Your hands don't have to move around as much to select a toolbar item and you don't have to move your hands up to the screen like a surface. I think the touch bar will be great for productivity.
The only part that's similar is the key faces can change. They're still physical keys that press individually. It's not multi touch, a key can't suddenly become a slider.
The issue is that the MBP line previously had zero of these ports and now they have zero of anything else. That means we have to go buy adaptors so that we can use our hard drives, power adaptors, iPhone/iPad charge cables, and other peripherals.
It's nice that these aren't proprietary cables, but I'll have to spend over $100 on adaptors, or wait two years until there are cheaper alternatives.
Lastly, there may be 4 ports in total, but since 1 is used for charging, there are effectively 3. Not a deal-breaker going from 4 to 3, but definitely a problem going from 2 to 1 on the low-end MBP.
> Lastly, there may be 4 ports in total, but since 1 is used for charging
Only if you're using it exclusively for charging. They literally showed using it with a display that gets video out over the same cord it powers the laptop with.
> Four standard (non-proprietary) multi-use ports is a complaint?
Well they are incompatible with almost everything Apple makes. You can't even plug in an iPhone out of the box. You'll need a special adapter for every device you have (monitor, storage, phone, SD reader, etc).
I hadn't even thought that far yet. All of my Apple cables would need Apple adapters. Every future Apple cable is going to need an adapter back to USB 2.0... facepalm
kinda reminiscent of the 12 year old Nintendo DS display. and in that I suspect developers will by constantly trying to find a purpose, never to much avail beyond some hotkeys, that only hunt and peck typists could appreciate. remember the uber lusted, and uber expensive optimus keyboards?
I'm surprised you're the only person here who has so far mentioned Art Lebedev/Optimus.
I have an Optimus mini 3 and an Optimus keyboard.
The former I never really got along with as the oled drivers made a loud 18khz whine. The latter, however, I still use for photoshop, gaming, coding, etc. - ain't got no poxy touch strip, my entire keyboard is a technicolor discotechque.
That ribbon was updated dynamically depending on the application you were using? Did it allow you to re-arrange the commands on it? Did it support scrubbing/swiping as a method of input?
So did I, but it was a simply something that could have used physical keys. Was it dynamic based on the application you were using or configurable in any way?
> No innovative features? What do you call a ribbon display that no one has ever done before?
A definite step back for the sake of introducing a gimmick, whose consequences have not been given enough thought.
They could have tried buying a Lenovo Carbon Gen.2 and using it for half a day, and realized what a stupid idea it is.
I actually had one of those laptops for a little while - issued by my workplace.
It came with the same concept - a touch-sensitive strip, with (limited) display capabilities and which could change its function depending on the context.
Even if the touchstrip hadn't been an utter piece of junk (which it was - hello lack of feedback and failing to detect extremely deliberate touches), I wouldn't have hated it any less. I don't want to have to constantly look away from the screen when I'm working. I'll avoid mentioning all the other problems of the Lenovo touchstrip (or the rest of the keyboard, which was an utter abomination) because hopefully Apple gets those right - but it doesn't really matter. Give me my ESC key back, and stop breaking usability.
In their boneheaded move, actually Lenovo _at least_ had the presence of mind to realize that ESC is really off limits, so they moved it to the row below. At the expense of the ` key, which isn't really an optimal solution, but it shows some modicum of reasoning about the usability impact of that gimmick. Apple doesn't seem to care.
I gave that mostruosity back shortly after, am now a happy user of a T450s which even has an ethernet port!!!, very happy with it. Lenovo shortly after retired the gen2, replaced it with a gen3 which has an absolutely normal keyboard, issued an apology, probably fired the idiot who suggested that horrible usability compromised. I'm afraid Apple may have hired that idiot.
I now may need to have the Courage to spend my own money on a non-Apple laptop after so many years.
No innovative features? What do you call a ribbon display that no one has ever done before?
No expansion - nothing new to the MBP line.