Gadgetory

we all do a lot of powerful work all day on our Macs and our hands can be super productive right there with the trackpad with the keyboard and so that's where when we look at providing more controls that's where we want them right where you're right where your hands are right at your fingertips if you're on the keyboard you tend to want to stay on the keyboard if you're on the trackpad or using a mouse you tend to want to stay on that Mouse and so having your hands on the keyboard and having just without even lifting your hand to be able to reach a control just right in front of you we saw the opportunity with the function key strip being really something that's a throwback to the past and a legacy too instead create an area that was so useful and so powerful and that really provided the controls contextually that were most relevant to what you were doing at any given time and so when the technology came together with a multi-touch display that we could actually engineer into that space and into this extreme enclosure you know our eyes really got got very wide as to what we could make what we can make happen there the touch bar almost becomes this mutable custom piece of hardware most of your keys are fixed in position and purpose but the touch bar is as a reprogrammable touch surface anything it needs to be for what you're doing suddenly it's a musical instrument where you can use multiple fingers to be doing real-time performance and operate not just buttons but but sliders and different effects and I think that really is an idea and a capability that it's just going to continue to get better as more and more developers really rethink how they can solve their problem through the framework of the touch bar its surfaces functionality that in the past has been in a way hidden behind a menu but the fact that it can come forward contextually based on exactly what you're doing that moment really prompts you to rediscover the depth of some of your applications and accomplish tasks that you might not have even realized were available to you and now you can do them in so much a faster way so there's a really great discoverability element to this this display that's right at your fingertips my wife of course wasn't able to know that I was using the system but she must have wondered why I was sending her more emoji because they were they were right at my fingertips you know so it is things it is things like that I do think also some tasks that you do like navigating through your photos just become so much quicker you know you end up approaching it differently because you just want to move around you just put your hand down slide across it's it's really fantastic at Apple we build prototypes around all sorts of ideas so we certainly explored the topic deeply many years ago and had had working models but decided that it really was a compromise that for a device that you hold in your hand like a phone or a tablet it's very natural rest your hand on the tablet and and work that way we think touch is at its best and we wanted to build and have built a really deep experience around a multi-touch first user interface grafting touch on something that fundamentally was designed around a precise pointer really compromises the experience when we engineered touch ID for the phone privacy and security were fundamental in fact we we'd had to put capabilities into our custom silicon years before people saw the the ever saw the the iPhone 5s with that capability because we wanted to make sure that we could keep your fingerprint data securely in a secure Enclave away from even even a hacker if they could possibly get access to your phone and so we've been able to take that same custom silicon that technology and build it into a chip that's in the Mac so you get those same protections and then you get this really incredibly fast sensor so when it comes to signing in to your Mac touch ID for payments with Apple pay or even fast user switching they all work here and I think just as with iOS as we saw people other third party starting to take advantage of the sensor over time to provide kind of security features we'll see the same kind of roadmap for the Mac as we built this 13-inch machine and really made the ID both so so tight and X&Y so dense so small we realized in the end we had the perfect 13 inch laptop and in fact when we compared it to the MacBook Air which is so beloved we saw that we built a machine that was actually a thinner smaller just as light and then had all the things that we really as users wished we could have in our air right it had the Retina display that I think once you have one it's it's really hard to turn back you have the fantastic trackpad and then just all the performance and so we realize for so many MacBook Air potential users this was the the right next step for them and so we were able to create a configuration of the 13-inch without the touch bar and with just the two ports which actually is a ton of i/o Phil talked about the incredible capabilities at the event about the thunderbolt ports and and it's sort of the best MacBook Air you could have and I think a lot of people who want it's a little a little something more from from the air are going to find this the perfect 13-inch machine