From 2001 to about 2010 we were spoiled with revolutionary Apple products: The iPod, the iPhone, the iPad. All were category-busters, game-changers. In the years since, nothing (in my opinion) as impactful has emerged from Cupertino.
But, as their product line-up matures, it's nice to see they've still got some design juice. It seems that for the foreseeable future it will be incremental improvements to existing categories, rather than Holy-Shit-I-Need-That moments, and I'm okay with that.
A good case in point is Apple's new Touch Bar, announced for their updated MacBook Pros. For those of you that haven't seen it yet, take a look:
It sounded kooky to me at first, but after seeing it in action, its value became obvious. I wouldn't wait outside overnight and trample you in the morning to get one of these, but I can instantly think of ways I'd use it. I like that you can customize it via drag-and-drop, and I'd love to use it to scroll through an Adobe Premiere timeline. In both Photoshop and Microsoft Word, I can think of at least a half-dozen commands I'd like up there.
The larger trackpad seems nice too, though I'd need to test it out in person; I'm worried about false-positive hand-heel hits while I'm typing.
In any case, do you think my earlier assessment is correct, about it being incremental change rather than game-changers from here on out from Apple? Their long-term car project was recently scuttled, or at least gutted; that notwithstanding, do you think Apple's got more revolutionary stuff up their sleeve?
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I've long been a fan of Apple hardware, but this appears to be a nicer version of the feature that drove me up the wall on a previous Lenovo (work) laptop. The absence of physical buttons makes touch-use all but impossible. That, combined with the fact that they change with context means that the user must take their eyes from the screen and finger from the touchpad to do something that could be done... in an on-screen toolbar. In my experience, re-focusing on the secondary screen, locating my desired function, and taking action would invariably break the flow of whatever task I was looking to complete.
I think is a gimmick, in terms of design I like what microsoft is doing. Apple is trying so hard to not including touch screens on macs.
&g do you think Apple's got more revolutionary stuff up their sleeve? t;
I use a 15" MacBook Pro with a dual Apple 27" display at work, and the MacBook is closed all the time. So bigger trackpad and fancy touch bar don't matter to me. I want bigger hard drive space and faster processors. The SSD drives are nice for the small footprint, but they are crazy expensive, $1200 to upgrade to a 2TB Drive! Maybe I should just have a Mac Pro; miss the G3 and G4 tower days.
They've had the last four years to make incremental changes. This is just too little, too late. Their core market of designers and content creators have much better options out there now, and they run Windows. They integrate Wacom-style drawing surfaces.. right into the main display, which can either fold or detach into a tablet. A tablet that runs a full OS, at that.