One of the nice parts of using a Kindle is that it syncs your page between all of your devices, so if I want to quickly open the app on my phone and read a few pages I'm right where I was when I was last on my Kindle. When I get back to my Kindle, it has the new location synced.
I read a lot of non-fiction. One nice feature that it has on WiFi is the ability to highlight a word or phrase and it will display a definition or a Wikipedia article/snippet right there on the device. Its an easy and fast way to get more information out of your readings, especially when I'm at the pub with only my Kindle.
Another strong reason why you probably need WiFi on a Kindle at least some of the time is because WiFi is the primary way it gets content. You can get a USB cable to load stuff on it, but chances are if you've bought a Kindle you bought it to use the Kindle store.
Also, I'm pretty sure it downloads a bunch of ads at once when it syncs, and then shows them over time. I've had it disconnected from WiFi for a few weeks before, and it still showed ads. So even if you only connected it for a few minutes to sync everything and then you disconnected until you wanted a new book from the Kindle store, you would still see ads.
Tip: if you have another browser, turn off JS in Safari. Use Safari until you really need JS, copy paste URL, Chrome, go to clipboard link, retry. It's laborious, but it beats getting bent over the knee by mobile ads.
Sounds like state-of-the-art pre-adblock technology.
Browsing with no-JS/JS browsers indeed is laborious nowadays. I use this approach out of habit on my desktop machine, but on my new laptop I just couldn't bring myself to copy this solution and installed an adblocker instead.
Or just keep Javascript on but install JS Blocker 5 and choose what scripts run. It quite amazed me how much sites try to fingerprint your browser, especially with canvas fingerprinting.
So... just about the touchbar and not this particular project:
The touchbar is on the keyboard, almost perpendicularly (and many times at an obtuse angle) opposite to the screen. So I have to move my head up and down all the time. This is not an issue with the regular keyboard because it has physical buttons which don't change their meaning, so I have memorized the layout and I can use my muscle memory.
To avoid moving human head up and down, maybe they should have put it adjacent below or above the screen, you know. And while they were at it, maybe they should have just merged it into the screen seamlessly... Oh, and while they were at that, they could make the entire screen a touch-screen instead of just a small bar. Just imagine... a touchscreen laptop. Now that would be amazing, right?
> So I have to move my head up and down all the time.
No you don't have to. You can simply move your eyes. Also humans have this ability called "peripheral vision". Not to mention using the touchbar is optional. If you want to memorise all the key combinations, you're fine.
I think we should stop guessing about a new UI method before we actually try it.
Apple stood by this conviction until they started selling iPads. It's likely that they will maintain their position against touchscreen laptops only until they can make a reasonable profit selling them. I speculate that the reason for Apple not currently producing them, more than anything else, has to do with the fact that touchscreen laptops would cut into iPad sales.
He says tablets are good for consuming information, but not for inputing, because typing is faster than handwriting. That seems to coincide with iPad's intended usage, which is media and web.
I'm right now using this wacom lower surface with a fullhd antiglare touchscreen in front of me, a 695g 9mm thin device with an all day battery and a backlit keyboard that adapts to my typing style, what am I using?
"So I have to move my head up and down all the time."
I believe that for the use-case of Touch Bar as slider, it has similar behavioral characteristics as a trackpad. Do you use a trackpad? Or a mouse? Do you find yourself moving your eyes back and forth between the screen and the trackpad or mouse? Honest questions. I'm not trying to be snarky :)
As for custom keys, I think this has more in common with chording/key commands. There is the distinction that there aren't physical keys, but in the case of key commands, I know I'm not thinking, say, ⌘-Z when I undo. I'm just thinking Undo. And many key commands are application dependent. As I get used to whatever custom keys I've got programmed or are made available by an application, there'll be some period of acclimation, and then it'll just become habit. Perhaps to offset the lack of physical gaps between keys there will be larger target areas on the Touch Bar.
What do you think? Are these comparisons useful? If not, what are their limitations?
I do think the Touch Bar would benefit from some kind of haptic response, and I wouldn't be surprised if this is the direction it goes.
I also wouldn't be surprised if at some time in the future there is a touch screen for Macs. That doesn't mean that Apple is ready to release such a MacBook yet (for whatever reason), or that the Touch Bar isn't a valid feature. And while it's generating a lot of heat at this point, until there are a lot more hands-on (cough) reports, I think it's prudent to remember a lot of this is speculation, both for and against.
Edit to add: If you choose to down vote, please take the time to reply with a comment as well in the interest of communication. Thanks!
Trackpad, mouse, etc, is not a good comparable. Unlike a trackpad or mouse, the touch bar is a video display. Being a display implies visual interaction, and the lack of physical feedback will make 'touch typing' the touch bar difficult.
Yes, it has a display component. I don't see how that implies it must always be used by looking at it. Keys (usually) have labels on them, yet many people don't use the labels as reference once they're accustomed to touch typing.
Learning key commands can be a chore, requiring use of the manual or discovery through menus. Do you remember cards provided with some applications that included lists of command key commands? The Touch Bar makes things like that instantly available. And once you learn where they are, you don't need to be looking at them.
There are probably going to be some interesting interaction possibilities where we're going to want use the Touch Bar in a more visual way.
One I can think of is the autocomplete demo during the Hello Again event. I personally think autocomplete would be better served keyboard alone in a manner similar to how the spelling and grammar suggestions work, rather than through the Touch Bar, but again, that's not having used it.
I completely agree that it is a new input device. Just not completely new. Some things are going to carry over from the keyboard, the trackpad, and the touch screen. And I agree the lack of physical response may take some getting used to. As I mentioned, I think we'll see improvements on this in the future.
You're missing the 'physical feedback' component. People don't need to look at labels on keys, because they can feel the keys. A smooth bit of touchscreen has no 'landmarks' to orient yourself with.
> I completely agree that it is a new input device. Just not completely new
Yep. Lenovo introduced one a couple of years ago in their X1 Carbons. It was hated so much that it was stripped out of the next gen.
Ultimately, the only benefit of the touchbar is the ability to be used as a slider, but you lose discrete keys to get that. How many things would such a slider be useful for? People aren't changing their volume all that often, and what real difference is there between a slider and a pair of volume buttons (media keys) anyway?
"Yep. Lenovo introduced one a couple of years ago in their X1 Carbons. It was hated so much that it was stripped out of the next gen."
From the reading I've done this morning on the 2014 X1 Carbon (the only model that had the Adaptive Keyboard replacing the function row), there was a lot of dissatisfaction with the keyboard and trackpad as a whole, not only the strip. Among others, they removed the physical keys from the trackpad, moved the Home and End keys to the Caps Lock location, and removed other keys entirely. I read a lot of complaints about all of these, and all of these were reverted in the 2015 version.
Yeah, people are discussing the removal of the ESC key on the MacBook Pro as well. I'm personally going to miss the dedicated volume and brightness keys, and I use the ESC key in conjunction with Command to trigger LaunchBar, which I use heavily. I also think I'll be able to get used to it. There was a time in my life when I didn't use LaunchBar, and before I had dedicated volume and brightness keys. I don't remember it being all that bad. I'll see, when I get around to getting a new machine. I'm sure there are those who use the function row much more heavily than I. In the absence of aggregate data, I really can't comment on much more than my own experience and read about others.
Lenovo's decision to revert everything could be seen as them deciding it wasn't in their best interest to determine which changes were worth keeping. This is all speculation, of course. And they could very well have determined that all of the changes were ruinous to some degree. It's really pretty impressive that Lenovo was willing to make so many changes to their keyboard, when, AIUI, the keyboard is one of the features that keeps people coming back to Lenovo in general.
In the MacBook Pro, they're only replacing the function row with the Touch Bar. From an experimental point of view, it's a much more focussed experiment. It'll be interesting to see what happens when it's actually had more use.
In theory, you wouldn't need landmarks because the keys below are the landmarks. Unfortunately, the dynamic actions don't seem to line up with the number keys so I don't know how that will work in practice.
The size and location of the dynamic actions/custom keys isn't fixed (unlike, say physical keys each with its own display), so I'm not sure if alignment makes sense in this case. Or am I misinterpreting what you mean?
That said, I think they can have the same "fixed" location for a given use case. Just like you can remap a keyboard so Caps Lock can mean Control, once you do that, Control will be at the same location (the Caps Lock key). Once you're used to that location, things work fine.
Regarding kyboard shortcuts Mac OS HIG Guidelines says:
> Avoid using the Touch Bar for tasks associated with well-known keyboard shortcuts. In general, the Touch Bar shouldn’t include controls for tasks such as find, select all, deselect, copy, cut, paste, undo, redo, new, save, close, print, and quit. It also shouldn’t include controls that replicate key-based navigation, such as page up and page down.
Thanks for the reference to the HIG. To be clear, I was using Undo/⌘-Z as an example of how I think about keyboard shortcuts as command rather than the specific keystrokes. I wasn't suggesting that Undo should have a place on the Touch Bar.
Besides providing the reference, was there something you intended to convey with the quote?
> Besides providing the reference, was there something you intended to convey with the quote?
Only that Touchbar seems intended to be very dynamic and have constantly changing mappings. So there will not be much consistency across apps, especially since common shortcuts shouldn't be put there.
Gotcha. I agree that there will not be much consistency across apps, and I think that's the beauty of it. And yeah, what's available on the Touch Bar can potentially be very context dependent.
Actually, I could see undo on the Touch Bar being useful. I'd use cmd-Z most of the time, of course, but on more than one occasion I wished I could see what the undo command would actually do (Finder operations, among others). A 'button' on the task bar that explicitly states what will be undone could be great.
> Do you use a trackpad? Or a mouse? Do you find yourself moving your eyes back and forth between the screen and the trackpad or mouse? Honest questions. I'm not trying to be snarky :)
I think the difference is that the feedback you get on the trackpad/mouse is on the screen. It doesn't need you to look down. The same thing could not probably be said of the touchbar.
Is that so? If you're scrubbing the controller on the Touch Bar, you see the result on the screen, don't you? From the demo video, when scrubbing video, there is a keyframe on the Touch Bar, but you're also seeing the change on the screen.
Also, looking at my keyboard, the angle difference between looking at the function row to about 1 inch above the bottom of the screen (which I estimate to be the roughly the same as where a scrubber would be), is about ¼ to ⅓ of the angular distance from the bottom of the screen to the top of the screen. I think it's useful to consider how the location of the Touch Bar and its display will affect our UX. In this case, I think the concern might be overrated, given how much we're currently accustomed to moving our eyes with our existing screens.
Please note that I'm not saying you'll never look at the Touch Bar. I do think there will many cases when muscle memory will be as effective as what we're used to with a trackpad or keyboard.
> If you're scrubbing the controller on the Touch Bar, you see the result on the screen, don't you?
What if you touch the wrong part of the bar and accidentally do something else? I personally have trouble believing that I'd be able to consistently touch the right part of the bar without looking every time without there being an actual physical divide between the sections even if I did consistently remember the layout and functionality for every app I used. I think peripheral vision would help here, although that goes out the window if you're hooked up to a monitor and still using the built-in keyboard.
It works the opposite way; by having a touch laptop touchers have this hilarious public shaming moment when the UI recoils away from them pawing at my display.
What's particularly weird are involuntary touchers who are physically incapable of gesturing at something on the laptop screen without touching it. Watching them lock up as they attempt to control their arms while talking is amazing, it's like they're learning to ride a bike for the first time.
> Is your premise correct though? Will you need to move your head up and down? Isn't the touch bar will be in your field of vision?
Considering zero part of my keyboard is in my field of vision I'd say yes I'd have to move my head up and down. I haven't had a chance to play with the new MacBook Pro yet but it seems like a reasonable assumption.
> Even if your premise is true, is it better to move your head up and down or to move your hands forward and backward to reach the touch screen?
It's actually two different use cases here. A touch screen helps with touch type of controls. So precision zooming and scrolling is kinda awesome on one (though scrolling is weak with the nice touchpad). The touchbar is meant to be more utility like a row of function keys.
I don't think it's entirely fair to directly compare the two. For instance moving it to the bottom of the screen instead of the top of the keyboard turns it from easy to access touch keys to more informational. At least in my opinion.
> Considering zero part of my keyboard is in my field of vision
Zero? Is that even possible?
When using a laptop, it's impossible to look at the display without being able to also look at the keyboard (and touchbar) by just moving your _eyes_. You don't have to move your head.
That's probably exactly how the argument went at apple. However, doing dev without any external screens or keyboard is the exception not the norm. If tou are already bending your neck like that day to day then sure you have bigger problems.
I don't look at my keyboard when typing so other than the slight realization that it is there on a laptop I never look at it (but yes it would technically be in my field of vision in this case but that misses the point). However on a desktop setup / docked laptop the keyboard isn't anywhere near where I could see it without significantly moving my head down.
Regardless discussing field of vision is more of a red herring in this debate; it's really about the eye movement and context switching. I should have chosen different wording.
> When using a laptop, it's impossible to look at the display without being able to also look at the keyboard (and touchbar) by just moving your _eyes_. You don't have to move your head.
I think you confuse the physical act of moving ones head to be more disruptive than moving one's eyes. It's actually about the same when you're talking UX assuming the head is moving to change the field of vision. This is something you keep track of and many times head movement will be removed or ignored from testing data when you're tracking where the user is looking because you can move your head and still keep your eyes in one place.
Again you said: "Considering zero part of my keyboard is in my field of vision I'd say yes I'd have to _move_ my head up and down."
I hope you understand that you move your eyes when you look at different things on your display. The touchbar is just another display that is only slightly lower than the lowest part of your display. You don't need to move your head to see that, only your eyes. The same eyes you move when you look at different things on the main display.
> I hope you understand that you move your eyes when you look at different things on your display.
But of course. That was a huge part of my point. Moving your eyes off the display is a _big move_. It's not a typical UX pattern. These things are very well tracked in user testing with eye tracking. The idea is to incrementally move their eyes and never require large movements else you end up having UX issues.
Judging from the downvotes I'm guessing many haven't looked into or used eye tracking during user testing. It's quite interesting, you should check it out!
I think the touch pad is going to be one of those things people will just have to try, and it might turn out to be an awesome addition to the input tools at hand. Or it might one of those things that sounded good in theory, but is just a pain in practice.
One thing to consider is that things like editing video are already mouse centric, and the keyboard shortcuts augment the interface. You don't leave your hands in home position.
If you're working on the laptop, using the trackpad, you're already in the mode where you are going back and forth, and your hands need to move around.
When using a mouse, trackball, etc, you can get into workflows based on having one hand operating the mouse, while the other does the keyboard shortcuts. So there could be very interesting uses with two hands.
What makes it not so compelling to me, is that I do serious work with my laptop closed, and a big monitor (I'm music producer/audio engineer).
The amount of information you need to get on the screen at once, if possible, for media authoring applications, requires a relatively rigid focus on the screen. Having my head hunched over a little laptop display is not going to work for extended sessions.
The problem of creating physical interfaces that work well with the screen relates to the abstraction that is involved in GUIs. You have to keep steady focus on the screen, keeping track of the mouse, and what you are doing. You enter kind of a trance, pretty quickly, where you have accepted a two dimensional representation of a complex structure, and are operating within its framework.
This divorces the metaphorical actions of the user in the GUI, which is what we care about, from the physical actions of the body.
For a new user interface to work, it will have to be incorporated into this metaphorical framework the user operates in.
If it deviates to much from the abstractions of the interface, it breaks the trance required to get into the flow, and will simply not be used.
I suspect one of the issues will be if users can actually quickly look down to see what they are touching, or perceive enough with peripheral vision, without losing track of where they are on the screen. It's a reasonable location for the touch bar. As the user gets used to where controls on the touch bar are located, the visual cues might be enough to consistently target the virtual control.
It could also be really helpful for keyboard commands that have a lot of modifiers, and which you don't use much. They can be real handy at times, but the trouble of looking up the key binding in the heat of the moment prevents the habit from getting built up.
Look at the image[1] on the Apple website showing off the Touch Bar on the new MacBook Pro. Nobody I know uses their laptop oriented perpendicular to their desk.
One good vantage point to view the Touch Bar is standing behind the user looking over the their shoulder.
>and while they were at that, they could make the entire screen a touch-screen instead of just a small bar. Just imagine... a touchscreen laptop. Now that would be amazing, right?
Ummm..Gravity begs to differ. Adding touch to your laptop's screen is the worse possible thing you could do to it. It just makes zero sense ergonomically: try holding your hand up to your screen for 30s and tell me how that goes.
I kind of have trouble imagining needing to use touch controls for a full thirty seconds for them to be useful. I don't even think I keep my hand on my mouse/trackpad for anywhere close to that amount of continuous time
Rest assured that Apple has thought about this a lot more than you have, and this is the solution they came up with. Touching a screen is pretty tiring for your arms; imagine if you had no trackpad but instead had to tap everything on the screen of your laptop.
I assure you that very few people touch type the function keys; they will not be missed. The escape key I will miss, but how much I don't know.
> Touching a screen is pretty tiring for your arms
Only if you're touching it constantly, without interruption, which is a very unusual use-case. Most instances are a quick tap on a dialogue button and then back to the resting / typing position.
Anyhow, extending my arm to touch the screen feels little different to reaching for my Dell 'media keys' ( in the same location as Apple's Touch Bar ); just a slightly different vector. In either case I have to break my home-row poise, but when touching the screen at least I don't have to break my eyes-on-screen-focus whilst my finger comes into view.
I like the idea up-thread of an alternative position for the Touch Bar below the screen, usually reserved for a logo which loiters uselessly but subliminally in my peripheral vision.
I already type on my iPhone without looking at the keys. You don't need tactile feedback to touch type. If you use the though bar in a particular app enough, I imagine muscle memory will help you out.
I have grown to love the touch screen on my Chromebook pixel. Felt awkward to reach at first, but a non touch screen now feels really awkward. Not that the touch screen replaces all interaction, there are some things that are faster on the keyboard, touch pad, or touch screen.
That said, touching other people's screens is not polite.
With regards to the touch bar, seems like you could use software in combination with the existing touchpad and screen to do something similar. Reserve the top edge of the touch pad, on touch a menu pops up, slide to select or something...
Same experience with my Pixel. Also, in some situations such as when training someone, being able to have them use the keyboard/track pad and then being able to move things forward by touching/zooming the screen when they get stuck is productive and doesn't interrupt flow.
I can confirm. I have a touchscreen laptop and use it only once a week when discussing things with coworkers, because that way they can see more clearly what I do in contrast to using the mouse.
Apple's HIG[1] on the Touch bar is actually great. You can sort of understand the reason Apple put it on the Macbook. You can at least envision two interesting things:
- Touch UI for scrubbing/scrolling contents faster.
- Dynamic shortcuts for most used commands that previously only accessible by using the keyboard.
I thought this whilst watching Apple's event. All of the functionality they demonstrated on the TouchBar basically duplicated functionality already in each app via a shortcut. Eg. safari - you can open a new tab! (cmd-T). There's an address bar! (cmd-L). You can go to each tab! (cmd-number, eg. cmd-1).
And all of the gestures were what the excellent touchpad was built to do anyway. Scrubbing? Gestures will do that.
It's like they put two giant touch interfaces on the device so that they could fight for attention, and the poor developer has to write two handlers for the two event sources, whilst it does the same thing at the end of it.
I haven't actually tried it yet, but by watching the launch demo and several screenshots of touch bar on app like Photos or Final Cut Pro I can see that:
- Touch Bar is probably better on scrubbing/scrolling because you can actually see the zoomed out content, like the entire timeline of the movie on FCP.
- I haven't tried Boastr. I am sure it's useful and faster for pro. But on first look it's pretty complicated. It's not built in to the Mac and not easily accessible, especially for new user.
I think there's something to what you're saying here. That's often been an argument for the mouse/pointer vs touch screen as well. How is this different from using a touch screen in general? Or are you saying that's problematic as well? Having an additional Touch Bar to effectively increase screen real estate by removing the necessity of dedicating screen space to the slider control seems like a win.
I don't do video editing or anything like that. My experience with a slider is pretty much limited to Netflix and such on my tablet :) Seems to work pretty well there. I can see how it might not work as well for fine-grained work. But that's an argument for touch screens in general, isn't it? Or do you think there's a distinction between Touch Bar and touch screen?
Caveat: On some video sliders, you can move vertically as well to increase/dilate the resolution of the horizontal movement. You won't have the same room with the touch screen. A couple options I can think of: use the track pad or a key press to modify the Touch Bar tracking; or perhaps track the speed of movement on the Touch Bar to modify the resolution, e.g., slower movement, higher resolution.
No, sir. In fact you can still see both the current content on the Macbook screen and the entire timeline on the Touch Bar. On trackpad, you need to actually move the pointer to the content before you can scrub, and it's not really that fast. If you manipulate directly on the screen, isn't it will block the view?
IMHO, as far as I understand it, Touch Bar is a bridge that connects the static nature of the keyboard with the dynamic nature of the screen. It is not intended to replace keyboard nor the screen. It is there to augment and extend them.
Touch bar is perfect for this job, considering:
- You can't beat the fast input from fixed keyboard + muscle memory.
- Touch screen on a laptop is really not ergonomic, your arm will get tired fast.
I always enjoy installing and configuring complicated 3rd party software! This BetterTouchTool is way better than any out of the box "it just works" software...
O' how I despise the new trackpads that aren't merely trackpad pointing devices, but also buttons, scrollbars and other bullshit I never wanted too.
Christ. I need to move the fucking mouse cursor. And, shit on me, I did not intend on fucking clicking or swiping anything, or an other absurdly tangential but obliquely imaginable bullshit, God damn it.
The worst is when you have to press the trackpad to click the button, and as your fleshy fingers flatten out against the trackpad, it registers the pressure center moving slightly, and so the pointer moves, and you click the wrong God damned thing because the trackpad IS the button.
It was better when the buttons were separate plastic divisions disconnected from the motion tracking area.
Have you tried Apple's recent trackpads with the Force Touch sensor and haptic feedback?
In my experience, the fact that the trackpad no longer physically moves when you press down on it to click makes really cuts down on the problem of the cursor moving during the click, as does the greatly improved uniformity of the force required. Being able to adjust the force required to click is also quite nice.
I was never quite satisfied with Apple's hinged trackpads (or the standalone bluetooth trackpad with the click mechanism in the rubber feet) as a replacement for the physical button despite the trackpad size increase it enabled, but the latest generation strikes me as almost perfect.
The public out cry is because Apple removed the ESC key for no reason (and positioned it one row above on the touch bar). And many are angry that MacBookPro now costs even more, and has 2013-style hardware in 2016. If it was called MacBookAir and cost half there would be no out cry. A Pro-level notebook that is now way too thin for high-end hardware and too thin for common connectors and too slow for high end application needs like 4k video cutting & processing, etc. - well it's not a Pro-notebook anymore, more something for wannabes, life-style and hipsters article. As the other hardware desktop/mini/Pro/notebook stuff from Apple is stuck in 2013-models as well, it's scary to watch how they don't get it at all. So the touch bar isn't a problem, it's just one of many questionable decisions (the same happens at Microsoft, so many questionable decisions and deaf ear to the community) - Steve Jobs and Bill Gates are really missing.
The charitable interpretation of their comment is not that Nyan Cat is useful, but that this is a creative use for a new medium/input device, and that we will likely see more uses developed for it that we had not previously envisioned.
Hmm.. I might use that. For typing, I wouldn't miss the physical space bar key like I'll miss the physical escape key. It would be closer to where my hand is naturally on the trackpad too.
It should be possible with enough care. A touch sensitive space bar would really enhance a keyboard (I'm mostly using a desktop though, doesn't make sense on a laptop)
That actually sounds like a pretty brilliant idea to me.
If the space bar area was converted to the track pad. Tapping it would be a space, while dragging it would give you the touch bar like features. So for example, when using Word, you have formatting options on the space touch bar like they demonstrated on the touch bar. If you tap it, it's a space, but start sliding from the left, and the formatting options appear on the screen itself, and you stop sliding when you reach the option you want to select it. Basically, tap to touch, and slide to scrub between options (or between a timeline).
This way you also wouldn't have to take your eyes off the screen to know what options are available.
This gives me an idea. The keyboard on my phone recently added the feature to drag along the spacebar to move the cursor in the text, but it's far too small to be that useful. I think being able to swipe on the spacebar to move the cursor or horizontally scroll would be fairly useful (especially given how often I actually scroll slightly horizontally on trackpads when I try to scroll vertically)
My bet is after this okay-to-failure of a product iteration Apple will pivot to a detachable dual screen model... Fear not though, they'll still happily lag behind current hardware for better margins. /s ;)
>Fear not though, they'll still happily lag behind current hardware for better margins.
They don't "lag behind current hardware for better margins". The CPU class they use in the MBPr line is still unavailable from Intel. Early "Kaby Lake" PC laptops use other, more power hungry, Kaby Lake models, and even those in limited runs.
If they wanted to achieve better margins in any way, they could use way worse construction and materials, not insist on high quality trackpads, not add the touch strip, add cheapo USB 2.1 and even Ethernet ports to keep everybody happy, and just put some early, 6-hour battery life Kaby Lake machine out there.
Are you referring to the i7-6700HQ that was released in 2015? The CPU that's present in the 15" Retina MacBook Pro? Or is there a different CPU that nobody else is privy to?
There isn't a mobile class edition of the Kalby Lake processor with four cores available. The 15" Pro has been quad core as long as I can remember. It was also only announced a few months ago.
Skylake processors were announced last year and the new laptop uses them. In fact, I believe the 15" BTO edition uses the fastest Skylake processor Intel makes.
I'm unfamiliar with what detachable implies here. What's the distinction between a detachable and something like an iPad with a Smart Keyboard? Is a Surface Book or a Surface Pro a detachable?
I think he's talking about what I would call a "convertible," e.g. Lenovo's portable Yoga range. Something that can be both a proper laptop (by the popular definition) and a tablet.
My big issue with the touch bar is it will be a far awkward reach for me when I use my desk with external monitor with a external keyboard. It's really only useful when I work outside my office. :(
This. I think from now on, If I get a Macbook Pro, I will just buy 2 monitors, and get them upper so the monitors with the laptop screen would make like a "V". With a mouse and no more... Because a keyboard with touchbar I think will be pretty expensive... But It will be at least a year until I change my actual macbook so a lot of can happen in one year, like Microsoft updating the Surface book...
Same for me, but - anecdotally - I've noticed a ton of people working with their laptops and external monitors in a stacked arrangement lately. They don't use a secondary mouse or keyboard, and instead keep their laptop in front of them with the external monitor above and behind it.
(Note: android, and computer users can use this righht away, but iOS users will need to add this page to their homescreen before Apple is fully convinced that the users DOES want to hear sounds generated via the web audio API. Seems silly, but Apple doesnt trust that users know what they want)
Well if you are writing your own HTML and JS instruments, chances are you do want to hear sounds generated by the web audio API.
Are the users of Safari and Mobile Safari so different that on the desktop its totally fine (as in any browser) but Mobile Safari users need it blocked unless they take action to hear it? I cant think of any reason to single out the users of Mobile Safari with such a feature.
I was worried that the touchbar will not have any legitimate use. On a bit more serious note, is there anything that this could do that is worth the pain of removing the esc and fn keys from the user point of view? I can hardly think of anything.
There really isnt any need for a mac or linux terminal, Bloomberg anywhere works great and so does running Bloomberg inside a VM... Also they would just release a new keyboard with a touch bar given 99% of the install base is Windows.
could someone who has the TouchBar tell me: is it possible to lock the function keys in place? Does the user or the app have ultimate control of its little screen?
edit: I say this as someone who loves nyancat, and would love to have a nyan-mode on/off toggle somewhere, if I had a TouchBar.
