“Choosing a new MacBook Pro has gotten a little more complicated since Apple introduced the Touch Bar, as not everyone necessarily needs to have the secondary touch-enabled display,” AppleInsider writes. “For this comparison, we’ll be focusing on the 13-inch MacBook Pro, since that’s the only current-gen model where you can choose not to have a Touch Bar.”
“The first obvious difference is the price, with the base model priced at $1,299, though most users will pay for the $1,499 model as 128 gigabytes of storage is very limiting. The cheapest Touch Bar-equipped model costs $1,799, a pretty big premium in comparison, but it does include 256 gigabytes of storage from the start,” AppleInsider writes. “Less obvious but possibly a bigger factor is connectivity, with the Touch Bar model equipped with four Thunderbolt 3 ports instead of two in the non-Touch Bar version.”
“Under GeekBench’s testing, the single-core benchmark for the Touch Bar model was ahead of the non-Touch Bar version, achieving 4,602 and 4,524 respectively. For multi-core, the gap widened, with the Touch Bar MacBook Pro scoring 16,699 to the base model’s 9,484. In single-core tasks, there isn’t much of a difference between both models, so if you’re someone like a student, who mostly just surfs the web and does homework, you won’t notice much of a difference,” AppleInsider writes. “On the other hand, the new Touch Bar model completely destroys the base model in terms of multi-core tasks, so this will help anyone who does a lot of video & photo editing, rendering, or other power-demanding tasks.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Yes, the Touch Bar remains a gimmick precisely because Apple half-assed it and did not release a Touch Bar-equipped keyboard for desktop Macs or even a MacBook with Touch Bar. If Apple doesn’t have confidence enough to use it everywhere, developers will use it nowhere.
That said, the MacBook Pro with Touch Bar is clearly the better machine, even if the only thing the Touch Bar ever offers you are prettier brightness and volume controls. And, if you actually use the Touch Bar and your apps of choice make use of it well, so much the better!
Touchbar is a pretty sweet tool for a lot of applications, and it’s an Apple HW/SW win over Windoze PCs.
Yet Apple is blowing it, making it a premium only solution. Apple should have pushed it into every MacBook ASAP, and kept the pricing down, and thrown it onto iMac keyboards.
Every Mac could have shown a unique advantage over every PC can’t mpared to, making touching screens on laptops seem a pretty poorly executed way to do things.
And? No. Apples screws up their Mac chances yet again because Cook has been forever obsessed with iPad. Ugh…