I wonder how long Rosetta 2 support lasts. I’m guessing longer than Rosetta 1 support in part because Apple allows Linux ARM VMs to access it, plus its own gaming porting tool relies on it.
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Apple Discontinues 13-Inch MacBook Pro With Touch Bar
- Thread starter MacRumors
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
Well blame Apple for that. They came up with an idea that they completely limited the market on. Either do it and give it to basically everyone or don’t do it. That’s the only way you get developer support. Developers assume Dynamic Island will eventually come to all phones.
And don’t kid yourself, Dynamic Island is Apple marketing at its best. Nobody wants a giant dead spot at the top of their display. So Apple spun it in Apple style. It will be gone as soon as they can be rid of it, and good riddance. It’s intrusive. Apple already started this style before the “dynamic island” with the watch unlock notification. They’ll keep the same animations when they get rid of the dead spot.
So Touch Bar was the classic example of a decent idea that was given a half effort. Relatively rare from Apple. I don’t know how this thing got released but it clearly never had the support of senior management.
I’m guessing much longer than the original Rosetta. To be frank, in the grand scheme of things, nobody ever gave a **** about PowerPC architecture. x86 is a very different story.
A lot of software has made the transition but a stubborn few (niche business software vendors) seem to still have trouble finding that “recompile for Apple Silicon without changing anything and everything is going to be totally fine” checkbox that Apple says is right there.
It’s really odd when people celebrate the death of neat tech like the Touch Bar. I love my MBP. The touch bar definitely has its uses and when I upgrade to a computer in the future it will take some getting used to not having it anymore. Much like when 3D Touch went away in the phones and watch. I freaking loved 3D Touch. But I hope you all are happy, you get a baseline MBP that now starts at $300 more, and $100 more than the MBP 13’ with 512GB storage, so you win I guess? It is funny though that Mark Gurman kept saying that a M3 13’ MBP was happening in the future. I’m sure he will change his story/ make something up about how Apple at the last minute decided to axe the model.
What I find super odd about all the fake outrage over a 13‘ MBP with a touch bar (an actual feature) is that no one ever talks about the fact that Apple still sells the old, M1 MBA that came out in 2020 for only $100 less than the newly designed M2 MBA. Like why not act fake offended at that? That’s actually ripping people off!
What I find super odd about all the fake outrage over a 13‘ MBP with a touch bar (an actual feature) is that no one ever talks about the fact that Apple still sells the old, M1 MBA that came out in 2020 for only $100 less than the newly designed M2 MBA. Like why not act fake offended at that? That’s actually ripping people off!
The problem with the Touch Bar was always this:
You had to see it to use it.
It's what also happens with touchscreens on cars: you can't keep your eyes on the road if you want to change climate or change a song/album on the infotaiment.
Using standard F keys, you can still type on the keyboard without looking at it. The return of the Esc key in 2019-2020 proves it.
It's as simple as that. Obviously you will not have that problem with a real full touch display: because you don't need to look elsewhere to interact with the function.
That's it. Not a good idea for the majority of pro and power users.
You had to see it to use it.
It's what also happens with touchscreens on cars: you can't keep your eyes on the road if you want to change climate or change a song/album on the infotaiment.
Using standard F keys, you can still type on the keyboard without looking at it. The return of the Esc key in 2019-2020 proves it.
It's as simple as that. Obviously you will not have that problem with a real full touch display: because you don't need to look elsewhere to interact with the function.
That's it. Not a good idea for the majority of pro and power users.
You have a much different memory of how most people thought of PowerPC than what actually happened lol. I guess you don’t remember the ”MHz myth” or people coming up with little equations to show what a G3-G5 equated to in terms of Intel/X86, or maybe telling a colleague, fellow student, or professor you read a rumor Apple was switching to Intel and they acted genuinely offended.
I loved the Touch Bar! For Logic Pro it was very useful but that’s about it …
This whole event was weird. Apple has never showed any qualms about dropping backwards compatibility for extremely useful software. I just hope they keep up with security updates for those people that dropped five figures on the last Mac Pro that could do everything.
The transition to Apple Silicon has its advantages, but they are dropping like a hot potato the advantages that came with Intel, and they proudly have no replacment.
Best feature on the 13" Pro was the Touch Bar....sad to see it go 😒
With the launch of the new M3 14-inch MacBook Pro, Apple has discontinued the 13-inch MacBook Pro. The 13-inch MacBook Pro is no longer listed for sale through Apple's store, with the MacBook Pro section offering only 14-inch and 16-inch models.
The 13-inch MacBook Pro was the last Mac with a Touch Bar, so the sunsetting of the 13-inch MacBook Pro also means that the Touch Bar has been officially discontinued.
Apple's 13-inch M2 MacBook Pro was priced at $1,299, making it $100 more expensive than the very similar 13-inch MacBook Air.
Pricing on the new M3 14-inch MacBook Pro starts at $1,599, which means the M2 MacBook Air is the only option for those looking for a more affordable notebook at the current time.
The 13-inch MacBook Pro will still be available from Apple's refurbished store and from retailers until supplies run out.
Article Link: Apple Discontinues 13-Inch MacBook Pro With Touch Bar
The 14" m3 would be perfect with the Touch Bar as an option!
Steve Jobs slashed the product line out of necessity. Apple was burning cash in 1997. They needed to cut costs.
It’s been 12 years since he died, so it’s hard to speculate what he would have done differently today. So much has changed. The product line is a bit bloated, but today’s move simplifies it somewhat by dropping the redundant 13” MacBook Pro. Steve Jobs transformed Apple from a computer company to a mobile device company. Tim Cook has made services much more important (something the Jobs-era Apple struggled with).
I remember. I was around. Let me clarify, nobody gave a **** about PowerPC compatible software. The world moved on very quickly. That’s why they switched to Intel in the first place. There was a whole world of new software with young developers vs a dying niche ecosystem. Now they are betting on their own niche ecosystem in the larger view of x86 becoming somewhat stagnant. Doesn’t mean there isn’t still a huge amount of useful x86 code that people are still using without any huge reason to change that. Beyond, of course, Apple declaring x86 obsolete.
You're not, it's just a narrative created by the so called techies on you tube, who haven't got a clue 😡
Apple missed a trick with the new Pros, I would gladly pay an extra $200 for it as an option!
Qualcomm is making a huge bet on Windows ARM with its new chips. Microsoft officially permits running Windows ARM on Apple Silicon Macs. Apple is pushing game developers to port to Mac. Even Intel is talking about ARM as a source of business for its Foundry division. Perhaps after 40 years the world is prepared to move on from x86.
I had high hopes for the Touch Bar back in 2016 but Apple didn’t do enough to promote it. If they were serious they would have released a Magic Keyboard so that iMac, Mac mini and Mac Pro users could have access to it. They would have also made better use of it in their own apps and within MacOS itself. Plus it was introduced alongside the awful butterfly keyboard that never made sense for the MacBook Pro.
Good riddance. The Touch Bar was an interesting experiment, but my previous MacBook Pro had one and I did not like it. Keys are better because they allow you to adjust brightness and volume using muscle memory instead of needing to look down at the dang bar every time.
I had the first TouchBar machine, the 2016 13" MBP. In the ~8 years I worked with it... it never rose above a gimmick. I like the sliders for volume and dimming but... not enough to justify its existence. I found it marginally more useful than F keys but... again, for the technical complexity, it just wasn't worth it.
I really wonder what drove that. You'd think they would have had a better plan for it but... it never materialized. Maybe if they'd had a standalone keyboard with one and included it on the Airs? Not even suggesting they should have but it seems like adoption is always gonna be "meh" when a large portion of your product line can't even use it.
Anyway, haven't missed it since I moved on to a new machine.
I really wonder what drove that. You'd think they would have had a better plan for it but... it never materialized. Maybe if they'd had a standalone keyboard with one and included it on the Airs? Not even suggesting they should have but it seems like adoption is always gonna be "meh" when a large portion of your product line can't even use it.
Anyway, haven't missed it since I moved on to a new machine.
Some friends and I were discussing today's event because I have one buddy who is still waiting for the next 27" iMac. (Dude, get a studio display and mount a mini to the rear. Then you can actually upgrade it!)
I have a 16" M1 MBP. Nothing announced today was compelling for me at all. I'm not saying the new machines aren't an improvement but... 22 hours of battery life? For... all those times I need 22 hours? I get it for content creators and the like, but for a programmer? Maybe about the time the M7 gets here, lol. (Hopefully, they kill off HDMI and replace it with another Thunderbolt port again on the next body design. I might consider an upgrade for upgrade's sake if that happened.)
You make some valid points, however what most people missed with the Touch Bar is that it was a brilliant middle ground between function keys and touch screens.
I will certainly miss it and I would gladly pay $200 more for it as an option.
Well what I liked about PowerPC most was that it was a differentiator and helped give meaning to the “Think Different” tagline for a lot of us, and for a time it actually was legitimately better than Intel. In retrospect if you look back there were a lot of clues that Apple wanted to go to Intel and even reporting, I just think a lot of that got bogged down or under-reported due to the immense hype and marketing of Apple. And yeah, there were a lot of really good and legit reasons to switch to Intel at the time, chief amongst them was stuff like Bootcamp but for the most part all those reasons have died down. I personally just didn’t care for intel pretty early on, and right around when the A7 came out, all I kept thinking was “Ok so when are they gonna make their own computer chips too” which at the time, most people just didn’t think was feasible but for me I thought it was just a matter of time.
I actually like that they make all their chips for everything now, and in fact I think the M series is probably their best and most important innovation they have made since Tim Cook was CEO. It certainly is the one that seems to be driving the entire industry forward, and I don’t see X86 being a major thing to most people 10 years from now.
The F keys are all media keys for me. I always contended the TouchBar was an upgrade over F keys, especially since they made way superior media keys, but I also never found the cost/complexity worth it. That's a lot of extra stuff for such a minor upgrade.
I don't get the hate. I don't miss the thing, but I never hated it. It was sorta cool when it was first released (except for the non-tactile esc key—good lord, what a miss—at least Apple allowed an easy option to rebind caps lock when they did that).
I would expect they want to keep the Mac user basing growing, even if that includes legacy Intel hardware. But internally, I think they want every Mac user off the architecture. It's gonna be a long while. We still use Intel Macs at work for enrolling iPads and iPhones into MDM. A co-worker got a brand spanking new 16 inch Intel that was sitting in a warehouse somewhere for that. In fact, Apple tech had to come on site to replace the battery because it was not being used.
Apple made it relatively easy to recompile Intel apps to run natively on Apple Silicon. Since 2021 it has made certain macOS features exclusive to Apple Silicon Macs. It’s pretty clear they want to move on. For years before the actual switch it was clear it was coming (dropping 32-bit support, bragging about the A7’s “desktop-class” strength).
I don’t think Apple expects many M1 Pro or M2/M2 Pro users to upgrade to the M3. But they do want to get those on Intel machines to move on.
I like it, I use it, I actually will miss it.
When apps took advantage of it, it was quite useful. Dare I say, it was as useful as 3D touch, another dead apple feature that enhanced the experience for apps that utilized it properly. 🍻
When apps took advantage of it, it was quite useful. Dare I say, it was as useful as 3D touch, another dead apple feature that enhanced the experience for apps that utilized it properly. 🍻