Same here, really hoping the removal of the touch-bar is not a myth. MacBook with M1, good keyboard and no touch-bar would definitely be the best laptop on the market for a looong time..

I'm never buying another MacBook with a Touch Bar. Ever. I've learned that lesson the hard way. I refuse to pay 3,500$ and have to put up with something actively hindering my work.

Getting rid of the Touch Bar might be realistic. If only it were realistic that they would add a USB-A and HDMI port back to it too...

The HDMI is apparently coming back, according to Ming-chi Kuo. No word on USB-A though.

Out of curiosity, if they kept the touch bar but as an addition to a row of function keys, rather than a replacement, would you still have an issue with the TB?

Personally I would rather it was gone. My fingers are big enough that they brush the edge of the touchbar while I type and volume/brightness/whatever just flaps endlessly while I'm trying to get work done. I have to use an external keyboard with that thing.

Btw you can lock the mode of the touch bar and customize/remove the items.

I doubt that would happen if there were a row of physical half-height function keys between the numbers and the touchbar. But I also doubt they would make that laptop, it would require a smaller touchpad and most people wouldn't want that, myself included.

Or 4:3 screen, but we can keep dreaming there...

My hope is that they offer the touchbar as a configurable option on all MacBooks going forward, at least until they realize no one is buying the ones with the touchbar included. Maybe some video editors like it? It's a failed experiment from where I'm sitting.

Or they could, you know, just do the obvious thing and give it a touch screen like their other devices.

For me, I think it's a novel concept, but it's rarely used in practice. I like having it as a scrub bar for video/audio apps or for fine-tuned volume control and it's nice for emojis. But other than that, I rarely interact with it.

Every now and then I overcome decades of muscle memory and push the buttons on a modal from the touch bar.

The ironic thing is that I would use it a lot, if, and only if, there were any browser which displays tabs as favicons on the touch bar.

But there just... isn't. It's completely baffling, the Safari preview is useless and Firefox has a 'touch to select address bar' button which I always forget is there.

I've found it occasionally helpful when using a fullscreen app, such as having access to Camera/Mute controls while on a video conference without having to remember the hotkey.

But I also wouldn't be particularly sad if it disappeared.

It all seems too good to be true, memory and ssd upgrades aside, the M1 devices seem to be fantastic value for money. Also waiting for a 16" M1, decided to order a mini in the meantime.

It definitely is. I'm daily driving a Macbook Air, something which I never thought I'd say. Even beyond the CPU crunching performance, I'm not sure what part of it is causing this, but it's just so much smoother for a variety of misc things. I suspect either better coupling with the integrated GPU or the unified memory.

But many little things, like the smoothness of the OS, or the way that the screen wakes from sleep instantly are just superior to my much more expensive, and power hungry desktop. Of course, my desktop can still cream it in a GPU workload but for programming, it's amazing.

It's certainly a capable SOC, but non-replaceable solid-state storage is a non-starter for me.

I would have said the same a couple years ago, but nowadays I can get an external 5TB solid state drive for a few hundred $$ that easily fits in my laptop case. As long as my OS runs from the internal disk, I don't really need much more. Everything in the cloud anyway. :)

My concern is more with the longevity of the drive. SSD failures are only a matter of time, and these new Macbooks are going to be bricked once they hit their TBW limits.

There’s a very good chance that the MacBook is outdated or otherwise broken by the time the SSD fails. I’ve been using SSDs for about 10 years, and I’m not the heaviest user, but so far I’ve never had an SSD fail from wear. Thumb drives, sure, but not SSDs yet.

I have no idea why you're downvoted. This is absolutely a valid concern and one of the biggest reasons why I'm staunchly anti-Apple.

I wouldn't be surprised if Apple excludes a random feature just because people won't need to buy again if they make the device people actually want.

You see it in the iPhones and the variant SKUs, and Canon and Nikon also had been doing this when there wasn't competition eating their lunch.

There are just going to be more and more pushes to turn your laptop into a subscription service. Pay apple $100/mo and always have the latest hardware sent to you on release, always have the latest version of the OS, always have a store you can drop off a broken laptop and walk back home with a perfectly working one that day no questions asked, etc.

I think it will be this for electronics, and hopefully telsa will be able to provide this for cars. If I cant own it fully, atleast make the subscription service completely hassle free and worth it.

ive been waiting for this since they first announced the iphone upgrade program, sign me up.

In fact this is an answer to the OP about they will hide features. Business is business and they have to survive in some form. One-off purchase is well one-off. If there is a business on-going concerns, they can sort of give out the shaver and recover from the blade sale etc. And as software need update any case whilst hardware we have been good enough for quite a while, it is better a software subscription model.

Of course the problem is whether they can cut the line ...

Enterprise IT works that way. You basically lease with option to buy servers/computers in bulk and refresh every 3-5 years.

That sounds like the absolute worst thing I can imagine ever happening to computing.