#2014 MACBOOK PRO REVIEW SERIES#
#2014 MACBOOK PRO REVIEW MAC#

IвЂ™m not sure that these buttons are better than physical keys, but they arenвЂ™t any worse either. But it is efficient, and I got used to the new control scheme within a day, able to operate it by muscle memory the same I would a physical key. ItвЂ™s surprisingly inelegant, in that you end up controlling a slider that you arenвЂ™t actually touching. IвЂ™d be annoyed by that, but fortunately you can move the slider without actually touching it, by keeping your finger held down on the bar. But you no longer have one-touch access to brightness and volume adjustments instead, you need to tap the button and then dial in your changes on a slider that pops up beside - not beneath - your finger. Apple does that by placing those controls in a set of always-present buttons on the righthand side of the Touch Bar. The Touch Bar has to replace the useful function keys - brightness up and down, volume up and down, and mute - without causing any headaches, or itвЂ™s undone from the start.

#2014 MACBOOK PRO REVIEW SERIES#

ItвЂ™s very much not a series of digital buttons - itвЂ™s a tiny little sliver of iPad, chopped off and grafted onto the MacBook Pro, with the same potential for complexity.Д«ut letвЂ™s start with the basics.

#2014 MACBOOK PRO REVIEW MAC#

Apple has been resistant to putting a touchscreen on any of its Mac computers, and if I had to guess right now, IвЂ™d say itвЂ™ll never happen - that is, aside from the Touch Bar.ДЄpple says weвЂ™re supposed to think of the Touch Bar as an extension of the keyboard, but in practice, it comes off like any other touchscreen interface. The Touch Bar arrives on the MacBook Pro with two objectives in mind: the not-very-lofty immediate goal of improving upon the function keys (how hard can that be?), and the more interesting goal of introducing a brand-new way of interacting with the Mac.

This is AppleвЂ™s vision of a touchscreen Mac ItвЂ™s an addition that very much can improve every MacBook - but itвЂ™s going to take some time to get there, if it ever does. But in many others, itвЂ™s overly complicated or just plain unnecessary.

In some cases, the Touch BarвЂ™s usefulness is obvious and immediate. I've been using the new MacBook Pro with Touch Bar for more than a week now, and I have mixed feelings about what it brings to the MacBook experience. It adds touchscreen buttons and ever-changing digital controls to the familiar set of physical keys, and it has the potential to remake the keyboard in a way we've never seen before. The MacBook Pro with Touch Bar is the first major laptop that tries to replicate that dream - not with individually reprogrammable keys, but with a thin touchscreen strip that can do even more. Still, the idea was promising, and it seemed destined to make it into our keyboards eventually. The keyboard eventually shipped, and some other incarnations followed, but they never did make a dent in the real world - they were too expensive, too niche. It was called the Optimus, and it was the most interesting keyboard you'd ever seen: a standard QWERTY design, but with a screen on every key that could change in an instant, giving each app its own perfect layout. A little over a decade ago, a Russian design studio unveiled a concept keyboard that, as much as any gadget ever can, rocked the tech blogging world.

2014 macbook pro review