Apple MacBook Pro with Touch Bar (13-inch, 2016) review – CNET

The Good The inventive Touch Bar streamlines work and saves clicks, and Apple has improved almost every part of the thinner, lighter MacBook Pro, including a larger touchpad, faster components and a flatter keyboard. iPhone’s Touch ID is handy on the Mac, too.

The Bad You’re paying a hefty premium for the Touch Bar, which supports only a limited handful of Apple apps for now. The USB-C-only ports mean carrying a bag full of dongles. The lack of high-end graphics or huge RAM options in the 13-inch model may frustrate photo and video professionals.

The Bottom Line Apple’s smart, useful Touch Bar makes it well worth splurging on the step-up version of the streamlined 13-inch MacBook Pro.

Apple’s taking big swings with the new MacBook Pro. Some land square, some miss their mark. Altogether, this is a beautiful, powerful machine that almost everyone will want, but consider the trade-offs carefully.

This MacBook Pro is thinner and lighter than its predecessor, with a flattened keyboard and expanded touchpad. It has a newer selection of Intel processors, faster flash storage and a brighter Retina screen. The new MacBook Pro has also dropped all its legacy ports for Thunderbolt 3-powered USB-C — a controversial move that requires you to buy a truckload of dongles, but also a move that many high-end Windows laptops are following. Apple even threw in the pleasing and very useful TouchID fingerprint sensor, imported almost whole-hog from the iPhone and iPad.

But you know all that already. What you really want to learn about is the new MacBook Pro’s headline feature: the Touch Bar, a tiny 1cm tall touchscreen that replaces the function key row on the top of new Pro’s keyboard, and also jacks up the price for this high-end machine.

View full gallery Sarah Tew/CNET

We’ve already extensively covered the basics on the new 13- and 15-inch Pros, which were unveiled at Apple’s headquarters on October 27 and are available for sale as of early November. That includes our exclusive early hands-on with the new MacBook Pro, as well as our review of the entry-level 2016 MacBook Pro model (which keeps its traditional function key row, and doesn’t include TouchID). Start with both of those stories if you want an exhaustive overview of the design changes, component upgrades and port-related compromises of this MacBook Pro — which is essentially the 10th anniversary edition of the original 2006 MacBook Pro.

More on the MacBook Pro

• Apple’s amazing strip show reinvents the laptop keyboard
• Apple MacBook Pro (no Touch Bar) review: The Retina MacBook Air you’ve always wanted
• Does the Mac still matter?
• Jony Ive talks about putting the Apple ‘touch’ on the MacBook Pro
• The Mac and iPad aren’t merging. Get over it

Here, however, we’re focusing on that Touch Bar. How does it work? Is it useful? Can it replace the iPad-like touchscreen Mac we’re not likely to get in the foreseeable future, according to our recent exclusive interviews with Apple execs?

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The new MacBook Pro (on the left) is thinner than the previous design.

Sarah Tew/CNET

I’ve lived with the 13-inch MacBook Pro with Touch Bar for almost two weeks. Here’s what I learned.

A tiny slice of iPad on your MacBook

The Touch Bar is a long, skinny OLED touchscreen that sits above the keyboard, replacing the traditional F1-F12 keys, as well as the escape key and power button. On the far right end of the Touch Bar is a fingerprint reader, similar to the one found on the iPhone, which enables Touch ID and Apple Pay for secure system log-ins and online payments.

By default, the Touch Bar displays system tools, including screen brightness and volume control. But when using select apps (for now mostly Apple-created apps such as Safari, but more third-party support is on the way), new contextual commands appear on the Touch Bar, and the system tools roll up into a condensed version on the right side of the strip. You can still access volume and brightness controls, but to get the full default list of commands back, you’ll have to tap on a small arrow to expand it (which also hides the contextual commands for the app you’re currently using).

View full gallery Sarah Tew/CNET

Having spent some serious hands-on time with the Touch Bar version of the new 13-inch MacBook Pro, and testing its capabilities with a wide range of apps, it feels like a tool that can enhance your computing experience, but won’t revolutionize it. It does less than a full touchscreen might, but Apple has found a way to use it to cut down on keystrokes, streamline tasks and add additional levels of fine control.

I almost immediately started find little things it did better than traditional keyboard and touchpad input

Some who’ve seen the Touch Bar only from afar call it a gimmick, but I almost immediately started finding little things it did better than traditional keyboard and touchpad input, and after a very short time I was using a handful of these Touch Bar functions instinctively, without even thinking about it.

If you spend a bit of time trying it out in different apps, you’ll end up with maybe a half-dozen or so shortcuts you love the Touch Bar for, while your computing experience remains otherwise unchanged.

That makes it harder to justify as an expensive add-on to the new MacBook Pro line. The least expensive Touch Bar system is the one reviewed here, at $1,799 (£1,749 or AU$2,699). That’s a $300 jump over the more mainstream $1,499 entry level MacBook Pro (£1,449 or AU$2,199), which lacks the Touch Bar. But in addition to the Touch Bar, this version also has a faster processor (a 2.9GHz Intel Core i5, versus a 2.0GHz Core i5), marginally better integrated Intel graphics (Iris 550 versus Iris 540), and it doubles the number of included USB-C Thunderbolt ports to four. So at least you’re getting more for your $300 than just the Touch Bar.

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The new MacBook Pro has a shallower butterfly keyboard.

Sarah Tew/CNET

Previously, the entry-level 13-inch MacBook Pro cost $1,299 (£1,249 or AU$1,999), but that model had half the storage of these new ones, only 128GB. Note that if you’re kicking yourself for missing out on the older Pro (which was excellent in its own right), with its lower starting price and wider variety of ports, Apple is still selling a single 13-inch and single 15-inch 2015-era configuration, at least for now.

Apple MacBook Pro with Touch Bar (13-inch)

One bar, many versions

The Touch Bar is is filled with possibilities, but like the branching menus within menus it’s supposed to replace, some of its functions can remain buried under additional taps and swipes, depending on which apps you use it with. There’s only so much one can fit into a 2,170×60 display.

Actual instructions for how to use the Touch Bar are sparse. Instead, it’s up to you to eyeball the new buttons that pop up contextually in each supported application and figure out how to use them. In most cases, it’s presented logically, but some on-screen buttons have layers within them, and navigating deeper in and then moving back out isn’t always intuitive (as in the case of Photos, Apple’s photo organizing and tweaking app). In other cases, the Touch Bar buttons are a perfect distillation of the most important functions in an app (such as Safari or Messages), and easy to pick up and use immeidately.

View full gallery Sarah Tew/CNET

Each Touch Bar series of commands has its own visual and organizational language. That’s easy enough to translate when only Apple-created programs are supported, but we’ll have to wait and see how other software makers handle the Touch Bar. Windows PC makers have struggled for years with how to properly present proprietary software interfaces, asking consumers to learn and relearn new behaviors for apps they may already be familiar with, or for programs and features that may disappear or change radically in the next version.

Adobe is one company you really want to watch in this space. A key partner for Touch Bar support, Photoshop will add Touch Bar controls later this year. It’ll be very interesting to see what they do, and if long-time Photoshop users take to it. That’s especially important because Adobe is a master of extreme usability and platform continuity. (As an example, I took a single-semester Photoshop tutorial course as a college undergrad way back in the 1990s. All these years later, and through countless versions of Photoshop, and I can still sit down in front of the latest iteration of the software and have a basic idea of what I’m doing.)

View full gallery Sarah Tew/CNET

Microsoft has also pledged to add Touch Bar support for Office. But until those companies and others deliver, it’s all about Apple’s in-house apps, including Mail, Messages, iTunes and Safari. I found the Touch Bar added something useful to each of these, but that’s predicated on actually using those apps. If you prefer Spotify to iTunes, or Chrome to Safari, there’s not much the Touch Bar can do for you from within those apps, besides the basic system functions previously mapped to the Function key row, such a volume controls.

One interesting comparison to make is to Microsoft’s new Surface Dial. That physical control knob works on many Windows PCs, but is specifically designed with the Surface Studio desktop in mind, and it covers a lot of the same ground as the Touch Bar. Both the Bar and Dial offer easier access to specific menu items in select apps. Like the Touch Bar, the Dial provides basic system functions, including volume controls, when not in a supported app.

Both are very early in their development, and both call out for wider app support (neither has a Photoshop-specific set of controls yet). For illustrators and animators, I can see the real appeal of the Surface Dial and its big, analog-feeling wheel. For more efficient general computing, so far I find that Apple’s Touch Bar is the more immediately useful of the two ideas.

First steps

The initial thing you’ll want to do with the Touch Bar is set up Touch ID. That uses Apple’s custom T1 security chip, which is built into the system, and the fingerprint reader that sits on the far right side of the Touch Bar. Setup is similar to an iPhone, with repeated fingertaps on the sensor recording fingerprint data. Unlike an iPhone and iPad, Macs support multiple user profiles, so each person using the machine can set up fingerprint access to their profile.

View full gallery Sarah Tew/CNET

User switching via fingerprint is especially impressive, and nearly instantaneous. I set up a “CNET” profile linked to one finger and a personal profile linked to a different finger. Just by placing each finger in turn on the Touch ID and clicking down (it’s both a fingerprint sensor and a physical button), the profiles switched on the fly.

After setting up the fingerprint access, which can also be used for Apple Pay purchases from supported merchants, you might also want to change the default lineup of buttons available on the Touch Bar. That menu is a little hard to find, tucked away in System Preferences under Keyboard > Customize Control Strip (oddly, it’s called Control Strip here, and not Touch Bar).

View full gallery Sarah Tew/CNET

From that menu, new buttons can be dragged down to the bottom of the screen, where they’ll appear on the Touch Bar, and from there, can be moved left and right. For example, I swapped out the Launch Pad button for a Show Desktop button. The default setup is the logical choice for most, but customization options are always welcome.

Here’s how the Touch Bar works in a few key apps:

W Labs by Whirlpool Corporation Zera Food Recycler Release Date, Price and Specs – CNET

Hi, I’m Megan, and I’m a grocery store junkie. See, I love food, so when I happen across a fruit I’ve never seen or a hard-to-find vegetable, I tend to snatch it up and ask questions later. Flash-forward a week and I’ve likely devoured a lot of what I bought, but those forgotten Japanese eggplants are well past prime. What to do?

Well, I could get better about meal planning, but in the meantime I have two main options: chuck the leftovers in a garbage bag bound for a landfill or toss them in a compost pile to make fertilizer. The first option is fast and convenient. The second option can take anywhere from a couple of weeks to over a year; the compost-to-fertilizer time frame can vary a lot depending on the size of the pile and your level of active involvement with it.

W Labs, the arm of Whirlpool Corporation tasked with designing, developing and manufacturing small-batch products on the quirkier side of the spectrum, has found a clever, albeit pricey, alternative to composting. The $1,199 W Labs by Whirlpool Corporation Zera Food Recycler claims to turn your food waste into fertilizer in just 24 hours.

Whirlpool’s food recycler makes composting…
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The basics

The W Labs/Whirlpool team visited the CNET Smart Home here in Louisville, Kentucky earlier this month for an in-person demo of Zera. For now, Zera is just a prototype, but W Labs and Whirlpool Corporation plan to launch an Indiegogo campaign in early January. Depending on the success of that project, Zera will make its way to the broader market.

W Labs has set its earliest “Early Bird” pricing tier for Indiegogo backers at $699 — a significant discount on that $1,199 MSRP. Previous W Labs products include the Vessi beer fermenter and the Swash “clothes refresher.”

Similar to GE’s FirstBuild, the Michigan-based W Labs seems like a research and development fan’s paradise, a place where employees brainstorm ideas and rely on the adjacent microfactory to test concepts and produce functional prototypes. Zera is simply the latest W Labs creation, one that’s being officially unveiled at CES 2017 — fortunately, we got an exclusive early look.

First impressions

Chris Monroe/CNET

Zera looks like a very classy extra-tall kitchen garbage can with an integrated touch display and a related app (the software was still in development during our demo, but expect to be able to start and stop a Zera cycle remotely — no third-party smart-home integrations are currently in the works).

Zera’s exterior has a white finish and a plasticky bamboo-effect sliding top lid that gives you access to a garbage-disposal-looking interior compartment. Below that you’ll find a second, slide-out compartment — this is where you’ll get your fertilizer post-cycle.

The idea is that you’ll plug the included power cord into a nearby outlet and leave Zera as a 24-7 fixture in your kitchen. This device does looks pretty sleek, but it’s also on the large side and not every kitchen layout will have a reasonable spot to permanently stick a Zera. It worked out pretty well in the CNET Smart Home kitchen lined up with the large center island, but some folks will have to get creative with placement.

Giving Zera a go

Zera is designed to hold up to 8 pounds of food, which according to Whirlpool is the rough equivalent to the amount of waste a typical family of four creates in a week. The idea is that you’ll use Zera like a receptacle over that week — tossing in apple cores, onion skins, moldy bread and whatever is left on your plate after a meal.

Every time you throw in something new and slide the lid closed, Zera is supposed to sense it and initiate a 2-minute process to push the food to the bottom of the main reservoir. This is supposed to help make room for more food to come, but it also serves as an initial step to prepare the food for “recycling” later on. I got to see this in action during the demo — you can hear it, but it wasn’t as loud as my dishwasher at home.

When you’re ready to begin a cycle, simply hold the start button on Zera itself (or use the app, once that’s up and running). I got to try this myself after tossing in whole apples, carrots, cheese, broccoli, dinner rolls, coffee grounds, tuna salad, cottage cheese — all sorts of stuff. We didn’t run a whole cycle, but I did briefly get to experience how a production-model Zera should work. Like those 2-minute preliminary runs, the main cycle was pretty quiet, although I don’t know if it gets louder at different periods throughout.

Chris Monroe/CNET

The tech involved

Chris Monroe/CNET

Aside from the obvious convenience of an in-kitchen composter, Zera is also decked out with tech that reduces a weeks-long process to anywhere from 16 to 24 hours. The team told me it primarily uses heat and airflow to accomplish this. But there is one other component — a small paper baggie containing coconut husks that have been transformed into uniform little pellets that look like rabbit food. Coconut shells have been used in gardening to supplement mulch for years, as they help retain water and their fiber contributes nutrients to fertilizer. It’s the same idea here, but W Labs will sell manufactured four-packs for $12 a pop. Toss in a bag (really, just throw in the whole thing unopened) before you start a cycle and then you’re ready to go.

W Labs said the coconut husks aren’t absolutely essential to this process, but that “the quality of the homemade fertilizer will decrease” without them. Buy them or not — it’s really up to you.

W Labs brought Zera-made fertilizer to the demo so I could see exactly what the finished product should look like. For every 8 pounds of food waste, Zera makes about 2 pounds of fertilizer that’s ready to be stored or to go straight to your next gardening project. A representative from W Labs listed off a variety of flowers and vegetables the team had already grown using Zera fertilizer.

Related links:

• What’s happening at the 2017 Consumer Electronics Show?
• Whirlpool brews up a beer machine for Indiegogo backers
• Whirlpool Swash review: Pseudo-dry cleaning at home

Big picture

Whether you’re deeply concerned about your food ending up in a landfill — or you simply want to re-purpose those leftovers into food for your garden, Zera presents a seriously smart alternative to traditional composting. But $1,199 is a huge amount to spend, especially when you can buy standard, outdoor composting bins and related accessories for well under 100 bucks. At the same time, there’s a huge convenience factor here that might make the price worthwhile for some.

And, if you get in on the action early, you can snatch one up for $699 — a solid discount for early backers. We’ve already requested a review unit, too, so we’ll be running our own cycles to see just how fast Zera works, as well as spending time testing out the companion app.