A Week with the New Macbook Pro with Touch Pad

I&#x27;ve had my MBP 2016 with Touch Bar since Tuesday. Some additional thoughts for anybody who cares:<p>Re: the speakers.<p>I was watching something on Netflix on my chest lying on my back (you know the position) and the speakers were so good they <i>almost</i> sounded like surround sound.<p>I had to turn the sound off because I was convinced somebody had walked in to the room behind me. Seriously good speakers.<p>The keyboard is also excellent, if not a bit noisy for my fat fingers but it doesn&#x27;t bother me.<p>Touch bar - meh. It&#x27;s good when it works but it&#x27;s not life changing. When more apps (I&#x27;m looking at you spotify) get on board I expect I&#x27;ll use it more. It definitely doesn&#x27;t detract from the experience.<p>Battery life is a real bug bear of mine. I come from a MacBook Air 2013 model and could <i>easily</i> get 6+ hours even if I was using Chrome heavily. Now my average run time is closer to 4 hours. Those two hours make all the difference.<p>The trackpad in my opinion is not too large. Having said that I was happy with the size of the previous track pad, I don&#x27;t know why they increased the size but it hasn&#x27;t lessened the track pad experience.<p>Finger print to login and siri a touch bar click away is neat, I hope to use siri more now.

Re: battery life. VSCode (and the underlying Electron shell) is likely to blame. I can get 10 hours on my 2015 MBP if I&#x27;m just tooling around in Safari and Emacs. Having anything Electron based (or Chrome) drops that to about 6. It&#x27;s somehow more power hungry than MS Office, which is saying a lot.

Very true about the speakers -- I never cared either, until now. They&#x27;re so good. Also true about the trackpad -- not a big problem, but it does sometimes move my cursor when typing, and there&#x27;s just no need for it to be this huge.<p>As for the keyboard, I&#x27;ve been using mine (sans Touch Bar) at home for four weeks now, and it&#x27;s <i>great</i>. It took a while to adjust, but now when I use my Air at work, the keyboard just feels so... suboptimal. It really is a pleasure to use. (In contrast to the Macbook keyboard, which was terrible.)

The author is confused over terminology. The control strip above the keyboard is called the Touch Bar. The main pointer input device is the Trackpad. Neither is called Touch Pad.

I am using the 13&quot; (maximum possible configuration) for a couple of days now. So far:<p>- At first, the keyboard felt very different, but now I really enjoy working with it and the may Air&#x27;s keyboard feels like a toy<p>- Screen and speakers are gorgeous<p>- USB-C is nice given you have all the adapters you need<p>- I find the TouchBar actually useful for some things, e.g. easier formatting in Keynote<p>But it looks like, there are still some bugs:<p>- The first adapter I plugged in caused a kernel panic<p>- After reboot, the login screen is hardly usable. Very slow and looks weird sometimes<p>- Three finger drag works only from time to time<p>Edit:<p>Two things I forgot:<p>- the media controls in the expandable bar simply do not work - nothing happens when they are pressed<p>- in Safari, the TouchBar allows to play&#x2F;pause and advance HTML5 videos. I took a photo of it: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;pbYdhMi.jpg" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;pbYdhMi.jpg</a>

It&#x27;s great to read some informed comments about this wonderful new laptop by someone who has actually used it. I disagree with his opinion about the size of the touchpad, but that&#x27;s a matter of personal preference.

&gt; I chose the maxed out “standard” model for $2,799 at the local Apple store: 15&quot; i7&#x2F;2.7&#x2F;16gb&#x2F;512gb<p>I might be nit picking, but maxed out normally means you&#x27;ve picked the very best config (2.9&#x2F;2T&#x2F;Radeon 460), not that you picked one of the standard configuration.<p>PS: Also, they are selling better configuration than the author&#x27;s at local Apple stores, no need to order necessarily online.

I got a maxxed out 13 inch (touch bar) a couple of days ago, and I hate the new keyboard (I never got used to the shallow keyboard on the 12&quot;, after having one for almost a year).<p>The Touch Bar is also pretty much a useless gimmick.<p>Besides that it&#x27;s a neat machine, though I think Apple is getting close to what is worth paying the Apple tax for (inconsistent product lineup: no USB-C on the iPhone 7, no USB-C on the external trackpads&#x2F;keyboards, etc). My employer paid for my machine, I do not think I would have spent my own money on this.

I have the new 13 inch model and one of my main frustrations is that if I apply pressure to the area just the the side of the track pad, it prevents two finder scrolling from working. Basically if I rest my palm to the right of the trackpad, it interferes with the track pad movement. This isn&#x27;t a palm detection issue because I&#x27;m definitely resting my hand to the right of the track pad, and I think it&#x27;s a result of the pressure from the weight of my hand.<p>Wondering if anyone else is seeing this?

Having used one for a few days I have found that while disk I&#x2F;O is an impressive gain on the already amazing speeds in the previous model the CPU gains are minimal and disappointing. And the GPU is already dated. It has a lovely screen and better speakers but I had hoped for a greater increase in CPU and GPU performance.<p>Also the keyboard just isn&#x27;t as good.

Anybody had any issues with the keyboard? I&#x27;ve heard rumors of some ergonomic issues and it worries me.

an overall experience after reading: the new model seems only has 2 real pros: brighter screen and faster ssd... Damn, such a pity.

What does the Touch Bar look like with Boot Camp?

I don&#x27;t know much about the new MBP specs, but I was a little surprised to read this:<p><i>This taxed the system hard and it was very hot, with fans running</i><p>I was under the impression that these didn&#x27;t have fans.