Gadgetory

Apple has finally put a touchscreen on the Mac sort of this is the MacBook Pro and this is the touch bar it's a thin touchscreen strip that runs from one edge of the keyboard to the other replacing me not very functional strip of function keys that have been there for years at its simplest the touch bar is a set of digital buttons that change from app to app so you get archived and send buttons and mail forward and backward buttons in Safari and so on but the touch bar is much more than that in fact it's often better to think of the touch bar as a little touch screen portion of every app and in a series of ever-changing keys on your keyboard I've been using a touch bar for a week now and I have mixed feelings about it in some apps the touch bar makes itself immediately useful creating clear keyboard shortcuts and letting me get my work done faster but there are a lot of other places where the touch bar is too complicated or just fails to make itself useful on the right side of the touch bar is an always available set of buttons for controlling brightness and volume and activating Siri you can change these which is good because I never use Siri and would rather put something I do use there like spotlight these buttons take a little getting used to but I'd almost completely adjusted to them within a day they aren't better than physical keys but they aren't any worse either that brings us to the middle of the touch bar which is where the real action is third-party developers will be able to customize this to suit their apps but for the time being I've only been able to test what Apple's apps are doing I found the touch bar most useful when it just served as a simple series of buttons that way I could get used to them just like anything else on the keyboard in mail I quickly picked up with archiving spam buttons word and use them to just jam through my inbox there's this emoji key when you're typing which everyone has show to love and there's this great button in photos that flips between your edited image and the original I love that other buttons help provide some context so Maps lets you filter my coffee shops or restaurants or hotels and Safari will show you a preview of every tab you have open I never actually used that but I can imagine other people liking it it's the more complicated controls that can be hit and miss here's two examples from Apple's Photos app when you're using the healing brush a slider pops up that lets you adjust its size so I can do that with one hand and move the cursor with the other it's great but elsewhere it gets to be too much here there are three different sliders to switch between it's not entirely clear what each of them does and I keep accidentally hitting these little checkmarks beside them the sliders are useful but not necessarily easier than on-screen controls other times it's been more complicated buttons behave in unpredictable ways so this one pops out this one pops over this one drills down into a new set of scrolling buttons offals essentially built a new set of menus into your keyboard which yeah can be about as awful as it sounds and then elsewhere the touch bar can just be kind of useless there were predictions that pop up when you're typing are particularly odd they're so slow that they don't even update until you finish typing and some apps make puzzling use of space you should really be able to customize the touch bar for how you want to use it but not every app lets you do that the touch bar can be useful but it's going to take Apple on third-party developers a while until they figure out best practices for it when that happens I think the touch bar really will help people better use the apps they're already in all day but it's not going to revolutionize the Mac and I suspect the future looks a lot more like a dull but useful row of virtual buttons than a strip of DJ controllers ok so we already have a video covering the MacBook Pro without a touch bar and you should check that out for a detailed look of the computer's hardware I'll just give you the quick version this is one of the nicest laptops Apple has ever made which is to say it's one of the nicest laptops anyone's ever made it's impressively small has an incredible screen and I even love the shallow new keyboard now for the differences this higher-end version has a touch ID fingerprint sensor it's better than typing a password though for some reason Mac OS doesn't always give you the option to use it having four USB seaports instead of two is a bit more convenient but not that much more convenient because you're still going to need new adapters two cables for everything for the most part this is a fast laptop but if you're looking for serious pro work your mileage will vary I was able to get pretty smooth playback and it didn't NADP video and premiere but I wasn't able to handle 4k this laptop is well made in the way that Mac laptops always have been and I'm sure a lot of people will like it for that reason alone but it feels like this incarnation of the MacBook Pro is shooting for a future it can't quite reach one where it can be impressively thin and powerful enough for pros where it can be super light and have all-day battery life where its ports and keyboard more perfectly to the needs of every user that future might be out there but it's not in this machine you