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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.
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.
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
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.
"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.
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?