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It's interesting how many people say "Touchscreens? Good riddance! But muh ARM mac?! Apple listen to me, you must do it for me!!". Do they not see their self-centered hypocrisy?

Personally there's nothing less interesting in the world for me than ARM Macs (they can't run x86 software or do virtualization) and I would never buy one, but I need a touchscreen Mac. But I'm not going to gloat "Good riddance!" that there are no ARM macs. It would be great if there were cheap, power-efficient ARM-based Macs for those who need it. Just like it would be great if there were expensive, powerful multitouch Macs for those who need it.

So please, stop being hypocrites. If you're going to bash the users that need touchscreens, don't cry about your personal baby ARM CPUs. I don't need them but I don't see any touchscreen creatives bashing your needs.
 
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It's bad enough how many fingerprints the 12" iPad Pro picks up; there's no way I'd want to keep cleaning my iMac screen.

People need to get over this ridiculous concept.
 
It's bad enough how many fingerprints the 12" iPad Pro picks up; there's no way I'd want to keep cleaning my iMac screen.

People need to get over this ridiculous concept.

Alex Trebek, I'll take "What is Oleophobic Coating?" for 500, please. And when you're done, please give me "I don't have to touch my screen if I don't want to, and I don't have to buy a touchscreen iMac if I don't want to" for 2000.

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It's interesting how many people say "Touchscreens? Good riddance! But muh ARM mac?! Apple listen to me, you must do it for me!!". Do they not see their self-centered hypocrisy?

Personally I there's nothing less interesting in the world for me than ARM Macs (they can't run x86 software or do virtualization) and I would never buy one, but I need a touchscreen Mac. But I'm not going to gloat "Good riddance!" that there are no ARM macs. It would be great if there were cheap, power-efficient ARM-based Macs for those who need it. Just like it would be great if there were expensive, powerful multitouch Macs for those who need it.

So please, stop being hypocrites. If you're going to bash the users that need touchscreens, don't cry about your personal baby ARM CPUs. I don't need them but I don't see any touchscreen creatives bashing your needs.

Well said. ARM isn't anywhere close to replacing the horsepower of the Intel CPU's.

Now, for the apparent target market for the new Macbook pro, it might be sufficient, because apple clearly isn't targeting mobile power users anymore. For your average macbook pro user, doing heavy powerpoint, tweeting, surfing, and so forth, it'd be an option. But those folks already live in an online-only world, so just use iOS.
 
Touching your computer screen is disgusting. Why would you ever want gross fingerprints all over a screen :(

Yet it's not gross for your phone?:confused:
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Nobody who owns one of those stupid convertible Windows touch notebooks thinks its a great idea; unless they have poor taste and not much of a brain in their heads. Apple is doing it right. Touch-centric os (iOS) for touch interaction, and a separate OS and hardware completely void of touch.

You are wrong. I love my Windows Convertible Touch notebook. It's what the iPad should have been.

And I have plenty of great taste - I was a Mac user since 2002.
 
The obnoxiousness of the anti-touch Apple crowd in this thread ("I have no creativity and my small mind can't picture any creative need for touch whatsoever and I refuse to accept that others need it so it sucks and Apple are Gods, hail Apple!") is doing a great job of driving me even closer to Windows. This "Big Apple" worship is very creepy and cult-like.

Only with Apple do we ever see these battered wives praising having less features. So maybe Apple and the community are both the problem. Apple are just another computer manufacturer, with a neat OS. But staying behind the times is going to hurt them.

Try to think about this rationally for moment:

- They have no touchscreen option for those who need it despite every other manufacturer having touch desktops enjoyed by creatives who need it!?
- And they have a dangerously backwards userbase who praises losing modern features and says that "no sane person uses a touchscreen desktop". A comment which implies that they think they're the only sane ones and that Apple validating their regressive biases is somehow a good thing.
- And Apple finally upgraded their MacBook "Pro" and took away all the ports!??
- And they lingered for half a decade without a Mac Pro upgrade?
- And now they want us to believe it will take a few more years to design a new Mac Pro that won't suck? So... what the hell have they been doing in the past 4 years since 2013's Mac Pro? It should be trivial to use all of their money to keep the desktops up-to-date.

All of that money they have is being squandered by blind idiots at the top who apparently can't multitask the desktop and iOS development at the same time and can't innovate anymore.

And Steve, the only man with creativity and vision - is gone.

The only reason Apple hasn't got a touch computer is because of their shortsighted comments years ago (and the fact that their OS has stayed behind the times as a result of that stubborn comment). They've got too much narcissistic pride to walk back those misguided comments against touch. They'd rather continue to alienate the growing segment that needs touchscreens. A segment that will soon overtake the whole computer market (give that 15 years at most). It's unfathomably shortsighted to believe desktop computers will stay the same as they've been for the past 60 years, while the whole world and all other devices around Apple moves on to touch.

There is nothing more natural than touch, voice and visual input. A mouse and keyboard are a clunky and completely unnatural abstraction which we've simply gotten used to, but which is now finally getting killed more and more, year after year. But Apple's utter fools at the top are instead doubling down on their short-sightedness and staying with ancient, nearly 60 years old, dying input methods, and refusing to even offer touch as an option whatsoever. Their obtuse stupidity, narcissism and short-sightedness is astounding, and the willingness of Apple sycophants to defend the lack of features and the lack of even the option of having that feature for those who do need it is equally astounding and perplexing. Stockholm Syndrome?

My next machine upgrade (due in 1-2 years) will be either a hackintosh with a touchscreen, or a Windows PC with a touchscreen. There's no reason to keep suffering inferior hardware and inferior input methods when Windows is making huge strides as an OS and is getting closer and closer to becoming equal with macOS in quality. Windows has shown that they're willing to redesign and innovate, and I look forward to switching away from the poisonous Apple farm around Windows 11 or Windows 12, so that I can finally enjoy modern hardware and features at great value.

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2017: Apple are no longer hungry. Just foolish. However, the lingering reality distortion field is still alive among some of the userbase, but more and more of us are snapping out of it. I'm so close to done with Apple.
Many good points there..some may be worried that a touchscreen mac might compromise the MAC OS that
we All use, as many said windows 8, trying to be all things to all people.. a touch OS was a fail.
I believe that Apple could do it right but will not worry if they don't..I use my laptop with 36" monitor so a touchscreen means nothing to me and something that I'd just as soon not pay extra for.
I would be interesting if they dipped their toe into the pond tho!
 
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Ah but I like seeing the icons. You saw my bar in the video I made. ;) Most of those icons have a purpose and show me some status (keyboard language, backing up, syncing, connection states to VPN or WiFi, whether my mac is in "caffeine" mode, whether my iGPU or dGPU is used etc) or let me toggle status by clicking them. But I can understand that some wouldn't use the icons and just want to hide them all. I've toyed with the idea myself but always come back to "meh, it's just a menu bar and the icons serve a purpose and it's nice to have them instantly available, and if the OS runs out of space for app menus it auto-hides some menubar icons so it's not like it matters that they're all up there constantly..."

By the way, in Sierra, 3rd party rearranging is perfect. I've placed CoconutBattery next to the regular Apple battery icon and it always returns to that exact position on every reboot:

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Coconut is that extra bar with charge percentage, drain rate, and time left. Something Apple removed lately. ;\
Yeah, that menu bar triggered me, lol. This is mine…
 

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Yeah, that menu bar triggered me, lol. This is mine…

Hehe, well I just counted, I have 22 icons and I can only afford to hide these rarely clicked and mostly-static ones:

BetterTouchTool, 1Password, Alfred, Typinator, Spatial Sound Card, WiFi state, Bluetooth state, Volume, Spotlight and Siri.

So I can hide 10 of them and replace them with a Bartender icon but it hardly seems worth it. Maybe if bartender was free, or if I didn't need the icons.

I want to like Bartender but I think it's mostly for users that don't use the menubar.
 

What I've been speculating all along...

from Apple's iPad page:

A9 third-generation chip with 64-bit desktop-class architecture
Compared to A8:
CPU: 1.6x faster
Graphics: 1.8x faster

Their iPad's really have desktop chips in them, the ones Phil are talking about are the earlier ones that are more "iPad/iPhone" class...

Apple's is like their version of the Chromebook.

I think they will start with the A11, with the A10 being in their "budget" laptop and Mac Mini...
 
MS has the Linux Subsystem for Windows available for Windows 10. Ununtu/Bash/Cygwin in Windows. A little messy to install but supoprted and supposedly works well.

Unix/Linux app support is a huge need for me. I do software development on the side and need to run various POSIX utilities in a terminal constantly.

I had a brief flirt with windows last month - the hardware (MS Surface Book) failed on me, so we're on a break at the moment, but I might give it another chance in the future.

Give Linux Subsystem for Windows year (or at least wait for the Win 10 "Creators Update" due Real Soon Now) and it might be a game changer. Currently, its very beta and maybe not ready for the big time - but it will only get better. Big problem is that it needs better integration of things like file metadata and permissions between the emulated Linux-like filesystem you see from bash and the NTFS filesystem that Windowsland sees: although your Windows drives are mounted like Linux filesystems, it comes with dire warnings against modifying files in linuxland with Windows software and (to a lesser extent) vice versa. Not all Unix packages will run (e.g. MySQL, yes, PostgreSQL, no). Things like running .sh scripts from windowsland seemed harder than they might be, and there's no real daemon system - so e.g. Apache will die when you close bash-for-windows. Even so, I installed Apache, made some symlinks between /var/www/ and C:/Users/me/websites, and web development with VS Code (running on the windows side) seemed like a goer. That said, currently you might as well install Linux under VirtualBox or VMWare and use their file sharing facilities. Or there's Cygwin if you just want a bash-shell and most of the usual Posix/Linux/Unix command-line tools. I, uh, ended up with all 3 plus the bash shell that comes with Git. But, as I say, give it a year.

Otherwise - Mac OS and the typical standard of Mac OS applications are just that little bit nicer in terms of design, responsiveness and attention to detail than Windows. Want to drag an email address from the "To" to the "CC" field? Want to type an en-dash or a copyright symbol without remembering the Unicode number? Lots of things like that. (Mac Mail is far nicer than either Outlook or the Win10 Mail client - and the integration of Outlook 2016 into Win10 - or lack thereof - is pathetic). However, I didn't hit any dealbreakers (apart from the technical failure of the Surface Book - and I may have just had a lemon) and you have to beware of your own tendency to forget all the little annoyances of MacOS that you've stopped noticing. Heck, I used Windows for years before going Mac ~2006. All things being equal, I'd choose MacOS - but if you need hardware options that Apple won't offer or need applications that are only available for Windows, or just plain can't afford to spend the thick end of $2000 to get a reasonably current laptop, that's not enough to save the Mac.
 
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Apple have always stipulated iOS is suited for touch and OSX mouse/track pad.

And some people ate that line up without thinking...

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I had a brief flirt with windows last month.

Thanks a lot for that in-depth overview. The idea of running linux in a VM just to use the POSIX utilities may be viable. I almost do that already on the Mac. There's so much more than what homebrew offers and much of it requires a real Linux installation.

As for the lack of app polish: Yes, that's my main issue with windows. Windows apps seem haphazardly put together by tasteless people. But it's improving rapidly so I think a few more years will be enough to break the Apple spell for a lot of people, including me.
 
I always hoped they would do something like this patent they filed in 2010. When engaged into the lower mode, the UI would transform to have larger tap targets to be more touch friendly. It would all be bundled into the same binary for apps. This would be nice for graphic artists and illustrators who could use the Apple Pencil on such a display.
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I'm SURE they prototyped it.

And you can see that they had already decided on a (shudder!) Metro-style "Tile" interface.

But obviously, it didn't "Focus Group" well; so they dropped the idea.
 
Well said. ARM isn't anywhere close to replacing the horsepower of the Intel CPU's.

The most likely candidate for an ARM would be something like a 12" touchscreen MacBook with more oomph-per-amp than Core M and the ability to run iOS alongside MacOS. The target user would be happy to use Pages or a cloud-based office suite than full MS Office.

You're not going to see ARM in Macbook Pro/iMac any time soon, because it would depend on lots of high-end software (such as Adobe CS and full Office) being ported to ARM. Also, the way ARM would compete with Intel on horsepower would be to go aggressively multicore - maybe coupled with some sort of vector/SIMD units to help with the heavy lifting. However, that sounds a bit to close to the Mac Pro Cylinder "lets bet the farm on OpenCL and multicore" policy to fly right now...
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The idea of running linux in a VM just to use the POSIX utilities may be viable.

Actually, that sounds like a job for Cygwin - which is a POSIX-compatibility layer for Windows and a large collection of windows ports of POSIX tools.
 
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Not sure why people are fighting over an ARM based Mac when it would be much simpler to make an "iPad Pro" OS that has some of the features of macOS combined with the touch utility and probability of the iPad. Throw in a keyboard and Apple Pencil and you have a Surface competitior.

Combine this with the "Apple ecosystem" and you have an actual iPad "pro". A machine that doesn't just work on its own, but works along side your more powerful desktop.
 
I will never understand peoples obsession with ARM chips in mac.
You call any technology "the next big thing" and people get excited.
x86 is still best in terms of raw performance, but ARM is newer, therefore better.
 
In terms of my actual day to day usage, I totally agree that a touchscreen Mac would be inappropriate—at least certainly for my desktop setup (begging for neck and shoulder problems, reaching 2+ feet across my music gear). My laptop?... Well, maybe... though I really don't like the idea of a fingerprint covered screen....

Although the TouchBar isn't the solution yet (great for some things, awkward for others), I think it represents the general direction they're heading; multitouch IO devices, with their own screens, that are context-aware and optimized for touch-based tasks.
 
So they just surrendered the one-device market to the Microsoft Surface.

You can be certain that they ran the numbers first. "How many users will buy both an iPad and a Macbook if we don't allow a mouse to be used on an iPad and if we don't make a Macbook with a touchscreen?" "How many users will buy a Surface or other 2 in 1 if we don't allow a mouse to be used on an iPad and if we don't make a Macbook with a touchscreen?"

They've already lost most of the professional users for the Macbook anyway due to the 16GB memory limit and lack ofports. And since so many professional users were running Windows on the Macbook anyway, those users have no issue with moving to a Windows laptop.
 
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Times change. Look at iPad. Blank statements like that are often proven incorrect.

That was a sales tactic to convenience people they didn't need a stylus.. SJ was good at sales / marketing tactics.

You have to read that quote in context. Do you really think Steve Jobs thought software for drawing or painting was an inappropriate use for a tablet? Apple has not introduced a "stylus" in the sense he was talking about - a tool used to navigate a touch UI. That is what he was talking about - Apple would have "blown it" had they ever created UI elements on touch screens that could not be used comfortably or efficiently with your fingers.
 
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