Even better, get BetterTouchTool, you can neuter the entire Terrible Touch Bar or have it display useful information without having any virtual buttons there to accidentally click. You could still have your escape “key” or an escape or Siri “key” that only shows when you press the Command key.
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I also suspect that the fairly limited strain relief on a lightning cable would make using one as the cord of a corded mouse potentially problematic if the design made doing so practical on an ongoing basis.
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Like an SD card slot and a real video port, like the previous gen had. USB-C sucks for video, always requiring multiple unreliable dongles. I have a new MBP for work and my personal one is pre-USB-C so I live the difference every day. On USB-C my external display is constantly flaky and needs three (yes, 3) dongles. My old MBP has a Mini DisplayPort and it’s bulletproof.
I also use an SD card nearly every time I use my computer because I produce audio and video content. The new MBPs mean I will have to carry a stupid dongle for that for the rest of my life. Yes my camera has wireless transfer, but it’s awful. Takes my 5 mins to dig through the menus and set it up every time, and it’s slow to transfer.
So yes, a civilized number of ports is not a big ask.
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Let’s not get started on Apple cables and strain relief.
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My god, are people still complaining about that mouse?
I’ve used it for years. It’s the best mouse I’ve ever had. Just plug it in for a few hours every six or eight weeks. If you forget, then you get a 10% power warning, and you plug it in and go on a coffee break, and you’re good for the rest of the day, at least. It is not that difficult. It certainly isn’t worthy of the infinite scorn that people heap upon it.
The touchbar, on the other hand: I don’t see the point of that at all. I don’t hate it: I just never use it.
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Exactly.
But he was employed as a designer, not just to be an effing ‘artist’.
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Yes. “That Mouse” is emblematic of everything wrong with Apple design, along with the touchbar and “You’re holding it wrong”. It doesn’t matter if the mouse takes 1 week or 10 minutes to charge; it would have been trivial to design a mouse that didn’t need to be turned over to be plugged in, and the fact that they chose the least usable possible design tells you everything about Apple’s organizational priorities.
The possible retirement of the touch bar in the post-Ive era is a small glimmer of hope that right-headedness might yet prevail, but only just.
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It could be that what they’ve recycled the name for is the feature being allegedly considered.
Doing something that adds internal bulk to a laptop would be a bit out of character; but adding the ability to charge a recent-model iPhone just by putting it on top of or on the palm rest of a recent-model Apple laptop wouldn’t be entirely out of place with a focus on minimal-cables-works-best-if-all-your-stuff-is-from-us; which is less out of character.
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Not an Apple user for my primary work load machines but I’m very happy to see this trend in interface design going away. Afaict it’s basically a hardware realization of the ribbon interface - with all the annoying issues that has of breaking the whole episodic memory, knowledge-in-the-world, memory-castle type effects that having predictable functions attached to physical locations brings, (basically the fundamental reason for having a graphical user interface in the first place).
That said - having lots of little distributed displays around is really cool if implemented in a sane way - there are a number of good examples of music hardware using in-situ scratchpad displays to place relevant info near where it’s being used.
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Don’t get me wrong, I use the SD slot on on my old MBP daily, and I’d pay money for that. But Apple’s position is clearly that, rather than provide two versions of USB, three or four different display interfaces, analog audio, SD, micro SD, RJ45, MIDI and whatever else some minority of users might want, they’re just going to ship Thunderbolt 3 and let God sort it out. I don’t love that, but I don’t see any reason why their thinking would change.
I can partly see where they’re coming from. I haven’t had a laptop in the last 20 years that didn’t need a dongle for something, and didn’t also have ports I never used, so I can’t make some pronouncement on which set of ports every laptop must have. And taking ports away will eventually help drive things to use USB-C.
The SD slot is the one thing I would call a flat-out mistake, because (1) it takes up no space, (2) it costs nothing, (3) it’s stable and relevant, (4) SD dongles are particularly obnoxious, and (5) it’s practically the definition of something you’d use when you’re not at a desk. Even Apple ought to see that’s worth the tiny compromise in purity.
The brand-new MBP that arrived last week will definitely bug me once I start leaving my home and being unable to use SD cards and USB-A memory sticks. But for now, I’m more excited about being able to dock my computer with a single cable, using my splendid new standing desk (which turned out to be probably the best thing I made in the last year, albeit hard to photograph) (and it has THREE SD slots!).
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I’ve shown this before, but all of my Apple cables have been wrapped in plastic lanyard - it acts as a general protection on the cable, a strain relief for the end, and it helps identify particular cables when I have to plug in along with a nest of other devices.
Every cable is wrapped in a different color scheme so I can easily trace the device back to the correct USB power plug.
First of all, that’s awesome. Second, I love the title you gave that image.
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Uh…
what’s a touchbar?
Yep.
I’m not sure how easy-to-replace the battery is, but this design also ensures that once your battery stops holding a charge, the mouse is useless.
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Even so, who would buy an electric car if you had to reach underneath it to plug it in?
Its just dumb. Its a feature designed by somebody who doesn’t know what a mouse is for.
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I’m surprised nobody has designed a wireless mouse with wireless charging and a plug-in mouse pad. Let the device charge whenever the machine is idle.
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Yeah its a great example of a good feature which you don’t even need to see or think about. It just works.
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I would say wait another 10 years, since by that time they’ll be back to using Intel chips.
As someone who carries their laptop to the office, I can’t recharge the mouse overnight unless I take it home with me, so it’s one more thing to carry / drop / forget. It’s just such an obviously stupid design that has no practical benefit whatsoever.
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Don’t count Motorola out just yet.
When I first saw that picture, I first thought that was some sort of USB hub. Then I realized, no, it’s the intersection of computing and Asshole Design.
One thing Logitech did very, very right with the MX Ergo trackball is that you can use it while it’s charging. It still operates wirelessly (Bluetooth or proprietary dongle), but at least I don’t have to break out an old mouse while I’m charging it.
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