Nothing particularly new, but I am comfortably in the boat of people that don't feel that laptops need to be reinvented in any major way. 95% of what I do is in the command line, the browser, or an IDE. I've consistently gone back to my MBP to do all of those things after having tried many other form factors.<p>That being said, I have to admit that I am at least intrigued by the Surface Book. I recently tried the Linux subsystem on Windows and was pretty impressed, it's literally just Ubuntu running with file access. The fact that I CAN pop off the tablet portion, and if I'm so inclined for art, have Photoshop, Illustrator, ZBrush actually available to me is pretty tempting. The OS differences between OSX and Windows for me have always existed only in the command line, so as long as Windows gives me bash and Linux, that pretty much disappears.<p>Conclusion is, I don't think Apple is suffering from a lack of innovation in the laptop department. I don't understand why people assume that we haven't yet converged on the optimal form factor. Why I chose an MBP for my current laptop wasn't because it offered anything totally innovative. It was already derivative of 30 years of laptops with the same form factor. I chose it because of the Unix development environment and the great build quality. I've never used a Surface Book, but it seems like Microsoft has stepped up their game in the build quality department. If their trackpad is as good as Apple's (I have yet to use a Windows laptop where this is the case), then I'd start to consider it a serious competitor. If the two have comparable build quality and Unix, then their form factor innovation is going to be the only thing left distinguishing them (for which Microsoft is obviously currently ahead).
I think conceptually this is really neat, but it could potentially suffer from one major flaw: I hardly ever look down at my keyboard. A flat, digital screen containing changing buttons does not cater well to touch typists, of which you can reasonably assume most are who use a macbook pro.<p>Touch ID is sweet though.
Would be curious to know if they tested the Touch Bar below the keyboard instead of above it.<p>I wonder if, as the concept further evolves, the bar might become larger or migrate locations. The comparisons they made to the original PowerBook were interesting, in that it really showed how constant incremental changes really add up in the long term.<p>Edit: Another possibility is to integrate an OLED display into the trackpad too, so then you have haptics as well, and could interact with both mouse and touch bar with one hand.
I wonder whether they'll offer a version without a discrete GPU, and how difficult will it be to install/run Linux on it ...<p>I've been looking for a good 15" laptop laptop for some time, and all other manufacturers only offer 15" models with numpads, which is just awful. The discrete GPUs are just a rather useless nuisance for me.<p>So I wonder whether there's more detailed info about the exact models they'll offer, somewhere.
One concern I have is that editing in vim is going to be more annoying since the escape key is so essential to the vim workflow and now it's a touch key.<p>I know that some have mentioned that you can map the escape key to the caps lock key, however, I've already mapped my ctrl key to the caps lock key for more accessibility. vim problems :/
I'm already looking forward to using the touch strip in the "professional" apps like Photoshop, but I really spend a lot more time with IDEs and specifically with Emacs.<p>One of the frustrating things about my various keyboards is that the function keys are located in slightly different places. I already have to look down to use a specific function key.<p>Emacs, by default, uses so many of the possible key chords using control and alt and even command modifiers on the Mac keyboard that users are expected to bind their own functions to some of the function keys. I'm wondering if the touch strip will be capable of simplifying my interaction with a complex interface like that presented by Emacs.
I had hoped it would be a click bar, rather than a touch bar based on my experience with my Lenovo touch bar. Also hoped for haptic feedback... seems a shame. At least it seems they have a bit of buffer room on both the left and the right so your fingers can sit on the side of the machine without touching something - I guess that does the job.<p>Will be most interesting to find out how the security is working, and if they're making using any of the Intel security features on these new machines. To date, they have been woefully bad at doing so, which is interesting given the security push on iPhones and the controlled hardware platform.