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I bought the first MBP with a Touch Bar shortly after it was released. I assumed that Apple had a cunning plan for the Touch Bar that would more than compensate for its disadvantages - turned out that they didn't. Touch ID, on the other hand, is really valuable.

I could write a book on why the Touch Bar is a bad idea but some of the obvious ones are:

• You have to look at it to use its keys 'cos you can't feel them
• This is made worse by the fact they move around so the same key can be in different places
• It often needs an extra press just to use it since it times-out and goes blank (even on mains power)
• The bar has limited capacity so lists (eg of E-Mail addresses) are often incomplete compared to the version on the display
• And why wouldn't you use the display version anyway 'cos that's where you are looking?
• It adds cost to the computer
  
• It adds hardware complexity so, in principle, reduces reliability
• Heck, it probably even reduces battery life

In its favour, the utility for configuring it is really cool.

So I hope the new MBP loses the Touch Bar. I really hope it does include the extra port types though, to save carrying dongles or being embarrassed when you've forgotten them. My MBP before the Touch Bar was a real road warrior: you could connect it to almost everything in the real world without a dongle. Making things smaller and lighter by moving required functionality into separate units is not clever design (hey, look at the size of the new notebook - you'll need to remember to take along a battery though, and a display and keyboard and the really neat SSD... but look how small and light the notebook is!).

As to a notch, I'm not really sure I care. On the iPhone, Apple rearranged icons so the middle of the top of the display wasn't needed. As I write this on my current MBP, I see a big empty space in the middle of the Menu Bar and I happen to know that macOS already knows how to dump Menu Bar items should it be full so I doubt it would be a big issue. If it does come to pass, I also very much doubt it will be as big as the schematic seems to suggest.
</rant>

I must be missing something:
One is an apple, one is a pear
One has a stalk, one doesn't,
One has a bite out of it, the other doesn't
One has a leaf above it, the other has a leaf beside it

We have a saying in the UK that you can't compare apples and pears (or indeed oranges)...

Call me old fashioned but this just seems unacceptably rude to me. It's a bit like you invite someone into your house to do a particular job and then, when you can't see, they rummage through your private documents that have nothing to do with the reason they are there. The same thought applies to those apps that, given access to Contacts for a particular address, read/copy all the others too. And 'this is how we make it free' is no excuse!

So well done Apple.

macplusplus said:

svanstrom said:

dutchlord said:

No way I am going to use any covid app. I don’t trust any of the parties involved. 

...
All this tracking could for instance be implemented at a network level where they use triangulation data to calculate the risks to individuals, which are at a certain risk level then targeted with an sms telling them that they should go to one of a list of providers doing COVID-19 testing.

That seems like the most feasible solution, considering that device based solutions would require the latest version of the OS.

To be clear, the UK's system (and I think Google/Apples' too) does NOT track users' locations. It tracks contact with (being close to) other (anonymised) users, not where that contact happened. Your phone remembers the anonymised identities of those you were close to (for 14 days, I think). If you, or they, fall ill with the virus and report that fact to the NHS the system then warns each of the contacts calculated to be at risk.

The only geographic data the system stores is the first part of your home postcode (Zip code). That only gets reported if you report being ill; it's used to identify potential infection hotspots for nationwide tracking. The first part of my postcode covers more than 28,000 people's homes. This is not a position in any practical sense.

Rayz2016 said:

Oh, the whining …

And I see the users in the UK trial are complaining about the battery drain, as predicted by just about everybody outside NHSX. 

I don't remember an iOS release or contentious app release where people didn't immediately moan about their battery not lasting as long. I'm sure. it doesn't have anything to do with using the phone more because it has a new toy on it.

If you read the measured reports, say Howard Oakley's (respected Mac expert, software developer and, coincidentally, a medic) who is based on the Isle of Wight so actually has the app live on his phone, you get a different story. He says, from real use in a live deployment: "Even when we have been quite active, and it has clocked up several hours in the background, it is amazingly frugal with energy on iPhones, and neither I nor my wife have noticed any increase in battery use".

In the same item, he also says that the 'Bluetooth in the background' issue is much less than anticipated.