While the new MacBook Pros with Touch Bar aren’t slated to start arriving to customers until next week at the earliest, French news outlet 01NetTV has shared an early review of the new device. The blog, which appears to have a review unit rather than an early shipment, posted a three and a half minute hands-on video review of the new MacBook Pro with Touch Bar (below), focusing primarily on the new OLED function display…
The video highlights the Touch Bar’s contextual capabilities, showing how it changes depending on what app is open on the Mac. For instance, in Pages, options to change the appearance of text appear on the display, such as the italic, bold, and strike-through icons. Additionally, emojis can also appear on the Touch Bar. More than anything, emojis highlight just how sharp the OLED display of the Touch Bar is in person, with incredibly deep blacks and bright color.
The contextual nature of the Touch Bar extends to a variety of different apps on macOS, including Garageband, Photos, and iMovie, as well as third-party apps like Microsoft Office and Adobe Photoshop. You can also bring up a traditional row of function keys at any time by pressing the fn button on your keyboard, as shown in this video.
The review focuses on much of what Apple demoed on stage, but it’s nice to get a closer look at the Touch Bar in real-world usage rather than on-stage.
One question people have had is what the Touch Bar will mean for touch-typers. This review, however, suggests that once you get the hang of the icons on the display, you can actually touch type with it for the most part. It also, on the other hand, shows that looking down at it isn’t that time consuming because of how it’s located right in your peripheral vision.
As time progresses, we should expect to see more MacBook Pro with Touch Bar reviews start to roll in. They’ll likely all be published at once when the embargo lifts, but for now, check out the first hands-on review of the device down below.
(As you’ll notice, the video is in French, but YouTube supports translating closed captions. Simply click the “Settings” icon, choose the “Subtitles/CC” option, and choose the “Auto-translate option.”)
