So the Touch Bar seems less gimmicky than I thought it would be. They really seem to have put in a lot of work thinking through how it could actually benefit the experience of using the Mac across a wide range of users and applications. It's quite tempting, but most of my work on the Mac is done during the day on my work iMac. I hope in the next year they ship an external keyboard like this with new iMacs, as well as making them available for sale separately, even if they are kind of expensive. I also love the idea of having TouchID built into the system. My wife shares my rMBP at home and it would be really neat to have user switching be that easy. I also use a really strong password to secure my system, so it would be nice to be able to quickly wake it up with a finger print.
Those performance numbers seem out of line with what Intel has released. Are most of those performance increases from offloading to the graphics card using Open CL, such as in video editing?
It was disappointing to see them pushing displays from LG. I mean really? That seems like such an un-Apple way to do things. The main reason I want to upgrade my machine is to run an external 4K or 5K display. The graphics capabilities in this machine are great, but does that really make it worth it? Same goes for the Flash storage. After decades of using spinning drives, I was amazed to go from around 100MB/s to 550MB/s. My apps still open in a matter of seconds—even though my rMBP is now over four years old. So 3.1GB/s doesn't really mean much to me, although it might when I finally upgrade my camera to one of the newer 42-50MP models. And I hope they have dropped the prices on their SSDs which are wildly expensive for the capacity you get. I hate having to plug an external drive into my rMBP all the time for my Lightroom catalog. The drive is a portable RAID 0 device (don't worry, I keep backups on another drive), and while it works well, it drains the battery quickly and gets very hot.
I really wish they could figure out how to put a quad-core i7 into the 13" model. I really love the footprint of that and feel like I would use it more. Ideally I'd love a more powerful 12" or 13" MBP, even if it's a little thicker, and couple that with a 5K iMac. Although I would also consider an iPad Pro + 5K iMac. Speaking of which, where is the iPad Pro? Is it dead already?