Posted on 10/27/2016 6:21:48 PM PDT by Swordmaker
The new MacBook Pro is here — literally available for preorder today — and I’ve just tried it. The best thing I can say about is simple: everything about it looks and feels so good I almost didn’t believe it.
We’ll start with the marquee feature, the Touch Bar. What you might not have gathered from the keynote is that it has a matte finish, which makes the buttons on it somehow feel a little more physical. It’s bright, but not so bright that it distracts — it seems to be about on par with the brightness of the backlit keyboard.
THE TOUCH BAR LOOKS REALLY GOOD, THE SCREEN LOOKS INCREDIBLE
I have questions about whether or not all these changing function buttons will be comprehensible, but in my brief time with them they all made sense to me. There’s no haptic feedback on them, unfortunately, but obviously they all worked perfectly. That included quickly applying filters in Photos and sorting emails in Mail.
I also rearranged buttons (you can find the option in a menu) and it worked, well, as advertised. What’s neat about dragging buttons down from the screen to the Touch Bar is that you can keep moving them with the mouse on the second screen.
(Excerpt) Read more at theverge.com ...
Both the ESC key and the full set of Function Keys still exist as virtual keys accessed by pressing the Function Key (hey, who'da thought that the Function Key would bring up Function Keys?) Press the Function Key and the Touch Bar turns into the full set of Function Keys with the ESC key in its normal location on the left.
$1500 starting price for a computer which should be $300-700 is insane. I’ll be switching from MacBook Air to a PC.
Only people who own Tesla’s could afford this.
$1,499 to $4,299. It must be the cost of the 2TB SSD.
You get this with so many Windows laptops today for under $1,000, heck under $700.
Thanks for the good work bro. My Mac Book Pro is only 3 years old, so I doubt I will upgrade to another one for a few years. I have never even used Siri on it, though I have used it occasionally on my IPhone 6.
I can think of one sashaying limp wristed reason...
I thought it was to conserve the battery.
Only in a breathless hyperbole loaded articles using a single source reporting ONE iPhone 7 Plus fire in Australia in which the headline implied that fire would lead to a massive recall of all 20 million iPhone 7 models already sold. There was one more iPhone 7 that was burned in shipment, but that fire was attributed to damage done to the device in shipping. The shipping box and device were penetrated by some exterior object doing severe damage to box and device, which resulted in the fire.
Counting the supposedly spontaneous fire in Australia, and the known cause shipping fire, that's a total of 2 (really only 1) fires in a population of approximately 20,000,000 in two months on the market. Compare that to the over 250 reported Samsung Note 7s that either caught fire or exploded in a population of 2.5 million shipped but only 1.5 million sold worldwide in a period of less than a month.
The normal failure rate of any Lithium Ion battery is 1 in 8 to 10 million per year, Apple has 1.2 billion iOS devices in the wild with Lithium Ion batteries installed in them. With that number of Apple devices out there, it would be normally expected to see 120 to 150 battery failures from over heating and fires among all those devices in a normal year throughout the world. In actual fact, the number of Apple battery failures is far lower than that. The number I've see is somewhere around 50 and few of them are overheating.
The math for the Samsung Note 7s works out to a rate that is 3,000 times that normally expected incidence of failures! There was something seriously wrong with the device, the batteries, or the charging system being used. That's why Samsung was so willing to write of almost $20 billion in losses associated with that phone! The potential with leaving it out there was far greater than recalling it. The bad thing is that over 1 million of those who bought the Note 7 have failed to turn them in!
People who are trying to somehow make an equivalence of the Apple products to the Samsung products that have such failures where there is none are spreading deliberate Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt (FUD).
It is my considered opinion that the problem with the Note 7 is not in the design, but rather with the rapid battery charging system used on many of the high-end Android phones, but primarily on Samsung phones. Rapid charging require pushing high-amperage in a short time into these batteries, which heats them up. Heat causes expansion. Heat and expansion causes stress. Then the cool down and that causes more stress. Physical movement in materials, especially solid state battery materials is not something that has been tested to find the battery failure rates. It may be that the 1 in 8 to 10 million per year is NOT the proper rate for Lithium Ion batteries that have been rapidly charged multiple times. We don't know THAT rate. For all we know, it might be 1 in 3,333 per year or 3,000 times more frequently than batteries that have not been rapid charged, because that testing has not been done!
Apple could easily use rapid charging on their mobile devices. They don't. Why not? Perhaps it is because they have done such testing and found it is NOT a good idea due to strain on the batteries. Apple did find that even their early MagSafe power connectors did not stand up well to higher amperage loads and could, if the load went up, fail much faster and catastrophically (read catch fire), They had to recall a whole bunch of them and replace them with a more robust design.
I’m going to buy mine tomorrow.
As opposed to Microsoft, who is all in for Trump? /S
I never knew MS was a media/rag, i.e. Verge. Of course Apple is led by “God blessed me with being gay”.
It does have an escape button, on the new touch bar.
Okay, so the CEO is gay, so thats a reason for you to want a $500B + AMERICAN company that is one of the most successful and innovative in the world to go out of business. You sound like a bitter person.
Late adopter! Trackpads are awesome, I've been using them since the 1990s, and haven't been using a mouse for almost two decades. This Touch Bar is insane and a nice new feature.
Macbooks are a better value.
Not if you want a respectable PC with features close to a Mac, yet still not equivalent. My brother-in-law just bought a laptop PC last week, none of them under $1000 were good enough and he bought for $1500. Only idiots buy cheap Windows laptops under $700, and they don't last or do much.
Thank you for those instructions. I appreciate it.
Right. Sure. Please show us any $300 PC that has a High Speed PCIe 256 GB SSD, a 13.3-inch (diagonal) LED-backlit display with IPS technology; 2560-by-1600 native resolution at 227 pixels per inch with 500 nits brightness and support for millions of colors, and can also support two 4K external monitors simultaneously, and has 10 hours of battery life. Be sure and include the built in software suite. I don't think you'd find a $1,500 PC that could do it. Certainly not one with anything like the Touch Bar technology or the much larger touch pad.
The Dell version of that PCIe SSD drive is ~$262. Try pricing out the screen.
LOL! I just configured a MacBook Pro 15 and a Dell Precission 15 5000 (5510) to be as closely comparable as possible. Hilarious.
Same Intel i7 2.7Ghz processor, same SSD capacity, same RAM, software suites somewhat comparable, Screens as close as possible to comparable.
I bet you don't have a MacBook Air.
Anyone can buy a brand new MacBook Air for $999.00
A refurbished one with a factory new warranty can be had for as low as $759.00
So show us this $300 PC that is as good as the new MacBook Pro.
I doubt the LED that lighted it took that much power. . . But it did take a lot of space to put that extra insert in there and light it.
The only one that is available right now is the version with regular function keys and only two Thunderbolt 3 ports. The others are two-three week delivery time or longer but you can pre-order now.
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