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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.
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 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.
Apple Desktop Bus was actually kinda cool.
Developed by Woz himself. First model that had it was the Apple IIGS.
A serial daisy-chained protocol, designed to be hot-swapped and to make it possible to bit-bang the bus with an inexpensive microcontroller.
Unfortunately the hardware designers then messed up, so it was not considered safe to hot-swap it.
Compare that to USB, which requires a complex software stack in the device firmware .. and if you want to "daisy-chain" devices you would have to implement a separate hub - which means that few devices even have one.
And don't even go into how overly generic and all-encompassing the USB HID protocol for keyboards and mice is, which means that operating systems don't support everything in a complete or consistent manner.
"We mustn't be caught by surprise by our own advancing technology" -- Aldous Huxley
"it just works.... so long as you only do what we explicitly allow you to and never want to actually USE your computer."
Hogwash. A MacBook comes with a full development stack preinstalled, and no limit on "what you can do with it" other than your own ability. An out-of-the-box MacBook is more capable than an out-of-the-box Windows computer, and roughly equivalent to Linux.