God no! At this point the Touch Bar is the one and only reason why I avoid MacBook Pros at all cost.
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Who’s hoping the new MBP will retain the Touch Bar?
- Thread starter The Cockney Rebel
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Yup. $750+ for a six-year-old machine that likely needs a new battery. There are only three of these for sale in my extended area. I think that the legacy ports are a factor too. If the M1X systems were out, I would expect asking prices to be lower.
CPU wise I seem to remember the 2016 actually ended up being marginally slower than the 2015 ?♂️ Between that, the worst version of the keyboard (which is now out of the replacement programme) and flexgate I'm not surprised people are staying away from the 2016s.
My 2017 MBP has a kernel panic related to the touch bar if I put it to sleep by closing it. I have to manually sleep it, wait for the touch bar to turn off, then close the lid. This might be fixed in recent macOS versions, but I'm just in the habit now. Also, a few months after the AppleCare period ended, the touch bar started flashing bright white like a strobe light instead of dimming or going to sleep. So if I don't type for a minute, I get blasted with a visual distraction. I've called Apple and they said it would require replacing the touch bar hardware, and they weren't even able to give me a price; I assume it would require replacing most of the computer. As a result, I expect this laptop to have the worst resale value of any Mac I've owned. So, no, I don't regret the imminent demise of the touch bar.
If Apple really believed in touch-bar and wanted widespread developer support, they would not have limited it to a single product-line. I don't understand, why they never released a keyboard with touch-bar for desktop use. Also people seems divided, so making it optional would be Prefereable.
I have never personally had it (outside playing with it virtual) or felt that it was a good idea (actually felt it was gimmic that Apple released to be stubborn and not fit a touchscreen to Mac's like every Windows laptop was getting). But all this debate has made curious and kind of regretting going with MBA.
I have never personally had it (outside playing with it virtual) or felt that it was a good idea (actually felt it was gimmic that Apple released to be stubborn and not fit a touchscreen to Mac's like every Windows laptop was getting). But all this debate has made curious and kind of regretting going with MBA.
Sold my 2015 15" 16/512 for $800 six months ago. It had a broken speaker, and a bad battery too. Buyer didn't care.
Funny thing is, I bought it used for $1,000 two years ago which means I paid $200 to use it for 1.5 year. Amazing deal.
2015 is still the best Macbook Pro overall right now and no one can convince me otherwise.
Looking forward to the M2X Macbook Pros later this year. Yes, M2X, not M1X.
I bought my 2015 in 2018 used for $1,100 at a wholesaler. I attribute the abnormally high used prices to pandemic and chopocalypse pricing. The market should eventually get back to normal. iMac prices are far better deals in my area.
I think it was obvious why.
- There were probably a sizable group of employees who opposed the touch bar before release and after release.
- It was probably clear to Apple management that the touch bar was a mistake immediately
- The first two points had evidence too. The 2016 13" MBP had a version without the touchbar which suggests that employees at Apple wanted to hedge and didn't fully buy into the touch bar. Then we rarely heard about new touch bar features at any WWDC event.
- The 2016 Macbook Pro 16" increased starting price by $400 from 2015. This suggests that the touch bar isn't cheap to make.
- If it's not cheap to make, then it doesn't make sense to add it to entry-level computers like the Air and external keyboards.
- For example, if the touch bar actually costs $200 to make, then the external keyboard would have to cost ~$300. Remember that adding the touch bar to an external monitor would mean that it needs the T2 chip, OLD display, bigger battery to get acceptable battery life. I think Apple would have had to charge $300-$400 just to make a good margin on it. No one is going to buy a $300 - $400 external keyboard.
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Maybe it had a bit of an effect on the 2015 used pricing but I don't think much. When I sold my 2015 6 months ago, anyone could have bought the MacBook Air M1 for $900 on sale and inventory was plenty. People are still clearly seeking the 2015 specifically in the used market.
Then they didn't really believe in it from the get go, why should developers.
They sure let it go on for long time. Even longer than butterfly keyboard.
First of all, I doubt the cost anywhere near your estimat and would go down by scale. Also if you consider the price Mac Pro and iMac Pro and even iMac, it is not a good argument. Apple most premium products didn't have any touch-bar support.
It was a differentiator between Pro and non pro laptop line. But yeah, having the touchbar only on 20% or less of the machines doesn’t help it’s case. Software adoption is weak to say the least.
That’s probably less of a mystery. Achieving good experience over Bluetooth for something like that is probably almost impossible, the connection quality is not good enough. It took them years to have a wireless keyboard with Touch ID, and that’s only probably possible by utilizing some proprietary wireless protocols. Apple probably has the tech pull it off now, but with rumors of TB being dropped and all…
There was no price increase. Apple simply discontinued the 15” model with the iGPU. The 2016 model was dGPU-only and it was actually cheaper than the previous dGPU version (but it also came with less storage for full disclosure).
I agree that an external keyboard with a TB would probably be prohibitively expensive, $200 or more. One can hide the extra cost for the TB within the laptop, but with a keyboards it’s going to be tricky.
A bunch of different things and programmable -- if you didn't use a 5250 terminal, it probably wouldn't do you much good.
What do you mean by real?
You can set the touchbar to display the function keys as default.
Or set the hotkeys as default with the function keys appearing with a press of the Fn button @ lower left of keyboard.
You can even customize the hotkeys with the ones which are important to you.
All under SystemPrefs->Keyboard
Since I personally don't need the F1 - F12 keys for what I do, I set the touch bar to show App Controls as the default, with Expand Control Strip with pressing the Fn key @ lower left of keyboard. This I feel gives me the best of both worlds in that I have immediate access to brightness/volume/mute/playpause as well as any app related stuff, with the classic hot key set immediately accessible.
I used to dislike the touchbar - especially back when there wasn't a physical ESC key - then I learned how to configure and use it. Such as being able to tap+hold then drag your finger to adjust brightness and volume very easily vs repeated taps to increase/decrease.
Outside of the cases where folks either normally touchtype the F1-F12 row or where they let their fingers sprawl onto the touchbar row, I find there more functionality and customizability than existed with the physical row.
Then add BTT as you did and theres even more options.
Well if I may play devils advocate, the 2016 mbp was designed for Intels 10nm mobile cpus. That didn’t exactly happen…
Surprised nobody has mentioned BetterTouchTool in this thread — I deliberately got an M1 MBP to replace my 2016 MBP so I could keep all my BTT customizations of the Touch Bar.
See https://talk.macpowerusers.com/t/i-the-touchbar/4779
Also, iPadOS 15 has a pseudo-Touch Bar floating above the keyboard….
See https://talk.macpowerusers.com/t/i-the-touchbar/4779
Also, iPadOS 15 has a pseudo-Touch Bar floating above the keyboard….
Physical keys.
Knew that, but it just doesn't work as well, no tactile feel, have to look at it rather than just pressing a key, and it's way to easy to misskey.
Indeed, though I think that was more an issue for the 2018-19 models; 2016 was always going to be Skylake, and while 2017 was meant to be Canon Lake 10nm, Kaby Lake was just a more refined (and cooler) Skylake too.
2015 15"
2.5 GHz quad-core Intel Core i7 processor with Turbo Boost speeds up to 3.7 GHz, 16GB of memory, 512GB of flash storage and AMD Radeon R9 M370X graphics starting at $2,499
2016 15"
From my 2016 invoice
2.7GHz quad-core Intel Core i7 processor, Turbo Boost up to 3.6GHz
• 16GB 2133MHz memory
• 512GB PCIe-based SSD
• Radeon Pro 460 with 4GB memory
• Backlit Keyboard (English) & User's Guide
• Four Thunderbolt 3 ports
• Touch Bar and Touch ID
• Force Touch trackpad
• Accessory Kit
This ^^^ was priced at $2699 before tax & discounts
I'm trying to understand how the price of a 2015 laptop went up $200 in a 2016 with similarly configured specs.
It's not the same model though. You are comparing the cheapest 2015 dGPU-based model and the higher-tier 2016 dGPU-based model (with better GPU, better CPU etc.). The base 2016 dGPU model was $2399 (albeit with a 256GB vs 512GB SSD).
One do has to point our that there were indeed some shenanigans going on in the lineup. Apple did shuffle things around, they introduced multiple GPU tiers, they have reduced the storage size (forcing you to buy the next tier if you want 512GB) and so on. So one can definitely argue that there was a hidden price increase. I am just not sure one can pin it exclusively onto the Touch Bar. There were a lot of changes that went into the 2016 models.