Great, premium PC laptops are available for half this price, even if Apple still maintains an edge when it comes to graphics and SSD speeds.

The main problem at this point isn’t that the Touch Bar is a bad idea, but that these laptops cost a whole bunch of money. Replace a four- or five-year-old laptop with one of these and you’ll get a great new design, a respectable performance boost, a nice screen, the single most versatile port you can get in any computer, and a new input device that tries to combine the good stuff about PC touchscreens (fast response, malleable button layouts) while avoiding the bad stuff about PC touchscreens (adapting a mouse-and-keyboard driven operating system to finger input, blocking the screen by poking at it with your hand).

If you’ve got a MacBook Pro that you bought in 2012 or earlier and if you’re convinced of the potential utility and novelty of the Touch Bar, these 2016 MacBook Pros were just about worth the wait. More at The Verge Ars Technica: Touch Bar, Touch ID, dedicated GPUs, more ports, and a whole lot moreĪndrew Cunningham at Ars Technica indicated that the new MacBook Pro with Touch Bar has much to offer certain users but that it comes with a high price tag: That future is almost certainly out there. Apple just released this machine too soon, or was too aggressive in the decisions it made. I have little doubt that in a couple years, the technology Apple has been waiting for will arrive and this vision, or something closer to it, will be complete. Where its ports and keyboard morph and adapt perfectly to the needs of every user. Where it can be super light and have all-day battery life. One where it can be impressively thin and powerful enough for the pros.

It’s a fantastic laptop on build alone.īut everywhere I look, it feels like this incarnation of the MacBook Pro is shooting for a future it can’t quite reach. The hardware is incredible, macOS is a joy to use, and I don’t want to give up this screen and keyboard. I may come off sounding quite critical of the new MacBook Pro, but the truth is that I really do like it.

2016 macbook pro 13 inch touchbar