This week on AI: 'Touch bar' MacBook Pro in late Oct., all-glass casing on 2017 iPhones & more

You know I've seen that picture of the 'Touch Bar' so many times that I really hope it looks like that or even better. The creator of the picture (I can just barely see the name Martin H.?) I hope is getting some serious royalty's for the use of it. On a side note, I think the Touch Bar is really cool (if it looks like that) and will open up a world of new use cases. We'll probably wonder how we ever did without it. But I'm just surprised no one has done this before or have they? Anyway, can't wait... :)

In my opinion, its like adding clutter to your keyboard. I personally did not like the idea of seeing the stuff on my keyboard touch bar, that I already can on screen. MacBook will lose it's simplicity and elegance.

Ok guys about that NVidia return, what if it isn't an issue of a GPU being slapped into a motherboard but rather an NVidia SOC.   Here I'm thinking NVidia Parker and Xavier like chips.  You put these into Macs as part of the transition to ARM in the Macs and you would get few complaints about performance.  

I don't think I'm crazy here though I haven't dug all the performance numbers.    It doesn't appear that these are laptop class chips but Apple has that covered with its own A series chips.  What I'm saying is that it looks like these new SoC from NVidia would give Apple the range of chips needed to transition most of the Mac Product line to ARM in one go.  It is an interesting possibility if you are one of the people that would like to see Apple move away from Intel.   

Another possibility, a very good one in my mind, is that these chips, one of them at least is headed for an Apple monitor with a built in GPU.   The extra compute power offered by the ARM cores could result in some interesting performance behaviors.    Effectively the Mac would end up sending very high level instructions over to the monitor to be processed on the ARM cores which then drive the GPU.   In other words you get a bit more than just sending GPU instructions over the TB interface.   The only problem here is that I'm not sure the complexity is worth it.   However another 7 billion transistors helping the laptops processor is a delicious thought.  

So so what in saying here is that rumors about NVidia could be more than a GPU design in.  

wizard69 said:

aegean said:

In my opinion, its like adding clutter to your keyboard. I personally did not like the idea of seeing the stuff on my keyboard touch bar, that I already can on screen. MacBook will lose it's simplicity and elegance.

Don't knock it until you have tried it!   

I really don't see how you can call this clutter, it effectively replaces a row of function keys already there.  While I have reservations I'm not going to dismiss this out of hand.   I can imagine this working in a number of different ways some not so good while others having huge potential.   

As as to what you are imagining I don't see it that way.    I fully expect usage similar to how function keys are used today.   You just won't have to guess as to key functionality. Frankly I see this as a power users feature, especially those that are very familiar with the keyboard.   If you are the sort that never used the function keys you will lose very little.  On the other hand if you do use the function keys this just makes it faster and easier to learn specific functions depending on the app in foreground.  

As as for your statement about Mac Book losing its simplicity and elegance, where are you coming from here?    Seriously how does an improved function key capability reduce elegance?    If this works as imagined it would be more elegant and enhance operator access to the machine.   

In in any event let's not knock something we haven't tried.   It could suck but this is Apple and we can at least hope that they do a better job than the average gringo implementing this on a MS compatible platform.   

We've all tried it. 

In the early 2000s. Gosh is had that ridiculous screen under the trackpad. 

It it was just clutter. 

Please Apple, don't turn the MBP into a Wii U. 

Andvthe render is hideous. I don't want a display showing something that I could see on the main screen.  Especially some "now playing" list that I'd just want to hide. Really hate to see that become ad space for Apple a music or some garbage like that.