So I was a proponent of the touch bar. Some here may remember me posting optimistic thoughts about it.
And I am still a big proponent of the 2016-17 Macbook Pros. I strongly believe these are the finest laptops ever created, and that there's literally nothing on the market that even comes close. I love the keyboard, have had zero issues with USBc & legacy I/O, the machine is insanely powerful, cool and quiet, and it looks sick in client presentations.
But.
A year in I have to say, the Touch Bar is an utter and complete failure. A mistake so huge and so prominent as to be historic. Why? [note: I am on the latest updates of everything mentioned here]
• A year in, very, very few of my everyday professional applications support it. And these are huge flagship mainstream programs. I spend the majority of my work time in Adobe CC programs. To date, only Photoshop and in the past few weeks Illustrator has finally gotten support. Lightroom, InDesign, After Effects – all the most important programs display a black Touch Bar. Adobe has no stated plans to expand support to the rest of the CC, and my communications with their customer service has indicated that I should not hold my breath. This is true of many professional programs – software companies seem to be just treating it as an unnecessary edge case and spending their dev time elsewhere.
• Bootcamp still does not support Touch Bar. Yes, I know it works sometimes, but about 60% of the time, the bar is black, meaning for Windows, I have to restart the computer 1–3 times each time I go into Windows, hoping to luck out and get a bootup with touch bar. And since there's no escape key, restarting in windows requires a lot of weird shortcuts, since the trackpad often doesn't work when the touch bar doesn't load up.
• The system preferences feature to set certain programs to default to display F keys instead of contextual controls simply does not work. I have various programs set to opt for F keys, and the touch bar simply shows up black. I've never gotten this to work for a single program. The cake is a lie.
• No escape key turns out to be the bane of my existence about 3 times per week, as the touch bar loves to freeze, disappear, crash and otherwise flub when in unsupported applications. I've hard-reset this laptop holding down the power button more in one year than all other times I've ever hard reset a Mac combined.
I could go on and on and on and on. I love this computer. It's my favourite piece of technology I've ever owned, outside one very nice Kona bicycle I custom tricked-out. I wanted to leave this frank highly negative review, as someone who is very positive about the direction Apple is going with its laptops. As someone who gave it the old college try, and even got my entire company on the machines, at considerable expense to my own profit margin. I'm a believer.
And this thing is an epic, epic fail.
And I am still a big proponent of the 2016-17 Macbook Pros. I strongly believe these are the finest laptops ever created, and that there's literally nothing on the market that even comes close. I love the keyboard, have had zero issues with USBc & legacy I/O, the machine is insanely powerful, cool and quiet, and it looks sick in client presentations.
But.
A year in I have to say, the Touch Bar is an utter and complete failure. A mistake so huge and so prominent as to be historic. Why? [note: I am on the latest updates of everything mentioned here]
• A year in, very, very few of my everyday professional applications support it. And these are huge flagship mainstream programs. I spend the majority of my work time in Adobe CC programs. To date, only Photoshop and in the past few weeks Illustrator has finally gotten support. Lightroom, InDesign, After Effects – all the most important programs display a black Touch Bar. Adobe has no stated plans to expand support to the rest of the CC, and my communications with their customer service has indicated that I should not hold my breath. This is true of many professional programs – software companies seem to be just treating it as an unnecessary edge case and spending their dev time elsewhere.
• Bootcamp still does not support Touch Bar. Yes, I know it works sometimes, but about 60% of the time, the bar is black, meaning for Windows, I have to restart the computer 1–3 times each time I go into Windows, hoping to luck out and get a bootup with touch bar. And since there's no escape key, restarting in windows requires a lot of weird shortcuts, since the trackpad often doesn't work when the touch bar doesn't load up.
• The system preferences feature to set certain programs to default to display F keys instead of contextual controls simply does not work. I have various programs set to opt for F keys, and the touch bar simply shows up black. I've never gotten this to work for a single program. The cake is a lie.
• No escape key turns out to be the bane of my existence about 3 times per week, as the touch bar loves to freeze, disappear, crash and otherwise flub when in unsupported applications. I've hard-reset this laptop holding down the power button more in one year than all other times I've ever hard reset a Mac combined.
I could go on and on and on and on. I love this computer. It's my favourite piece of technology I've ever owned, outside one very nice Kona bicycle I custom tricked-out. I wanted to leave this frank highly negative review, as someone who is very positive about the direction Apple is going with its laptops. As someone who gave it the old college try, and even got my entire company on the machines, at considerable expense to my own profit margin. I'm a believer.
And this thing is an epic, epic fail.
