high end models with standard keyboards. How this did not get shot down the second it came out of Ive's group is a complete mystery.
chock full of gimmicks.
I have one and I just dont get it. First of all as a touch-typer I never look at the keyboard. Therefore, it's completely awkward to have to look down at the keyboard from the screen to see some shortcuts buttons that randomly appear. Also, the buttons that appear arent useful at all so far. Fact is I only got the model because I wanted the Touch ID button (which also not very functional compared to the iPhone).
This was a big goof up by apple.
Just kidding I'm not a psychopath lol.
All that courage has got to count for something!! Right?
I know why he is a former employee: he lacked Courage.
Are perfectly viable options for 90% of Mac users. A good thinkpad with better features can be had for less than an MBP. And most applications are either cross platform or have a cross platform equivilant.
If you want Mac OS and can live with shit hardware stay there, if you need a lower TCO and better performance look at windows or Linux.
This post is 100% Click-Bait. No where in the article did the author say anything remotely like the headline for this post. So why is it in quotes? Author was actually pretty neutral overall. Said he wants to give the touchbar more time to develop and would either make it ubiquitous among all macs or optional on high end.
No Esc and No function keys == no serious users. Enjoy your toy.
How about they put the Touchbar in a USB-C dongle for people who still want it, and put the legacy USB ports back in that most people frequently use and will continue using for years? Or maybe go back to a keyboard that has a sane amount of travel? Add in an SD card slot and it might be back to being a "Professional" machine again rather than a glorified MacBook Air with a bunch of dongles hanging off it. And while I'm asking for a pony, how about bringing back magsafe power and a matte screen *option*, even if I have to pay more for it?
I don't need a thinner laptop and all the sacrifices that go with it.
-- Current (old) MacBook Pro user who will upgrade what I have until Apple comes to their senses or I switch to something else.
Something that Chuck acknowledges but is glossed over in the summary is that the Touch Bar is only in the MacBook Pro for now. If it gets added to the MacBook line, as he suggests, the Pro users aren't paying extra but all MacBook users might be. Also there is the underlying assumption that the Touch Bar never changes. Could it become a force touch sensitive in the next iteration? Could Apple use the same tech and make the entire Track Pad double as a screen?
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Useless things PC owners paid for
5.25" floppy drives, parallel ports, Rs-488 serial ports, premium sound cards, Mouse ports, and these days they pay for CD players. All of those were niche market items when the rest of the world had long moved on to newer technologies but still installed by default on generations of PCs.
On the other hand who's to say a context sensitive touch bar won't catch on? A decade or more ago every bond groaned when yest another serial port was added to PCs already festooned with Parallel ports, Mouse ports, keyboard ports, serial ports, and PC card slots. another serial standard???? like that was going to catch on.
at that time most keyboards didn't have that ubiquitous 6th row of keys they all have now for screen brightness sound etc... the touch bar is replacing that with non-mechanical keys. in the long run it will be cheaper
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Oh wait, you can't. Not without looking down to check if virtual ESC button is there and where it is. And not without looking down to see if it actually "pressed" or not.
Touch bar has got to go. And give the ESC key back or lose developers, who will quit you just on the principle of not supporting this design-dumb idea.
Suggestion: Put a touch bar (perhaps vertical) to the right of the touch pad. If you need gimmicky stuff like audio volume slider etc.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Don't you just hate that phrase now?
Some writer has figured out that the Touch Bar won't even outlast the short attention span of your typical MBP fanboi.
You can just put them on the touchbar.
*rimshot*
I find emergency management to be a fine use of my tax dollars.Remember the people suffering aren't the people in power.
I basically got it for the extra USB ports. I mainly use it with an external 4k screen and usb keyboard anyway.
I expected more, but in principe it's not bad.
When you start debugging in Xcode, the TouchBar changes and you get buttons for step in/over/out, plus continue running. However since I consider myself in the high-risk RSI category, I use an external keyboard (Kinesis Freestyle 2) and I know the shortcut keys by heart now, but that took a loooong time since I'm not in the debugger every day.
TouchID: In and of itself, it's not bad either. However when you use a password manager, it goes from bad to great because you use it ALL the time.
I do agree with the writer of the article about the new iMac Pro. Why didn't that new external keyboard with touchbar and fingerprint reader? I hope it's some technical/safety reason, because I think it's weird that for such a machine, this tech isn't included.
I'd love TouchID to work on my Linux servers, in combination with sudo. I mean why not? Very convenient.
8 of 13 people found this answer helpful. Did you?
The new iMac Pro that costs $5000 doesn't even come with a touchbar keyboard. If it stays laptop only, I'll never use it. My main computer is a Macbook Pro, but 95% of the time it's hooked up to my 27 inch monitor with an external keyboard and is never opened. Until they come out with a Touchbar keyboard I'll never use it. Too bad because when I tried it out at BestBuy it was kinda cool. The escape key whiners definitely never used it, since the escape key is still there it's just on the bar, duh.
The Touch Bar, if engineered right, can be very useful. Before Apple's devices, Lenovo had it on one of their laptops. Of course, it was just plain worthless, especially when the laptop was running under Linux. That, plus the fact that Lenovo decided to randomly switch keys around (dropping the caps lock key and moving other keys like the "\" key around, willy-nilly) made their implementation more of an obnoxious hindrance than anything else.
Apple's Touch Bar, isn't that bad. A MBP with it isn't worse than one without it. However, it seems to be a niche item as of now.
Is Apple putting a gun to these people's heads?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
I don't use a Mac because I am part of the Sheeple or bought into Apple's marketing. I use a Mac because I am (despite strong efforts from Apple to make it otherwise) more productive using it compared to the alternatives. I have a very nice employer-provided Windows laptop that I have to use as well and it reminds me daily how much easier it is to do my job on a Mac.
I need to upgrade my Late 2011 MacBook Pro. I can still do what I need to do on it, but technology has marched on and the faster processors, additional memory capacity and an SSD would be nice.
I have no need for the TouchBar, priced out the non-TouchBar i7, 16G, 1TB SSD 13-inch MacBook Pro model and was ready to bite the bullet. It did bothered me that, even with i7, the fastest processor was not available on the non-TouchBar version (and the clock rate wasn't even as has as the 2011 MBP it would be replacing), but clock rate isn't everything and it would still be better than what it was replacing.
Then I discovered that the non-TouchBar MBPs only have two USB-C connectors and one is used to power the laptop. To get four USB-C connectors, I would have to get the TouchBar model and that pissed me off. That was the straw that broke the camel's back and I am now probably going to replace my 2011 MBP with a Early 2015 (Broadwell) instead of a new MBP.
There's no less than two companies (and maybe more, I just haven't been looking that hard) that make better MacBook Pros than Apple, with the single feature they can't do better is that you can't (legally) run macOS on them.
https://www.razerzone.com/gami...
http://www.dell.com/en-us/shop...
Both have better displays, better GPUs, better RAM capacity, better CPU options, and are maybe slightly heavier, but not when you figure on all the dongles you'll have to pack around with you on the Mac to plug in shit you already own, or may run across.
Oh, they are also massively cheaper, even before the overpriced dongles. Apple is just behind, and it's by their own doing. And I say this as someone who has used an Apple laptop since the PowerBook 5300.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Houston votes (D). It's half black and hispanic and a lot of the whites that live in the city are properly guilt ridden professional class, government and academic types that mindlessly support every tenet of the progressive world view. That's why Houston has a black mayor and of the eleven city council members only three are white males. Some of these people were victims of Katrina as well, since much of the black Katrina diaspora landed in Houston's government housing. So you might want to at least refine your funding policy a bit; a lot of bought and paid-for voters live in that town and expect the largess to continue.
Just kidding I'm not a psychopath lol.
No, you're just a hate filled liberal sperging out on the interwebs. Please don't stop; the more visible you people are the better.
Meh, considering how much I paid for a fully loaded MBP the touchbar cost is insignificant. It's not that bad, though since I am not usually looking at it I am ignoring most of what's on it. That, and it takes a bit longer to modify brightness and sound than I'd like.
I would like to see Apple provide more tools for using it to input things like Unicode symbols used in Perl 6! While we are dreaming I'd like to exchange my screen for a multitouch capable one that opens flat to the table and use with a pen. Oh, and next time would it be so hard to avoid making razor-sharp edges on every part of the case? I am constantly worried about tearing my slacks and the part where you open the cover (just like my 2009 MBP) has wickedly sharp knife-like points on it.
the touchbar uses an extra monitor driven by the graphics card to provide the seamless extensibility that it does — so i dont think you could easily add something like that to any old USB keyboard — because you would also need the support of a graphics card to do so.
it is only possible on the macbooks because the graphics card is already rolled in to the same package as where the touchbar is.
2cents from toronto island
john p
In the long run this will be cheaper than mechanical keys. You still want mechanical keys for typing but you don't type on that top row. So even if all it did was permenantly show the F-keys it will not be costing extra. and if it works out it could have a lot of other uses such as more expressive touch modalities without the nuiscances of a full touch screen. cheaper too.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
I was perfectly happy carrying around my cell, my PDA, and my MP3 player. Then Apple went and rammed all of them into one device. If I wanted three devices, I'd BUY three devices. Thanks a lot, Apple.
BAR test and other banned places make it so that you need an system with the same base power but without this.
This is why people make hackintoshs apple does not offer choice that people need.
The Imac pro seems like it is going to fail. As the start price price is to high and due to apples push for thin and looks. Most people will be forced to pay apple pricing for RAM / Storage / CPU upgrades. As few will want to void the warranty and deal with unglueing reunglueing the screen Just to upgrade the ram.
Apple may change $600-$1200+ to go from 32 GIG to 64 GIG. right now an 4 stick 64 GB DDR4 ECC kit is about $800-$1000
This. You can have a fully functional Linux laptop for $100. It's cheap enough to be disposable, and still powerful enough for dev work at least.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
Houston votes (D). It's half black and hispanic and a lot of the whites that live in the city are properly guilt ridden professional class, government and academic types that mindlessly support every tenet of the progressive world view.
No, you're just a hate filled liberal sperging out on the interwebs. Please don't stop; the more visible you people are the better.
Sounds like you've got your diatribe well expressed too. Let he who is without sin and all that...
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I'm going to need that physical Escape key back. Mm'kay?
I wanna mbp with these features: real fn keys, usb-c, and 32GB memory - you can get real fn keys right now, but not usb-c; or you can get usb-c but no fn keys, and nothing has more than 16GB... will apple ever listen to users?
Like many people, I'm in the habit of resting my hands on the keyboard. On a Macbook with a touch bar, I'm constantly performing random actions (often starting Siri) by mistake. No doubt with time I could learn not to do this, but I'm not willing to pay extra and have to relearn using the keyboard, for no significant advantage.
The touch bar is clearly a gimmick, but please name a single OEM who doesn't charge for every feature they build into their computers, even the ones that aren't wanted?
It's unfair to single Apple out for doing the same thing as literally every manufacturer in the history of manufacturing.
but I run desktops & buy my own hardware and use PostScript compat. printers so I'm kind of cheating. My kids Toshiba laptop was a nightmare of crap bloatware software.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
I've always enjoyed my Macbook Pros. There are people who feel like it's some fashion/gimicky thing, but it has an underlying Unix/Linux flavor with an appealing GUI. You get the best of both worlds. That being said, I was excited to see my new work laptop had the TouchBar, but after about 5 minutes I put it back to the default Mac keys, and haven't looked back. I love the idea of keys that can change with context, but the reality is I never use it for that.
I will shred my adversaries. Pull their eyes out just enough to turn them towards their mewing, mutilated faces. Illyria
The biggest disappointment is that no other vendor has been smart or brave enough to fill in the gap.
OSX was basically an awesome product 5 or 6 years ago, and has added little in value since then.
Dell or HP and/or a dozen other companies could have easily financed a start-up to polish up a Linux distro made for a small but specific line of laptops built as well as MacBooks with solid driver support - similar to what the Dell XPS Dev Edition is trying to become.
Instead, each hardware vendor has put time and energy into multiple different business line laptops (Thinkpads, Precision, Latitude) which perform somewhat well with various distros, but never just work for a single version of one distro.
But had they done this years ago, and with far more resources thrown into it, they could have owned the developer market that Apple ended up winning (and Microsoft is playing catch-up with Subsystem for Linux) . People obviously pay a premium for Apple - they have the largest profit margins of any company. There is a lot of money on the table.
You all sounds just as whiny as the people complaining the new models only have USB-C ports...
The TouchBar is not amazingly useful yet, but over time we'll see a lot of value as apps integrate it. For me the one thing I think the TouchBar really needs is haptic feedback. Well one more thing - we need to have a TouchBar on external keyboards too, the lack of that is what is really lowering adoption even for a lot of laptop owners.... including it would also mean iMac users could join in the TouchBar fun.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Apple don't need to do anything. Sorry Chuq, but Apple doesn't need to even listen to you.
They don't even need to acknowledge your existence. You haven't worked for Apple in over 10 years.
When you did it was as tech support and internal email systems.
Now you're an expert on product development and marketing?
I've been primarily a Mac user since around 2000-2001, when OS X was a new thing and I was bored with the same old DOS and Windows routine.
The #1 thing that took me MONTHS to warm up to and embrace on the Mac was the handling of the application menu bars. If you're used to other GUIs, it really is kind of painful getting used to the idea that the "Finder" (essentially the desktop you're working with to do everything else) has its own menu bar that only has focus when you click on some unused portion of your screen to bring it forward. And as you launch applications and go between them, that same top menu bar changes to perform as the menu set for whatever app has focus.
And to be honest? Although I've gotten completely used to it now, I *still* don't know that I care much for the way the "Finder" is handled like that. I feel like everything else related to OS X is controlled from the Preferences panel, so why not the stuff on that Finder menu too? If I want to show or hide my connected network drive shares, wouldn't that be a good option to put someplace under Networking in System Preferences instead? I feel like it's a concept carried over from pre OS X days and isn't necessarily the best way to do things today. But it is what it is.
I think the other thing that seems to take people a long time to get used to on the Mac is the liberal use of compressed .dmg image files. In the Windows world, it would be almost like people regularly having you download applications in the form of ISO images and expecting you to mount them temporarily to the desktop as virtual CDs or DVDs so you could copy over or install software from them, and then unmount them again when you're done. Weird, right? I mean, you usually only download an ISO because you're going to make a bootable disc or USB thumb drive from it or something. But in the OS X world, they "think different". You commonly have to uncompress a .zip or other archive file just to wind up with a .dmg that you have to mount so you can get to its contents. And cleaning that up requires remembering to unmount the mounted image first (by dragging to the trash) so you can delete the .dmg file successfully. This took me more than a month to really wrap my head around and consider normal/usual.
But really, I think more in OS X is similar to using Windows (or even a popular Linux GUI) than different. It's nice not having the Windows registry to hassle with - but "prefs" files nested in the hidden Library folder, under various sub-folders, is somewhat equivalent. (If you just delete your apps by trashing them from your Applications folder, they often still have leftover bits and pieces in that Library folder -- even if leaving them behind typically does no real harm.)
I find that OS X does a generally superior job of handling peripheral setup. I can often get Bluetooth to pair and work with things that Windows struggles to use properly. Wi-fi seems a bit easier to manage on the Mac, including the dedicated application for detecting and managing any Airport devices on your network (although Apple is disappointingly getting out of the wi-fi router market). More printers just plug in via USB and work on my Macs than in Windows, too.
And obviously, OS X is much less of a hassle when it comes to malware and virus threats. (Sure, it can be infected. People who say Macs don't get viruses are clearly wrong. But the point is, they just don't have the severe issues Windows machines have. Maybe it's due to a better underlying architecture, or maybe it's just because far less effort is put toward infecting Macs? Who knows, and to an extent, who cares? I've used them for 15+ years now and it's held true that they just have fewer issues.)
If you really used the Mac for a YEAR or more and still dislike it? Cool ... it's not for you. But I'm just saying, it's not an OS change I felt fully comfortable with until I kept plugging along with it for at least several months -- maybe even 6 months?
I have one of these laptops and I'm quite frustrated with it. The touch bar is the least of the issues - although I appreciate Touch ID for my password manager, the rest of the bar is meh. It's everything else that's wrong. The keyboard is pretty bad. I started off really liking it for the extra clickyness, but it just isn't stable, sometimes keys fail to register in certain places, which changes as the laptop warms and cools. Yesterday the 'k' key just stopped working, which you'd think would be a hardware issue, maybe a crumb. But rebooting fixed it?!
Compared to the previous model the new mbp has poor battery life. And it's oddly slow. Maybe that is due to the higher screen resolution it's pushing - jitter and odd delays here and there.
None of the new stuff and forced hardware changes with USB3, no lame touchbar, etc. I am bummed that Apple no longer offers to customize and order 2015 model online like its MF839LL (http://apple.com/us-hed/shop/buy-mac/macbook-pro?product=MF839LL/A&step=config). The defaults are crap like the small SSD, RAM, etc. sizes. :(
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
No, but the dumb redneck fucks voted for them.
(But that one became a hit)
OF COURSE it's all gimmicks. You can get a $200 laptop that will do all what is required, which is pretty much run a web browser. How else are vendors to justify 5-10 times that price? Apple is nothing on this front, have you seen Samsung or Sony?
The Touch Bar, if engineered right, can be very useful.
Mysteriously, you didn't provide actual examples of those useful things it could do.
lucm, indeed.
Houston votes (D). It's half black and hispanic and a lot of the whites that live in the city are properly guilt ridden professional class, government and academic types that mindlessly support every tenet of the progressive world view.
No, you're just a hate filled liberal sperging out on the interwebs. Please don't stop; the more visible you people are the better.
Sounds like you've got your diatribe well expressed too. Let he who is without sin and all that...
It's not a diatribe. You'll see that one day if you free yourself from the Clinton doll you've got up your ass. ( <- that is a diatribe, see the difference?)
lucm, indeed.
Don't like Apple's choice of hardware for you?
Motherfucker should have bought a PC.
This kind of user loves to buy expensive computers believing they are "better", when the same hardware can be found for half the price or less. Apple innovations are not real innovations, are just copies. And paying more than twice the price is plain stupid. I tell my collleagues how stupid they are buying Apple products, but they don't want to check and believe me. Tsk
For any surviving Slashdotter who's not rageblind at the mere mention of Apple, here's a thought.
Properly engineered products can have a roadmap that's a few years long. For a product to come out about 9 months after Touch Bar while not including one doesn't indicate that its omission was a last-minute decision.
If you choose to believe that this interface has no future, knock yourself out. However, the evidence presented gives no support to this theory.
I recall all the fanboi's raving, "It's so BRAVE of Apple to do this..."
Brave is when someone runs into a burning building to save a life. Being stupid with input sources is par for the course from Apple tho'.
1. ALL new technologies are bootstrapped like the TouchBar and funded by the COGS of the product - this isn't new or unusual
2. ALL successful tech companies must and do "experiment" with new features like TouchBar - you can NOT know if something is the next big thing any other way
3. Chuq can NOT possibly know if TouchBar has no future - markets decide if features are to survive, not "know it all" pundits
4. If you really don't want the TouchBar, there is a MBP version that does have it. Problem solved!
5. Clearly the ex-Apple employee Chuq is butt hurt about something and not mature enough to deal with it. Honestly the article is ignorant, juvenile and pathetic
Personally, I'm a die-hard Mac, but, for instance, I have no use for Siri. I don't like and won't use it. I personally think only an idiot talks to an inanimate object as if it were a person - I'm not into anthropomorphizing THINGS. However, I'm quite possibly not "representative" of the larger Apple market space and I'm under no illusions about that (unlike Chuq apparently).
The fact of the matter is that NO nerd is any longer "representative" of anything that Apple's features are designed for or loved for by the majority of their customers. We are NOT in the Early Adoption phases when nerds play a large role. So sad but that's how it is when your mum and grand have iPhones! So basically pundits claiming some feature is "lame" is pretty much like some male, socially inept nerd commenting on how women will hate the new Coco Chanel line this year - basically nothing about the pundit is relevant anymore!
For the record, Dell has basically invented mass customization. Their manufacturing agility has been copied by their Asian suppliers, and that's how today we get such a rich ecosystem of computer vendors.
And if you ever have to work in enterprise IT (which you clearly don't), Dell are as good as it gets; their inventory management system is terrific, allowing you to download updated drivers for all the components you've cherry-picked during the customization process even years later, thanks to their tag system that other vendors have tried to copy but failed. Dell also makes it immensely convenient for companies to keep a running bill instead of having to pay huge sums upfront, making it easier to align your payments with the depreciation period and with the EOL. When you buy high end equipment, they tell you exactly how many spare parts they keep and how far they are. They were the first major vendor to offer (and support) Linux on their servers. They're a great IT vendor.
So go play with your consumer-grade junk backed by disorganized, incompetent support, and feel free to keep being smug about it.
lucm, indeed.
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