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MacBook Pro review: Touch Bar comes at high cost

Edward C. Baig
USA TODAY
Apple MacBook Pro

NEW YORK—A full touch-screen Macintosh computer is a touchy topic at Apple. Despite popularizing touch screens on iPhones and iPads, and the fact that Windows rivals have embraced touch screen PCs for awhile, the folks at Apple have resisted on the Mac.

They still have.

On the pricey ($1799 on up) new MacBook Pro laptops that I’ve been testing for more than a week, Apple brought a fresh approach to touch computing, via a high-resolution strip of virtual controls known as the Touch Bar that's above the traditional Qwerty keyboard. I found it useful at times, but it comes at a high cost.

This multi-touch glass strip of shortcut keys dynamically changes depending on the app you’re using. In the Calendar app, for example, you can change the on-screen view by electing day, week, month or year controls on the Touch Bar. In Photos, you can slide your finger to crop or rotate a picture and apply filters. And in Messages you can easily insert emojis.

Adding emojis

Sometimes the context-sensitive functionality of the Touch Bar adds capabilities you may be accustomed to on an iOS device. Take predictive text—if you’re composing an email or iMessage, say, the Touch Bar surfaces words you may want to type next.

And yes, you can still summon traditional function keys and system controls from the Touch Bar, for screen brightness, volume, and so on, all accessible via a collapsed strip on the right side.

Apple is also opening up the Touch Bar to third-party developers, bringing the functionality to, among others, Microsoft Office and Adobe Photoshop. At this stage, though, all my Touch Bar usage involved Apple’s own apps and tools.

*Is the Touch Bar worth it? Though tough to quantify, I quickly came to appreciate how the Touch Bar might make you more productive.

But you still have to weigh whether trading up for the feature is worth the splurge, what with 13-inch MacBook Pros with the Touch Bar starting at $1799 and 15-inch versions $2399. After all, new MacBook Pros without the Touch Bar go for $1499, and you can still get an older model for $200 less than that.

Plus, handy as it is, Touch Bar does take a little getting used, if only because old computing habits are hard to break. With the laptop on my, well, lap, I sometimes gazed right past the Touch Bar altogether and instead stared directly onto the computer screen.

Other times I’d momentary pause to consider whether I should use the Touch Bar to handle some task or alter my workflow. Sometimes there’s no Touch Bar alternative. When I wanted to scroll inside the Safari browser, I had to stick to my tried and true method of using the trackpad, which was far easier anyway.

Speaking of which, the trackpads on the new MacBook Pros are relatively ginormous: twice as large as the prior generation on the 15-inch model and 46% on the 13-inch.

Apple had to consider which actions warranted Touch Bar controls and which didn’t. In the iBooks app, you can drag your finger to quickly pore through the pages of a book, but there’s no Touch Bar control for moving ahead or back a single page at a time.

The Touch Bar for iTunes shows you the usual play controls for fast-forward, pause, rewind and such. What you don’t get in the Touch Bar is the name of an artist or song, or a progress bar, one of those small details that would be nice to see added in the future. Apple if it chooses can add Touch Bar controls via software updates.

As a Mac user who also frequently employs Windows PCs and Chromebooks with touch screens, there were times I instinctively reached to make physical contact with the Mac’s display — muscle memory, at work — but it had no effect, of course. So while I like the Touch Bar, I hope Apple is persuaded to add a full touch screen Mac down the road. I'm not counting on it.

Meantime, here are other observations on what are on balance very appealing, if expensive, MacBook Pros.

*Touch ID. The fingerprint sensor familiar to the iPhone crowd is a welcome addition to the Mac, and not only for using it to get past a lock screen. It’s a handy way to authorize purchases made on the Web through Apple Pay.

You can use your fingerprint to unlock the Mac or pay via Apple Pay

*The keyboard. I never fully cozied up to the “butterfly” style Qwerty keyboard on Apple’s MacBook notebook and was worried when I first learned that the MacBook Pro keyboard was based on the same technology. But the refined second-generation butterfly mechanism used here represents a marked improvement. The keys are responsive. I felt perfectly comfortable, for instance, typing this column out on the keyboard.

*Ports As it has done so many times, Apple gives and takes away. The priciest new MacBook Pros come with four Thunderbolt 3/USB-C ports, two on each side. You can use pretty much any USB-C charger to juice up your Mac, though if you try a cellphone charger as I did, it might not charge quite as fast as using the supplied USB-C power adapter, which incidentally replaces the old MagSafe power adapter. And you’ll need an adapter to charge an iPhone.

Indeed, while the ports here are fast, powerful and versatile, you’ll need accessory adapters for HDMI, full-sized standard USB connectors and other devices, a painful transition for some.  Apple has already lowered the price of some accessories. Camera buffs will especially lament the loss of the SD card slot.

*Battery. I didn’t do a formal test, but Apple is claiming about 10 hours of battery life for wireless web usage or iTunes movie playback, comparable to prior models.

*Sound. Apple says the speakers here have twice the dynamic range of earlier MacBook Pros. What I can say is that the speakers are loud and crisp, and the overall audio quality is excellent.

*Portability. Older MacBook Pros were not only expensive compared to MacBook Airs but much heavier. They're still not cheap of course, but the latest 13-inch model now weighs 3 pounds, same as the Air, and is 12% thinner. The 15-inch model weighs about a pound more.That makes them a lot easier to schlep around.

Email: ebaig@usatoday.com; Follow USA Today Personal Tech Columnist @edbaig on Twitter

The bottom line

MacBook Pros with Touch Bar

www.apple.com

$1799 on up

Pro. Touch Bar, Touch ID. Fast, thin, powerful and light.  Retina display, Superb sound.

Con. Expensive. No SD slot. You'll need adapters for certain connectors.

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