This Is My Last

The New MacBook Pro: Touchscreen With a Glowing Apple Logo

As rumored, Apple unveiled a new MacBook Pro with touchscreen for all your swiping, pinching and rotation needs.

Something that I didn't read on the rumor mill: the return of the glowing Apple logo on the back of the laptop screen.

This is the pro version of the MacBook Pro, and the price tag reflects that. It may take quite a while before the MacBook Neo gets a touchscreen, I think.

Jason Snell, Six Colors:

Another question I had coming into this event was just how much effort Apple would make to adapt the macOS interface for touch. The answer is: A little, but not a lot. When you touch the screen, the interface makes subtle adaptations—more spacing in menus, more feedback when selecting and dragging items—but what it doesn’t do is flip into some new Touch Mode that looks and behaves totally unlike the Mac.

Steven Levy, Wired:

As a pair of Apple managers take the MacBook through its paces, I see how Apple has addressed some of Schiller’s decade-old concerns, like having to redesign the menu bar for fingers. While it looks the same, when you move a finger over a menu item, it expands to allow you to select your choice with precision. Some of the objects on the screen, like the traffic-light buttons that close or hide windows, also get bigger when you touch them.

They show me how the touch tech can handle precision tasks, like color grading in the video editing software DaVinci Resolve, or tweaking a soundtrack on Logic Pro, Apple’s high-end audio workstation. One innovation, not just for pros, is a new gesture to pull down the “Dynamic Island,” that black oval hosting ongoing tasks that has made its way to Mac from iPhone. An expanded version floats on the screen like a widget, enabling easy access to Siri responses and Spotlight search.

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