3 ms·

The touchbar is a whole bunch of tech they manufacture that seems to add little value. I expect it to cut cost and complexity in the most obvious way (literally

The touchbar is a whole bunch of tech they manufacture that seems to add little value. I expect it to cut cost and complexity in the most obvious way (literally just shave off 65 dollars from the laptop, regain some space if possible). Make the function keys super small and increase track pad size, or add more vents. Another rumor: https://www.macrumors.com/2020/12/29/apple-researching-keyboards-with-displays-on-keys/amp/ https://www.macrumors.com/2020/12/29/apple-researching-keybo... ^ This might be the first iteration setting up for the end state of what will be the long term vision. Exciting, love seeing them grind out the little (but ambitious) improvements on what most companies would consider ‘perfect as is’ product. ——- For Apple at this point, I think, getting people to buy a 1100 MacBook + AirMax headphones is better than trying to get them buy not-so-obvious high end $1600 laptop.

jrockway 6y ago
Always felt like a bit of marketing to me. Nobody would buy the laptops if they said "this thing is 10x slower than a random desktop cobbled together from parts purchased on Ebay, and gets hot enough to burn your lap when you use it as a laptop", so they kind of had no choice but to add some sort of whizbang wowie zowie add-on to stand out from PC laptops (that also used the same slow and inefficient CPUs). Now that their laptops are as fast as desktops and use very little power, they can sell them on computing power alone, meaning they don't need to inflate the BOM with gizmos and gadgets. One less thing to break. Good riddance, I say.