> 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.
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.