Apple gave its new MacBook Pro a thinner, sleeker case, which demanded a
new, lower-travel keyboard, a new venting system, and even a smaller
battery. But while I appreciate a Mac that’s smaller and lighter, I’d
rather have a Mac that’s easier or just more fun to use. These 13-inch
and 15-inch MacBook Pros with Apple’s new Touch Bar are both.
The Touch Bar brings my favorite things about the iPad Pro’s software keyboard to the Mac. The amount of useful shortcuts it adds is ridiculous, and this is before most third-party developers have even had a chance to add Touch Bar support. Even for a premium price—and these Macs aren’t cheap—I think the Touch Bar makes this a much more compelling buy than the MacBook Pro with function keys.
Meet the Touch Bar
The Touch Bar is an OLED strip that’s tempting to call a display, but Apple wants developers and users to think of it as an input device, not a display. You can’t adjust its brightness yourself, for example, because if it was too bright it would start looking more like a display than a set of keys. It’s also optimized for viewing at a 45-degree angle, looking down from above, which is odd for any screen. Nonetheless, the Touch Bar stays visible and legible even if you are sitting at an off-angle to your Mac.
Adam Patrick Murray The Control Strip is a set of four of your favorite keys, and it stays on the right side of the Touch Bar all the time. You can choose which four buttons you want in System Preferences > Keyboard by clicking Control Strip. That will display a grid of buttons on your screen, and then you use the MacBook Pro’s giant trackpad to drag them from the screen directly onto the Touch Bar. The default set of Control Strip keys is brightness, volume, mute, and Siri, but you can select from tons of useful shortcuts, like buttons to take a screenshot, start dictation, open Notification Center, or put your Mac to sleep.
Adam Patrick Murray The Escape key, which is no longer a real physical key, hangs out on the left side of the Touch Bar almost all the time. The only time it goes way is when you expand the Control Strip to its full length, but when that happens, an X button shows up where you’d expect Escape to be, and tapping X shrinks the Control Strip again to reveal the Escape key. Keyboard shortcuts that use Escape still work (like Command-Option-Escape, to force-quit an app), but if you’re concerned that the Touch Bar itself could freeze up and prevent that, you could always remap Escape to a different physical key. I’m not going to bother, because in my time with the Touch Bar, it’s worked perfectly.
Using the Touch Bar in apps
Along with the Escape key and the Control Strip, the Touch Bar presents app-specific controls in the center, and that’s where the real magic happens. This is just a short list of the ways the Touch Bar delighted in me in each app.-
In Mail, the Touch Bar makes sorting the inbox fast and easy, with
buttons for flag, archive, and delete, as well as a button that guesses
where you might want to file each message.
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In Safari, when a video starts playing, a pause button and scrub bar
appear on the Touch Bar. Tapping that pause button is a much quicker way
to shut the video up than having to find the cursor onscreen, then find
the video and hover over it to get the player’s pause button to appear.
Adam Patrick Murray -
Also in Safari, when you select the Location bar to type in a new URL or
search, the Touch Bar fills with favicons for your favorite sites. The
first time I saw the Macworld logo on the Touch Bar, I giggled out loud.
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When filling out forms in Safari, QuickType suggestions on the Touch Bar
will pop up with your name, address, phone, and email when you tab to
those fields.
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In Messages and Mail, the emoji picker gets a button on the Touch Bar.
Tap it and you can scroll through all the emoji or jump to a certain
category. It’s faster than pressing Command-Control-Space and then using
the Character picker to find and click emoji with the trackpad.
Adam Patrick Murray -
In Calendar, if you select an appointment that someone else invited you
to, there’s a button on the Touch Bar to send that person a message.
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If I’m trying to navigate with mostly the keyboard, dialog boxes can
sometimes pull me out. Now, the options in a dialog box also show up on
the Touch Bar.
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I also love how the Control Strip’s volume and brightness controls are a
single button, and not two buttons (one to increase, one to decrease)
like on a function key Mac. You just tap the button to see a slider, and
you can even tap and keep your finger down to slide up or down, even if
your finger isn’t directly on top of the slider. A smooth slider makes
more sense than having to tap-tap-tap a single key to crank the music or
brighten your screen.
Adam Patrick Murray Speaking of QuickType suggestions, this is one area where the Touch Bar falls flat. I type about 80 words a minute, and suggestions just can’t keep up with that, lagging as far as two words behind my fingers. While I’m in the midst of typing a sentence, the words tend to freeze up and only change when I stop typing. But the suggestions can be useful if you’re a hunt-and-peck typer, or you’re, say, holding a sandwich in one hand while one-finger typing with the other. (Hey, a lot of us eat lunch at our desks.)
Adam Patrick Murray The Touch Bar also has Touch ID, which lets you log into your Mac, authenticate Apple Pay transactions in Safari, and authorize purchases in the iTunes and App Stores without having to type your password. I also love being able to use Touch ID in System Preferences, instead of typing my Mac’s password. Developers can use Touch ID too—1Password already added support, letting you unlock your password vault with Touch ID, just like you can on iPhones and iPads with Touch ID.
Performance
Let’s not forget that there are computers attached to these Touch Bars. In my earlier review of the 13-inch MacBook Pro with function keys, benchmarks showed only a slight improvement in CPU speed over the previous generation, but much better graphics performance. These MacBook Pros did a little better.
Adam Patrick MurrayIn Geekbench 4.0.1, the 13-inch MacBook Pro with Touch Bar scored 3927 in the single-core 64-bit CPU test, which is 5.3 percent faster than the previous generation’s score, and 4.2 percent faster than the just-released 13-inch 2GHz MacBook Pro with function keys. The 15-inch MacBook Pro scored 4216, which is just 1.5 percent better than 2015’s 15-inch MacBook Pro with 2.5GHz quad-core Core i7 with 16GB of RAM and a discrete AMD Radeon R9 M370X.
The 15-inch MacBook Pro with Touch Bar scored 42827 in Geekbench’s OpenCL test when using the AMD Radeon Pro 450 graphics, which is 38.7 percent better than the last gen. This model has 2GB of dedicated graphics memory, but you can upgrade to a Radeon Pro 460 with 4GB of memory for $200. The 15-inch MacBook Pro also contains an Intel HD Graphics 530 chip that can be used to extend battery life during less-intensive tasks.
