As a newcommer to Cake, i'm not sure if this is an effective way to respond to the two replies of my post about the touch bar. But here goes . . . . .

If one concludes that the touch bar is a gimmic, inappropriate for "desktop" machines, then what do we conclude? Here are some possibles:

1) Apple have "lost their way" and are moving away from quality tech to the high-end jewelery market.

2) The touch bar is the prelude to a fully "soft" keyboard. Of course the battery life issues apply here - but to my mind there is no real problam in having a wired keyboard for a desktop machine. But perhaps I'm a dinosaur.

To be clear - I'm not obsessing about the touch bar. What I am really concerned about is the general future trajectory for Mac-OS machine.

Apple have "lost their way" and are moving away from quality tech to the high-end jewelery market.

Great insight!

Perhaps they are making decent machines that no one wants to buy because their 3-year-old machine is good enough? It's could be it's just harder to get people to pay up for a new Mac every couple of years, and Apple is experimenting to see what gets people to buy.

I have come to the sad realization that my 6-year old MBP is better than the new one.

Apple should offer a 15" MPB without the touch bar as a premium feature

Yay first post!

Anyway I just bought the new Macbook Pro for programming purposes. I upgraded from a 2011. When I first got it a was skeptical but, then fell in love with the speed of it, keyboard and display. And I thought the lack of ports would bother me but too be honest I was able to adapt. The battery life lasts all day for me and I put it on heavy load (xcode, webstorm, web browser, and file server). I think it was a bit expensive (especially as a broke high school student) but I love it so far.

Edit: I got the lowest end one btw. No touch bar.

Welcome to Cake, arodebaugh. 😁 Great first post. I'm relieved to hear that so far people seem to like the keyboard, and the battery lasts all day. I'm one step closer to buying myself.

I bought the 2016 model,

I remember these keyboards as being too shallow but I tried the latest model the other day and it feels like a normal keyboard again.