Hands-On With the New MacBook Pro: Apple Puts a Touchscreen on a Laptop for the First Time

Apple has updated its MacBook Pro line, in both 13-inch and 15-inch sizes.

Apple's MacBook family has just been through its biggest change since it was born in 2008.

In the early hours of the 28th, Beijing time, Apple held a small launch event for about 300 people at its Cupertino headquarters to show the new generation of 13-inch and 15-inch MacBook Pro laptops.

From the invitation's “Hello Again,” a nod to the first Mac's “Hello,” to the reminder on stage that this week marks 25 years since the PowerBook, Apple kept insisting that this was not a routine upgrade.

It isn't. This is the first time Apple has built a touchscreen into a laptop. Until now, Apple had always refused to put touch on the MacBook line.

But after our hands-on time at the event, this looks like a generation of Mac that a lot of people will love — and a lot of people will hate.

The Basics: Lighter, Thinner, Faster, Longer-Lasting

Apple opened on the 25th anniversary of its laptop line, looking back at a few of the laptop's revolutionary changes: the trackball, the trackpad, built-in WiFi. At the end of that retrospective it slid naturally into the biggest change in the new MacBook Pro: the Touch Bar.

The Touch Bar is a strip of color OLED screen with multi-touch, sitting where the F1-to-F12 row used to be on the MacBook Pro — the same size, the same place, a straight replacement.

Apart from this change, which Apple has placed in the “revolutionary” slot, the new MacBook Pro's body is much more compact and much thinner.

The 13-inch model goes from 18 mm thick to 14.9 mm, and from 1.58 kg to 1.37 kg.

The 15-inch model goes from 18 mm thick to 15.5 mm, and from 2.04 kg to 1.83 kg.

Apple says the plain version without the Touch Bar is what you buy when you give up your MacBook Air.

On screen, weight, thickness and battery life, the new 13-inch Pro beats the Air on every count. The only problem is the price.

The 13-inch Air sells in mainland China for just 7,000 yuan; the cheapest new Pro costs 11,500 yuan. A model with the Touch Bar costs more than 2,000 yuan on top of that.

Worth singling out: the 15-inch model's discrete graphics switch to AMD's Radeon Pro series, built on the “Polaris” core at a 14-nanometer process, which in theory means a large jump in performance. It is the first real upgrade to its graphics since 2012.

Along with the speed, Apple claims longer battery life on both the 13-inch and 15-inch new MacBook Pro, with web browsing now rated at 10 hours.

Perhaps because that strip of OLED screen in the Touch Bar costs so much, the new Pro is also priced somewhat higher than before.

But You'll Have to Replace All Your Video Cables and Adapters

To get thin and light, the new MacBook Pro's ports have changed drastically: the old USB, Thunderbolt, HDMI, MagSafe magnetic charging port and full-size SD card reader are all gone, replaced by four Thunderbolt 3 ports that support USB-C. Of the old ports, only the 3.5 mm headphone jack survives.

The ports use the USB-C shape, which plugs in either way up, and beyond ordinary USB 3.1 they also carry DisplayPort and Thunderbolt. Which means that from now on, hooking the new MacBook Pro up to an external display, a card reader or a full-size USB device means buying new adapters.

Any one of the four USB-C ports can charge the MacBook Pro. When the computer is a long way from the outlet, being able to charge from either side helps. If cables are plugged into all four, the system picks one to charge from.

The Keyboard Is a Lot Like the 12-Inch One, but It Feels Better

Every new MacBook Pro switches to a “butterfly” key mechanism like the 12-inch MacBook's; Apple calls this the second-generation butterfly keyboard.

Trying it at the event, we found the new keyboard really doesn't feel quite like the 12-inch model's: key travel and the force needed to trigger a key sit between the 12-inch model and the old MacBook Pro. In other words, mercifully, it is not as bad as the 12-inch MacBook's.

Besides the new models with the Touch Bar, Apple also slipped out an entry-level model that looks exactly like the new 13-inch MacBook, with slightly lower specs and no Touch Bar, as the replacement for the old 13-inch MacBook Air. The MacBook Air line, still on sale for now, will likely be cut entirely before long.

The Touch Bar: A Second Screen and a Second Trackpad on the Mac

During the MacBook Pro demos, you could see that the way things were shown on the big screen had changed too. Demo time used to need nothing but a picture of the MacBook's screen; with the Touch Bar added, the big screen could also show the presenter's fingers working it — one hand on the trackpad, the other on the Touch Bar, this second new “trackpad.”

Apple's official Touch Bar video introduction

The difference is that what the Touch Bar does can change. In different apps it shows different shortcuts. Apple put three presenters on stage for three demos, using versions of Photoshop, Final Cut Pro and DJ Pro adapted for the Touch Bar.

Cutting video in Final Cut Pro, the Touch Bar becomes a thumbnail strip of the timeline; sliding a finger along it jumps quickly to a point in the timeline, and trim, cut and other tools sit beside it.

Editing a photo in Photoshop, one hand controls where the brush goes while a finger of the other adjusts hardness or size on the Touch Bar.

Mixing in DJ Pro, the presenter on stage never touched the keyboard, doing the whole thing on the Touch Bar — picking tracks, instruments and effects, looping sections, adding vibrato and much more.

Apple's demo at the launch event

In the end the Touch Bar is a strip of OLED screen, and it looks nothing like the main display above it — the surface has something like a matte finish. But it feels smoother than you would expect; if you have used the Force Touch trackpad on the newer MacBooks, the two feel somewhat alike, even though the materials are entirely different.

In our limited time we tried three or four apps. By default, the far left is the Esc key and the right end holds Siri and the volume control. All of it can be changed in settings.

Open mail and start typing, and the Touch Bar offers predicted words and emoji you can tap. Watch a video in QuickTime and a scrub bar pops up for you to drag.

Apple told QDaily that it has opened up the interface, and what shows on the strip is for each app's developers to decide. Whether the virtual keys in a given situation can be customized is up to the developer too.

Whether this strip of screen makes you work faster varies enormously from app to app. In Final Cut Pro, for instance, previewing a clip full-screen brings up a scrub bar on the Touch Bar, which saves some of the trouble of jumping back to the edit view to move the timeline. Picking emoji while typing, on the other hand, saves almost no time at all.

From our short time with it, the Touch Bar amounts to taking some toolbars that used to live on screen and making them touchable. It is a way of working that sits between a keyboard and a real touchscreen. But it may take some learning: for the first few minutes at the event, at least, we were a little lost.

The Touch Bar Is Actually Friendlier to Non-Professional Users

Windows laptops have had touchscreens for several years. Tim Cook once said doing that was like forcing a toaster and a refrigerator together.

Touch on those laptops really hasn't been good, mainly because software on the Windows platform has withered and the productivity tools that remain were never properly tuned for touch. Even Microsoft's own Office team cared more about the iPad than about Windows when it set out to improve touch, and everyone else cared less.

In the end, a Windows laptop is still just a PC you can touch. The giant-screen Surface Studio Microsoft launched this week may push things along, but only may.

The MacBook Pro's shape hasn't really changed. Unlike the iPad Pro and the Surface, which come with keyboards but keep the screen closer to you, its screen sits farther from your hands and is still built around the keyboard and the trackpad.

Touch on the MacBook Pro is penned into the narrow Touch Bar, which takes over the F-key row at the top. That row was already used for brightness, volume and the like. Losing these physical keys won't spoil your feel for the keyboard.

The Touch Bar flexibly shows the buttons you are most likely to want in whatever app is running. The paradox is that the professionals who buy the Pro line tend to know the shortcut combinations for their most-used functions by heart; all the Touch Bar does is display the buttons they could already hit without looking.

Where it may help professionals is editing photos and video full-screen, when the Touch Bar can show a few basic details and handle simple changes. Plenty of people used to solve the full-screen-versus-editing problem with two monitors, but you can't do that on the move. The Touch Bar makes it possible.

The Touch Bar on the Pro line actually suits non-professionals better. People who don't sit at a computer a dozen hours a day and don't remember the shortcuts might otherwise spend a while hunting through the toolbars on screen.

And users who grew up with touchscreen phones and tablets will take more easily to a Touch Bar that simply shows them the buttons.

On Bringing Touch to the Laptop, Apple Has Gone Only Halfway

For the thirty years since Mac and Windows were born, the personal computer has worked like this: a button appears on screen, and you move a cursor with a mouse or trackpad to press it, or you press the matching key. Either way, it is not direct.

See a button, press that button with your hand. This is the most basic technology behind the smartphone revolution. It is also why many older people never got used to the personal computer, yet can pick up a phone or a tablet and shop, read the news and send messages without trouble.

The Touch Bar gives MacBook Pro users a slice of that directness: the buttons software developers judge most important appear right there.

How good it turns out to be will finally depend on how many developers support it, and on whether they can work out which functions belong on the Touch Bar.

But Apple hasn't put the Touch Bar on the whole line this time. Even the new 13-inch MacBook Pro still comes in a version with the old keys.

That means developers have to support two kinds of keyboard at once, and the two pull against each other. If the point is direct interaction, important things — a dialog button, answering an internet call — ought to appear on the Touch Bar itself. They wouldn't even need to show up on the big screen.

The cheapest MacBooks today — the 13-inch MacBook Air, the 12-inch MacBook, the new low-spec 13-inch MacBook Pro — all lack a Touch Bar.

Add to that how long people go between computers — four or five years is common — and the Touch Bar will stay a minority feature for a long time. Developers will inevitably keep designing for the traditional keyboard.

Behind this may lie the plain fact of what OLED screens cost, but it will slow the spread of touch across the MacBook. Whether Apple will one day use the Touch Bar to turn the MacBook's whole keyboard area into a touchscreen is a more distant question still.

Choosing the Touch Bar says that Apple still sees the future of the laptop as improvement rather than revolution. It will go on being the machine tens of millions of people work on, the companion to the iPhone, but it won't change how you use a computer — which also means users won't have much reason to buy a new one.