Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2021/01/15/report-no-touchbar-for-redesigned-2021-macbook-pro.html
…
2 Likes
The riddance is good. I’ve been touch typing for decades, and using those things causes me way too much anxiety as I am forced to adopt a slower, more careful style, halfway to hunt-and-peck. Even gaff tape over the Escape ‘key’ doesn’t entirely prevent me from cancelling renders like it’s my job.
14 Likes
I hope you’re not just teasing us, because a return to the mid-2015 era specs would amazing - the best machine Apple ever made. I was contemplating buying up more reconditioned MacBook Pros from that era to ensure I have another decade or so before the glory fades…
12 Likes
After 10 years of nursing a 13" MBP, I broke down and bought an M1 Air. I’m very happy with it but I would of held out a little longer if I knew more ports and magsafe was making a comeback.
9 Likes
They are slowly undoing Jony Ive’s worst decisions. More ports may be the real win in this story. The first hints that Ive was gone was the new wallpapers on the latest round of system updates. Ugly like only Microsoft managed in the past. Jony was a mixed bag, but he had impeccable taste.
14 Likes
Is it still going to be limited to 8 GB of RAM? Cuz I need at least 16, and, planning for the future, I would prefer to have 32… I would gladly take a touchbar on an Apple chip MBP if the RAM capacity was increased.
6 Likes
Siri is going to be very lonely. I don’t know about the rest of you, but I still ‘butt-call’ her more than 1ce/day via the touchbar, even after 3 years of acclimation.
3 Likes
You can remove the Siri button - System Preferences > Keyboard > Customize Control Strip…
4 Likes
I have a new MacBook Pro with the physical escape and power keys (non-butterfly keyboard), and I kinda like the TouchBar. I’ve customized it to mostly should AV controls and the couple activities I do most often, like take screenshot and hide/show windows. That said, I knew the lack of escape key would be a deal killer so I waiting until this model came out to upgrade.
And yes, I know there’s a keyboard shortcut to take screenshots but even after 35+ years of using a Mac, it’s always a crapshoot which screenshot variety I end up getting after 3-4 guesses at the key combination.
6 Likes
Jony Ive really jumped the shark right around here:
The touchbar was really the apotheosis of his “aesthetics ahead of functionality” approach to design. If you value aesthetics over functionality, you’re not a designer; you’re an artist. Just fucking own it, dude, and stop making life harder for everyone else.
21 Likes
It’s a.system on a chip so whatever you want in the future you have to buy right then. The M1 design is not upgradable. Obviously the SoC design has some great advantages but this is the most obvious downside.
4 Likes
If getting rid of the TouchBar and bringing back ports happens, this will be a Shut Up And Take My Money situation. I love Macs and have used them continuously since 1984, but cannot abide the post-2014 MBPs. I’ve been clinging to my ported-and-TouchBarless wonder (mid 2014 MBP), hoping Apple comes back to their senses.
12 Likes
Agreed!
This one was one the worst designs I’ve seen out of Apple … and I’m including the touch bar here 
When I first got it:
<Your mouse needs recharging>
“How do I recharge this thing?”
“Oh, here it is”
“Oh, now I can’t use my mouse. Ummm…”
Very agreed!
4 Likes
I have a Very Specific Theory about the premise of this design. Anyone who has ever used a mouse knows that having the port on the edge (or even the top) would be more functional than having it on the bottom. In addition to Ive-era Apple’s well-established “port shame”, I strongly suspect that they did not want anyone to possibly leave their Magic Mouse plugged in and charging and have someone walk by a desk and think, “Oh, look, a corded Magic Mouse”. That would be Against the Apple Way and could not be tolerated – we can’t have someone mistakenly thinking we’re making corded Magic Mice! Putting at the port on the bottom – and thus deliberately making the mouse unusuable while charging – was a conscious choice valuing aesthetics and Brand Principle ahead of user need.
Ugh.
15 Likes
The current M1 can take a maximum of 16GB but it’s a build-to-order option, the default machine ships with 8GB.
1 Like
There are 16GB variants as well, but apparently not nearly enough to meet demand.
My understanding is that the M1 is sort of the Celeron of that new family, just barely enough of almost everything to ship them in quantity. Which is what makes their current ass kicking that much more impressive.
I can’t quickly find the details, but I believe I recall that they skimped on the SoC equivalent of the North Bridge, thus the 16GB cap. The next version is expected to support properly crazy amounts of RAM.
5 Likes
SoCs don’t always have RAM built-in, but it could still be something like a stacked chip arrangement with the RAM soldered onto pads on top of the actual SoC. Or, it could just be a separate chip soldered to the motherboard like on recent Raspberry Pis.
If you have to get a system with soldered-in RAM, get as much as you can afford. Unfortunately, this gives Apple the opportunity to really soak you for that extra 8 GB.
4 Likes
Thanks, I guess I didn’t click far enough on Apple’s website to see that. Still, my next MBP will be one I want to use for many many years, and I expect my RAM needs will increase quite a bit over that period (thanks for the bloat, Adobe!). I’ll be first in line once they get a 32GB chip out!
4 Likes
One of the top five reasons I’m still a Mac user; I can’t afford the cheaper stuff.
8 Likes
For that very reason, future chips from Apple will almost certainly have to have a north bridge that supports external RAM. Most people will see sharply diminishing returns on adding memory, but the target market for the iMac Pro (and especially the Mac Pro) can profitably use as much RAM as they can afford, and Apple say they’re going to move those products to ARM in the next 18 months. A Mac Pro that only supported a single SoC with a fixed amount of memory would be unsellable.
Even if you could just add more M1 chips to get more memory, while that might make sense commercially, it’s not how software is designed to work. Although I guess it wouldn’t be impossible for Apple to do something like that, since they also control the OS and the development toolchain.
But my guess is the next wave of Apple chips will be basically the same cores as the M1, but with new peripherals to support fast external RAM (and GPUs?). They’ll keep making the SoC version, though, because it saves space and power, and 16GB is more than most people need (@ugh the current M1 is available in an 8GB and a 16GB version. For various reasons, it’s also not an apples-to-apples comparison with memory sizes on other platforms).
ETA oops, it seems like I missed a bunch of posts there
Also, what I originally came to say was that I am skeptical about this report. Getting rid of the touch bar would obviously make sense because it’s as useless as function keys while also costing more, and even if you wanted to use it, you couldn’t do so when your laptop is docked, as mine usually is. But adding more ports sounds like wishful thinking (like, what? A parallel port?), and as for a return to MagSafe, I’d bet $1 against that. I mean, they’ve already recycled the name.
6 Likes
