Apple adds keyboard touch functions to Mac

The price is high, but... I just watched the promo video and the multi-touch bar is pretty awesome! Definitely makes this laptop tempting!

I'm going to pick one a new MBP ASAP. I've been waiting for a year for this, mine is almost three years old now.

My favorite MacBook I have used for years is Mid 2010. Works great and fast with 8MB of RAM I put in. All my other Macs are too slow, and two of them are brand new Desk Tops iMacs.

I want one but I'm not going to rush out and buy it on day one. The touch bar is kind of cool but for me it'll be the overall upgrade in specs that makes it the machine to buy. I know there are machines out there already with awesome specs and probably for a lower price, but I want this purely because I like it and my experience has been Apple computers are easier to work with for the things I want to do.

I think it's the end of the road for me and Apple with this new Macbook "Pro". It's a nice machine in its way, but it's totally unsuitable for people who want to do any serious work on it. Allow me to explain why.

No ports, other than USB-C: Very often people hand me a USB memory stick with data I need. With no standard USB ports on the new Macbook "Pro" I would need an adaptor to use the stick. I often copy data from the SD card in my camera to my Macbook Pro, with the new machine I cannot do so (without an adaptor). When I give a talk I need to connect the computer to a projector. I will have to buy a new adaptor for that as the old one will no longer fit.

No Magsafe power connector: People trip over power cables from time to time. With the Magsafe connector that's not a problem. With a USB-C connector there is a much bigger risk of damage to the computer. Of course, I can always buy a USB-C adaptor that replicates the Magsafe connector.

So that's four adaptors I need to buy just to maintain the same functionality I have at the moment. But it's even worse than that.

No Escape key: I often (every day) log into remote computers and use applications like Vi to edit scripts. The Escape key is essential for that program and many others. Having a non-responsive "Escape" region on a touch bar is a big problem. I imagine much of the time it will disappear to be replaced by Emojis or other useless stuff. I've never used an Emoji and don't intend to start now.

Then there is the keyboard. It looks like the one they have in the current Macbook, which is dreadful. They claim it is improved (of course), but the keyboard on my 2011 Macbook Pro was the best and Apple have been going downhill ever since. The Apple video showed the Touch Bar "helping" with typing by displaying auto-complete suggestions, but any professional would be able to touch type and would be looking at the screen, not the keyboard.

I liked the Macbook Pro because it offered a Unix-like OS without all the aggravation I used to get trying to install Linux on laptops. But with the new Macbook Toy and Apple's increasingly useless OSX it looks like I'll be going back to Linux, which I use on desktops at work.

Apple: I couldn't give a toss about the machine being 2 mm thinner, or the volume being 30% less. I want something that allows me to work unimpeded. By removing all the useful functionality from the Macbook you have made that impossible.

I was expecting a Macbook Air upgrade, I like the 11in ones.

"The Touch Bar... our new reason to jack up the price.... We are brave... This is innovation!"

I found the touch bar to possibly be really useful for someone who uses the adobe suite along with a graphics tablet. The graphics tablet, in my case wacom, can only give so many shortcuts. With the touch pad it could really help! I won't have to sit tablet so awkwardly anymore,

as I'm trying to be an iOS / Android programmer through night school this is interesting and useful. I'd default to a terminal but the notion of hotkeys for every app that are customizable might be an interesting niche market. When watching video you could watch it in full screen with the timeline below for example. Since it's off the plane it wouldn't be distracting. I like it. Other germane microviewing would free up the infrequently used function keys.

The charger is new, as you know I have a "thing" for chargers so the all Thunderbolt all the time ports struck me as funny but perhaps I can be forgiven. Actually that makes it easier to use a third party brick. Hooray!

Now it's just a question of what kind of app to make so I can afford to buy one ;) suggestions?

27" desktop seems to take care of all my needs. I don't want to carry a laptop around, I don't want to do computing outside my place. When I leave my house I leave tech behind. A free phone with free minutes takes care of the rest.

It looks like Apple is unleashing a mishmash of a lineup of Macbook models. New ones with bar, new ones without the bar, old Pros, old Airs, and old plain Macbooks. Seems confusing for the consumer.

I think by putting the new bar on the 15's they're trying to sell that model more even though I see more 13's in the wild as they're easier to carry. I don't know the breakdown of 15's vs 13 inch screen sales though, but that's my one person subjective impression

the Magsafe is awesome. My dog running amuck, my cats freak out and take the cord with them and my son jets towards my mac book pro when i play games...now with no Magsafe...crash! but daddy likes!

in a rare contrition, Apple had to ditch the gimmicky adapters for standard cables and ports that could handle more functions. Hard to believe port standard and Apple were in the same sentence. Pinch me

Yeah, it's hard to understand why they would drop the magsafe - it was a great idea when they brought it in, and I really appreciate them.

Apple won't have to keep censoring pics on the Internet of mag"safe" catching fire. I imagine having magnetism near an electrical port and conductive wires wasn't a recipe for safety and they got tired of the repairs and replacements.

As an idea it certainly had noteworthy uses and appeal. Probably the engineering wasn't able to keep it up. I also wonder if it was a matter of suppliers and they went with the new standard Thunderbolt they've been trying to push. Thunderbolt looks to solved more problems they were facing in one solution as a combo port and will help cut costs up and down the company. It was low hanging fruit for a company trying to make more money.

You'll have to get used to taking care of where the wire is ;) That's altogether not a bad thing as it will help stop accidents.

Had this "feature" for 2 years on my lenovo laptop. Its the worst thing ever. Because it changes per app you can't type without having to stop and look at the keyboard to see where the button is. For a power keyboard user it's a massive time waster.

maybe customization will help in that case? Assuming it can be customized of course

sf2k : It can but the problem was it changed every time you opened an app and every app used it differently and offered different icons for whatever the app thought was best or needed. Not only this the icons were different sizes and shapes with nothing in common. I still think this is the worst thing ever and people will use it to customize their macs but if it is anything like lenovo's everyone is bound to hate it.

Thanks, that's great insight to a similar use case. I was going through the API for the toolbar and it's a mini retina screen, so it can be used for graphical data as well as buttons. In the case of the buttons, there are standard ones in place and you would drag it to the right to reveal additional custom sections. So you might escape over customizations. Of course we will see how it goes.

In other human computer interaction news is the Microsoft Dial for the Surface Pros and the new epic Surface Studio. Also a display of standard and custom menus and tools. If the dial concept takes off like the mouse and pen that might show up on a Mac as a third party device. Microsoft stole Apple's thunder there

Got mine reserved! Can't wait!

https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/5a6lbd/it_just_works_apple/

Lol. 7246 comments- for one comedy pic posted on reddit...... soon there will be no ports at on the macbook, though the latest one does have a headphone jack! yay.