Function keys are out. A new, glimmering multi-touch OLED display is in. Apple’s new MacBook Pro line — announced in October 2016 — introduced the world to the Touch Bar, and despite the initial ooh‘s and aah‘s, the tech world seems polarized on whether such a thing is actually worth it. It adds an extra $300 to an already expensive machine. The 10 hours of web browsing and movie playback isn’t great (and, in some cases, not true). Plus the Touch Bar is only compatible with a select number apps — and Chrome isn’t one of them. Three staffers at Gear Patrol — an editor, photographer and tech writer — tested the new 15-inch MacBook Pro, for a week each, to see if they Touch Bar was a good fit for them. Their thoughts are below.
Matthew Ankeny, Deputy Managing Editor
There are times you know you don’t need something but you want it anyway. Lust, we call it, and it’s our most bedeviling vice. Apple — an arbiter of plush pragmatism, in most cases — doesn’t always tap into the lusty side of our tech-souls, but more recently they’ve dabbled (hello, Hermés Watch). The Touch Bar is exactly one such offering, and it’s held at a carrot stick’s distance away from a justifiable purchase. For everything I do, I don’t need the Touch Bar. I also don’t need the extra processor horsepower on the MacBook Pro Touch Bar version or its two bonus Thunderbolt/USB-C ports. And I definitely don’t need to spend another $300 on a laptop where my most commonly used program is TextEdit. But damn do I want it.
In testing the new MacBook Pro, I identified two notable experiences: one, I converted back to more Apple apps (formerly known as “programs”). The bar encourages you to stay in the Apple software ecosystem and definitely encourages you to use Siri (though she’s unresponsive when not connected to the internet, discouragingly enough). Despite the forced prodigal return, I actually enjoyed it. I re-discovered Reminders, found Safari to now compete with Chrome, and started using Notes to take, uh, notes. On the flipside in my experience, I also noted that the Touch Bar made the sixth row of the keyboard a bit less functional. The expanding and contracting of the buttons, I found cumbersome — when I reached for them I wanted to hit buttons once, not twice. The anticipatory text was a tiny bit helpful, but I found it no faster than typing the word on the keys like a conventional, old-fashioned writer.
Yet despite my lack of WOW! factor, I still wanted to be a part of the Touch Bar world. I center this mostly in the dream that the Touch Bar is the future. I don’t know what that future holds or why I need that future, but the Bar’s smoothness and dynamism and full spectrum of color (it is well built, I’ll give Apple that) seemed like something dreamy from five years from now (it reminds me of, 13 years back, when I splurged for backlit keys on my first Powerbook — then also the seeming future). At the end of my trial week with the computer, I didn’t fall in love with the Touch Bar, but those beguiling geeks from Cupertino definitely had me — despite my most logical efforts — falling in lust.
Henry Phillips
