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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.
Apple has always made its customers pay for high-end features that they did not want.
I agree. Back when I owned Macs it was sad to see how many features they forced down our throats.
First it was USB. They took away my awesome ADB, Modem and Printer ports.
Then they added Gigabit ethernet to all of their machines.
Finally they shoved out this thing they called 'Airport' back when I was happy dragging around my 10-BaseT ethernet cord around the dorm room.
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.
I know why he is a former employee: he lacked Courage.
...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."
Just to clarify, every fucking vendor is now selling products riddled with bullshit features no one asked for in order to drive massive profits.
Apple is hardly the only one doing this crap now. They're merely the best at it.
I'm more interested in the coming iMac Pro....I really would like that 5K screen combined with some actual GPU muscle behind it....
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
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.
I agree. Because Apple has made some good decisions in the past, all of their decisions are good.
A lot of anti-Apple people like to say that, and if they've rarely used Macs, they probably believe it. But there really is something to "It just works". I say that as a user who is fluent in Windows, macOS and Linux. Obviously, it doesn't ALWAYS "just work" - it's a computer and nothing is perfect. But compared to my Windows and Linux boxes, for day-to-day stuff, I have to do far less fiddling with my Macs.
Yes, Apple users do pay a premium, but for most of them, they do so for the ease of use and reliability, not for some naive devotion to fashionability.
Relax. They're busy removing all that crap.
https://galliumos.org/
Inheritance is the sincerest form of nepotism.
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
Apple has always made its customers pay for high-end features that they did not want.
I agree. Back when I owned Macs it was sad to see how many features they forced down our throats.
First it was USB. They took away my awesome ADB, Modem and Printer ports.
Then they added Gigabit ethernet to all of their machines.
Finally they shoved out this thing they called 'Airport' back when I was happy dragging around my 10-BaseT ethernet cord around the dorm room.
We can add some to that list can't we? Those evil bastards cut the weight of a laptop from a feather light 4 kilograms to a spine distorting 1 kilogram, they reduced the thickness of a laptop from that of an average Unix programming manual to an utterly unacceptable one and a half centimetres and they had the unmitigated gall to shove UHD laptop displays down our reluctant throats. I feel your pain brother! We all do...
What the fuck kind of shitty IDE are you dweebs using that relies so heavily on function keys and esc? Xcode doesn't, IntelliJ doesn't, Android Studio doesn't. Don't tell me you're still writing code in some piece of shit text editor Richard Stallman hacked together in the 80s? I'm glad Apple doesn't hold everyone back just for a couple useless baby boomers.
Beyond being attractive, which is more important in many households than you'd believe, they are pure tech porn when you open them up. They are so well laid out and so well fabricated. Perhaps that is why they have such a high resale value. Go check eBay for yourself. It is amazing what a 5 year old MacBook goes for.
I was offered a Mac mini at work a few years ago. Since I didn't have to give up anything (my existing Linux and Windows workstations), I gave it a go.... a good, solid go. Not an hour or two, but a month. I simply didn't like it. I didn't like the windowing, the lack of mouse acceleration that I couldn't just change, a lot of windowing issues like borders, from where you could resize. Some things couldn't be changed, and the things that were fixable (like acceleration) were either crazily stupid, or you could buy something to do tweaks. And that's the thing about apple users - they just keep paying, and in that case, for features they had in older versions of the OS.
So it really comes down to perhaps being more difficult, but extremely customizable (like Linux... which, while difficult, also has vastly more helpful resources on the net... and also really only difficult if you want to customize the UI because of so many options), to really rigid and easier to use because of it (MacOS), with Windows somewhere in the middle. I simply didn't like it. I don't berate other people's personal choices, though... some people like it, so it's great we have choice.
Now, as far as TFS goes, "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" is just ridiculous. Apple doesn't need to do jack. People that want it, buy it, unwanted features and all. That's what life is like, and if Apple is happy with sales, they don't need some ex-wife telling them how to run the company.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
I'm old enough to remember when they made you pay for this "mouse" thingy that nobody had asked for and nobody wanted.
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.
The problem is that the F-keys are the worst possible design usability-wise. Being soft keys without labels, just by looking at them there is no possible way of knowing what they do. Quick tell me, what does the F9 key do? There is no way to say what it does, because the answer is different for every program. So, narrow it down a bit. You just installed a new CAD suite/Image editor/IDE/other professional software you just spent $$$$ on. Quick, tell me what does the F9 key do in your shiny new app? You don't have a clue, because you haven't gotten to that part of the manual yet, if it even has a proper manual. And considering it probably has a use that has nothing to do with the use in any other program that maps some functionality to F9, you now have to memorize a completely new meaning for that key.
Now replace that with a touchscreen. If a program wants to expose a one-tap function, it can map a region of the screen for that purpose, and label it clearly as such. Now, you not only know what function it does, but that the function is available to you in the first place. From a usability perspective, this is infinitely better than F-keys.
In an ideal world, the touchbar would be augmented by OLED key caps on the rest of the keyboard. Not only would this allow for remapping the keys when changing keyboard layouts, pressing the CTRL key could cause the key caps to be redrawn with the menu commands that would be executed by completing the key chord.
"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.
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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/
What happened to the decade after 10 base T cable? How shitty was your mac? Fuck, I guess you needed to be forced new technology if you held on 10 years too long. How the fuck was this modded funny?
I gave it a go.... a good, solid go.
Me too. I used a Mac on a daily basis for a couple of years, and never really got used to it. Nothing about it is intuitive to me, and I spent a lot of time just trying to figure out how to do things that should not have been complex.
But that's the beauty of having options! Macs don't work well for me, but they do for others.
I've had no significant problems. I can bring up a shell, type unixy things at it, compile LaTeX, C and run many more froo froo languages. People running a window system on Linux - now that's odd behavior. Haven't these people heard of screen?
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
I'm not sure what reality show you were on, but wow. Perhaps had you asked someone well-versed in macs, you'd have gotten responses to your issues that may have opened doors. If you can deal with Linux's flaws, then there's no mac issue. FWIW, I don't use Launcher nor Mission Control, or a host of over available things, yet I manage running multiple applications and documents with ease. Mouse acceleration? It's been under the "Mouse" preference panel forever, from what I recall, haven't been there in years. And you don't need to buy anything to do tweaks. In fact, I've been running with video blocked for years in Safari, because you can turn it off with a simple command (no, it's not available via a GUI, which would be nice, but that'll be fixed in Safari 11 apparently) etc etc etc.
As for Touch Bar, I still haven't figured out a reason for it. It's a nice tweak, maybe, for video or sound editing, but everything else? Not convinced, please leave the F keys alone thank you.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
A new bus design with every new generation throughout the 90's
SCSI instead of internal expansion slots
round mice
proprietary connectors everywhere
replaced Mac Pro towers with unmaintainable, but aesthetically pleasing, trash-can Mac Pros with no expansion capabilities
replaced maintainable Power PC MAC tower and iMac designs with unmaintainable iMac designs that save 1/2 an inch of thickness
Wireless mice with the charging ports on the bottoms of the mice so that you can't charge the mouse while you use it
quiet or fan-less designs that can't dissipate heat efficiently enough for unthrottled operation.
soldered-in hard drives
soldered-in memory chips
batteries that are not user replaceable.
proprietary screws. SCREWS!!!
Also, please note that the standards you mention, (USB, Gigabit Ethernet, 802.11) were not invented at Apple. Not a one. Meanwhile, they stifle their own really great inventions (e.g. firewire, Final Cut Pro). Apple makes great technology. Then, they somehow manage to twist things around that it just makes it a pain in my ass to support.
Yes, I am bitter. 20 years in IT dealing with Apple's hostility to business and education customers will do that to a person.
No, instead they force you to store it on their poorly protected cloud so retards can get a copy of your naughty pics. Much better.
lucm, indeed.