Macbook Pro With Touch Bar: The Best Bits Of iOS In A Really Great Mac

The 13-inch and 15-inch MacBook Pros are naturally thin, fast, and expensive. But the innovative new Touch Bar makes them surprisingly delightful to use.

- Susie Ochs

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 (go.macworld.com/ mbpfunctionkey).

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.

The Touch Bar is incredibly handy not only because its controls change to match the app you’re using, but also because it’s so customizable. Visit System Preferences → Keyboard, and you can choose what happens when you press the Fn key. The default shows the function keys: F1, F2, and so on. But if you never use those keys, you could also have the Fn key expand the Control Strip to full size.