With Touchbar, Apple Is Grasping At Straws (Opinion)

[scolaner]

Thinly veiled advertisement...

Lol, what?

I'm so confused, the people who downvoted the person you quoted also downvoted you.

Anyway i agree 100% with your article.

I'm not even sure who I'm being accused of advertising for.

 

[daglesj]

They need to give Johnny Ive the push. His design philosophy is bankrupt and doesn't allow them to add functionality, only remove it. This leads to dull repetitive products as we've seen for the past 6-7 years or more.

 

[RealAberracus]

Lol, i can see clearly a bunch of people who will never be on the Apple Macbook market, im a profesional video Editor i run a business, entirely on Mac OS X computers, and im salivating for that touch bar, its a universal command at your fingertips, the idea of editing the timeline without leaving the shortcut filled keyboard is great. I think this is real innovation, not just putting multitouch in the laptop screen and call it a day. we will see but as a Profesional editor count me in.

 

[nateb25]

I use function keys for Photoshop actions. Now this Macbook Pro with touch strip will be useless for me. They should of left function keys and added this strip if they wanted to. I don't really care about it. Nope, I am not buying this Macbook Pro with this touch strip...

 

[hitman400]

OP has never tried out the touch bar, or anyone commenting in this section has either, so I wouldn't be so harsh to criticize. The people who tried it out at the event said it was a great piece of innovation. The bar is not just for moving commands on the screen to the touch, you can literally assign any function or app to the strip.

I don't understand how this kind of flexibility is neglected in the PC enthusiast forums.

 

[hitman400]

I use function keys for Photoshop actions. Now this Macbook Pro with touch strip will be useless for me. They should of left function keys and added this strip if they wanted to. I don't really care about it. Nope, I am not buying this Macbook Pro with this touch strip...

What are you talking about? You can reapply the function keys to the touch bar. Considering that the haptic function keys are already a stretch when you type, you still look down to see where the function keys are to press them haptic or not. During the Apple event, they even showed off how the touch bar works with Photoshop.

 

[hitman400]

Apple has never been a "great innovator", at least not any time during the memory of anyone under the age of 50. What Apple has done well, at times very well, is take what is there already and either make it better or combine it with something else in an unexpected (and not always useful) way. At their best, they were "The Matrix" of computer companies. And even that hasn't been the case since they lost Jobs. Now they are quite content to rely on the insularity and elitism of their userbase to allow them to get away with packaging old technology as "innovation", and it works, as long as it looks pretty. They're the epitome of style over substance.

The style over substance argument usually comes from someone who is incredibly biased towards the PC userbase. Apple revolutionized the trackpad on laptops and multi-touch so much that Windows began copying. Apple was one of the few companies who inspired other laptop companies to start making their laptops thinner and not bricks (ie: Razer Blade). Apple invented USB-C. Apple was the first to have Wifi in their laptops I believe?

Innovation is there, it just goes unseen to many PC users.

 

[gggplaya]

Apple has never been a "great innovator", at least not any time during the memory of anyone under the age of 50. What Apple has done well, at times very well, is take what is there already and either make it better or combine it with something else in an unexpected (and not always useful) way. At their best, they were "The Matrix" of computer companies. And even that hasn't been the case since they lost Jobs. Now they are quite content to rely on the insularity and elitism of their userbase to allow them to get away with packaging old technology as "innovation", and it works, as long as it looks pretty. They're the epitome of style over substance.

Apple was the first to have Wifi in their laptops I believe?

Innovation is there, it just goes unseen to many PC users.

Not really fair to say. The iBook was a premium product like macbooks are today. They charge alot more money and can have more standard features if they choose. The iBook G3 was the first laptop to have an optional wifi card built in.

But the boardband market was much different back then, i know because i sold computers when i was in high school and college back in 1999 when the ibook was released. I also sold iBooks, albeit not many of them because they were so expensive. But the cute iMac sold like hotcakes. I, like most other people were still on dialup 56k at the time, so 56k modems were standard. But there was a PCMCIA slot standard on all laptops, so if you did have the luxury of buying broadband, you would buy a router and PCMCIA wifi card to go with it. It wasn't a big deal as laptops were big and heavy back then. It wasn't until a few years later when these laptops were obsolete that broadband became more mainstream.

Wifi became standard on cheaper PC's when the market actually wanted it, but back in 1999, wifi users were the extreme minority. Even businesses preferred to use an ethernet connection because it was far more reliable and way faster(802.11b only had a max rate of 11mbps). In fact, according to internet user data (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_in_the_United_States) 43% of people were connected to the internet, but only 2.5% of people were on broadband back in 2000. So you can see why it didn't make sense for laptop manufacturers to install provisions for a wifi card you had to buy and install anyways, when you could just plop a universal one into the PCMCIA slot.

 

[johnblommers]

So no other laptop has a 10-point retina display touch bar and neither does MSFT have it
And keyboard users are clearly not the target for this and neither are MSFTs recent announcements
Seth is the hardware expert so Apple has hubris but not Microsoft?
Apple has single-handily jump-started the touch-aware device marketplace but it's Microsoft that is doing things right? Uhuh.

What is that smell? I know! It's Seth blowing Microsoft smoke up my shorts.

Seth completely and totally misses the obvious reason for the touch bar.

It's all about accessibility. Uhuh I knew you wouldn't get it, Seth.

 

[Jorge Nascimento]

Apple....Re inventing other people technologies and calling them Technological Revolutions since 19.........................................!