I don’t know what that future holds or why I need that future, but the Bar’s smoothness and dynamism and full spectrum of color (it is well built, I’ll give Apple that) seemed like something dreamy from five years from now (it reminds me of, 13 years back, when I splurged for backlit keys on my first Powerbook - then also the seeming future). I center this mostly in the dream that the Touch Bar is the future. Yet despite my lack of WOW! factor, I still wanted to be a part of the Touch Bar world. The anticipatory text was a tiny bit helpful, but I found it no faster than typing the word on the keys like a conventional, old-fashioned writer. The expanding and contracting of the buttons, I found cumbersome - when I reached for them I wanted to hit buttons once, not twice. On the flipside in my experience, I also noted that the Touch Bar made the sixth row of the keyboard a bit less functional. I re-discovered Reminders, found Safari to now compete with Chrome, and started using Notes to take, uh, notes. Despite the forced prodigal return, I actually enjoyed it. The bar encourages you to stay in the Apple software ecosystem and definitely encourages you to use Siri (though she’s unresponsive when not connected to the internet, discouragingly enough).
In testing the new MacBook Pro, I identified two notable experiences: one, I converted back to more Apple apps (formerly known as “programs”). And I definitely don’t need to spend another $300 on a laptop where my most commonly used program is TextEdit. I also don’t need the extra processor horsepower on the MacBook Pro Touch Bar version or its two bonus Thunderbolt/USB-C ports. For everything I do, I don’t need the Touch Bar.
The Touch Bar is exactly one such offering, and it’s held at a carrot stick’s distance away from a justifiable purchase. Apple - an arbiter of plush pragmatism, in most cases - doesn’t always tap into the lusty side of our tech-souls, but more recently they’ve dabbled (hello, Hermés Watch). Lust, we call it, and it’s our most bedeviling vice. There are times you know you don’t need something but you want it anyway. Three staffers at Gear Patrol - an editor, photographer and tech writer - tested the new 15-inch MacBook Pro, for a week each, to see if they Touch Bar was a good fit for them. Plus the Touch Bar is only compatible with a select number apps - and Chrome isn’t one of them. The 10 hours of web browsing and movie playback isn’t great (and, in some cases, not true). It adds an extra $300 to an already expensive machine. Apple’s new MacBook Pro line - announced in October 2016 - introduced the world to the Touch Bar, and despite the initial ooh‘s and aah‘s, the tech world seems polarized on whether such a thing is actually worth it. A new, glimmering multi-touch OLED display is in.
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