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Kraetos
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Join Date: Dec 2005
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2017-06-06, 21:58

Quote:
Originally Posted by Eugene View Post
Phil Schiller is literally making shit up.


Apple has no reason to lie about this, and we know for certain that the Mac Pro's cooling system wasn't even up to the task of cooling the D9000.

Logic, logic, logic. Logic is the beginning of wisdom, Valeris, not the end.
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Eugene
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Join Date: May 2004
Location: Hillsborough, CA
 
2017-06-06, 23:28

You're going to see what you want to see, I guess. What you linked is repair program for Mac Pros manufactured during a 2-month window 1.5 years after launch.

We know the vast majority of Mac Pros work fine. We also know faster, more efficient (lower power,) pin-compatible, drop-in upgrades have been available for quite some time.
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Dr. Bobsky
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2017-06-07, 01:02

Quote:
Originally Posted by Eugene View Post
Hell, if thermal designs were dependent on faster radiation, then methods like liquid cooling wouldn't even be feasible.
what do you mean by this? The principle of direct air cooled heat sinks and liquid cooling are very different. One uses a large metal radiator to increase the volume of heated material and rate of heat transference to air, the other uses the high heat capacity of a liquid to draw the heat away to an even larger heat sink.
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Eugene
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2017-06-07, 01:24

I mean that water will transfer heat away from the die/block more slowly than a larger heatsink + fans would. Random claims of the Mac Pro's heatsink design having some silly thermal balance issues are unimportant with that consideration. What matters is thermal capacity and air volume moved.

When you consider the Mac Pro is still whisper quiet at its loudest, that cooler running / more powerful processors were available, and that Apple even threw the MacBook Air a CPU upgrade...Schiller's point of being handcuffed by the trashcan's cooling limitations sure seems like nonsense.
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Kraetos
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Join Date: Dec 2005
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2017-06-07, 07:24

Quote:
Originally Posted by Eugene View Post
Schiller's point of being handcuffed by the trashcan's cooling limitations sure seems like nonsense.
You've made it abundantly clear that you're skeptical of the technical details Apple has provided, but you've failed to answer my simple question. What reason is there for Apple to lie about this?

Logic, logic, logic. Logic is the beginning of wisdom, Valeris, not the end.
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Matsu
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Join Date: May 2004
 
2017-06-07, 07:58

Quote:
Originally Posted by Robo View Post
It's more expensive than I thought it would be. I was thinking it would start at $2999, with Apple leaning heavily on the "it's the same price as the Mac Pro, but you get this gorgeous display!" thing and the modular tower Mac being the one that goes into crazy high-end (dual-socket?) territory.

I'm not at all saying it's overpriced, and once they started going through the specs I wasn't surprised by the price. But if you told me yesterday that Apple was going to release an iMac Pro in the same 27-inch form factor, my guess would have been it would start at $2999.

It really is a legit pro machine, through and through. They're not really playing the "go for pro users but also any well-heeled users who just like the sound of a fancy better Mac" with this one, not at that price.
Sort of interesting 'cause you can get the gorgeous display on a regular iMac, which is what I would buy for my purposes, but could be equally attractive to someone who needs all the extra computing power.

Now if it's a really legit pro machine - what more can they do to it make a Mac Pro? See Schiller's open letter for clues?

Quote:
Originally Posted by kscherer View Post
Found this on Daring Fireball.

https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2017/...ives-december/ So, to answer the thread's original question:

No, no it is not.

And, on top of that, when one takes a look at the internals, the keyboard, etc.—and that it is shipping in December—it should be very clear that Apple has been working on this system for at least a year, and maybe two. In other words, they realized their mistake with the current Mac Pro long before their press release back in March or April, whenever it was.
Would a "headless iMac Pro" satisfy the design brief if it wasn't necessarily conventional but remained modular and supportable over a long period by incorporating...
  • - space for a load more user accessible RAM slots
    - space for some really fast hot swappable drives.
    - a lot of TB3/USB-C ports on independent buses in order to keep throughput super high for the folks who would plug into lots of external arrays and high res displays...

Which leads me to: what would an external Mac Pro Display look like? I would have to guess that the new bar would be 30" 8K, which sort of necessitates lots of fast I/O ports.
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alcimedes
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2017-06-07, 10:00

Quote:
Originally Posted by Kraetos View Post
You've made it abundantly clear that you're skeptical of the technical details Apple has provided, but you've failed to answer my simple question. What reason is there for Apple to lie about this?
Apple had written off the Pro market, got too much grief for it, then made up the technical excuses as the reason why they'd dropped the ball completely. (although if the hurdles were strictly technical, there were work arounds in place if they cared enough to really want to speed bump them at the least, since faster stuff with a lower thermal output has come out since then.)

An 8k display would likely be magnificent, but is that enough to justify an entire line of computers? TB3 can drive an 8k display in theory can't it? How many 8k displays do you imagine people would be using? You'd need to have multiples 8k displays (3+) before a MacPro would be required, right?

I think the iMac pro is going to sell very well, and the Mac Pro will continue to see technical issues preventing its release until no one cares because the market has moved past the tower concept.

Google is your frenemy.
Caveat Emptor - Latin for tough titty
I tend to interpret things in the way that's most hilarious to me

Last edited by alcimedes : 2017-06-07 at 10:33.
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Matsu
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Join Date: May 2004
 
2017-06-07, 10:41

My 2013 vintage iMac still does everything I do with it quite well. I've not moved into making video, so even 4K is not yet a consideration. An SSD and more RAM could probably keep it happily chewing through multiple 24-50 MP photo libraries.

But, the new 10-bit, wide gamut, Retina displays attached to the new iMacs are tempting.

An 8K 30" version would be glorious...

.........................................
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Kraetos
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Join Date: Dec 2005
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2017-06-07, 11:15

Quote:
Originally Posted by alcimedes View Post
Apple had written off the Pro market, got too much grief for it, then made up the technical excuses as the reason why they'd dropped the ball completely. (although if the hurdles were strictly technical, there were work arounds in place if they cared enough to really want to speed bump them at the least, since faster stuff with a lower thermal output has come out since then.)
When exactly did Apple "write off the Pro market?" Was it before or after they put a huge amount of effort into redesigning the Mac Pro? Before or after they put a huge amount of effort into redesigning the MacBook Pro? Before or after they decided to add a second workstation-class desktop to their lineup?

But, okay, even though the timeline for this argument makes zero sense, let's concede the point: at some point between 2013 and 2017 Apple "wrote off" the Pro market and then changed their mind, despite releasing a new or redesigned products aimed at pros in 2013, 2015, 2016, and 2017. You expect me to believe that Apple made a strategic decision of this magnitude and then changed their mind not because of anything having to do with profit or revenue, but because Marco Arment wouldn't stop whining about it? Really?

Logic, logic, logic. Logic is the beginning of wisdom, Valeris, not the end.
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kscherer
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Join Date: Aug 2004
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2017-06-07, 13:03

Quote:
Originally Posted by Kraetos View Post
When exactly did Apple "write off the Pro market?"
As soon as the self-proclaimed tech press said they did.

Apple made a market mistake with the 2013 Mac Pro, but the engineering/monetary effort they put into designing it is clear evidence that they did the opposite of "write off the Pro market". They misread the market, but they in no way wrote it off. It's a beautiful machine—inside and out—that any self-respecting pro would love to have on their desk (if it met their technical needs).

And the iMac Pro did not just design itself in the last six months. It is a system that has likely been on the board for two years, and maybe more. I suspect the iMac Pro was to be added to the lineup regardless the Mac Pro's success (or lack thereof). I suspect any Apple computer has a design life at or over two years (even the Mac Mini). I suspect this because all of Apple's parts are custom engineered, not just off-the-shelf stuff we can pick up at Fry's. It takes far more dedication and engineering effort to design a computer from the ground up than it does to hork together whatever bits are laying around. This why the little folk can build their own PC, but not their own Mac. It takes great effort, which suggests (by way of the 2013 Mac Pro and the iMac Pro) that Apple is doing anything but "write off the Pro market".

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709
¡Damned!
 
Join Date: May 2004
Location: Purgatory
 
2017-06-07, 13:08

I'm more excited about the accessories, tbh. An official space-gray wireless extended keyboard? Dark MMouse and Trackpad? Yes, yes and yes please.

Kinda kills the SG Matias Keyboard, but at least they've got the other colors and backlit versions as well.

So it goes.
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chucker
 
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2017-06-07, 13:54

Quote:
Originally Posted by 709 View Post
I'm more excited about the accessories, tbh. An official space-gray wireless extended keyboard? Dark MMouse and Trackpad? Yes, yes and yes please.
Those supposedly aren't coming standalone, alas.
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alcimedes
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2017-06-07, 13:55

So in my mind, it likely played out like this.

Quote:
When exactly did Apple "write off the Pro market?"
About 6 months after the release of the new Mac Pro, where they had no roadmap/plan towards upgrades of the chipset/GPUs in the Mac Pro. When you're talking about the Pro market, you need to update the hardware in your product. When you haven't updated said hardware for 3+ years, you've clearly written off that market segment, or you'd have done something to the internals in that time frame.

There were quite a few articles coming out of Apple/tech press saying that the Desktop group had lost a lot of sway in the new Apple. That was also part of their abandoning the pro market.

http://bgr.com/2017/04/07/mac-pro-release-date-2019/

According to that article, the decision to resurrect the "Mac Pro" came about after their new Pro laptop line didn't perform as well as they'd hoped, so the decision to 'fix' the Mac Pro seems recent, not like some brilliant secret strategy to let your flagship desktop languish for years only to reveal something great after your Pro client have left the platform.

Again, all signs point to Apple abandoning the dedicated desktop. Why bother when they think everything is going mobile anyway. Sure, they're all over the Pro laptop market, but we're talking about the Mac Pro, not the MBP.

Didn't Apple also pretty much screw the pooch in this same timeframe with regards to various Pro software packages?

No, I see Apple's recent excuses as just that, excuses, not the reality. I can't believe that if Apple had dedicated any serious time/brain power to putting more powerful components in the same case/design, they couldn't have done it.

They chose not to.

They recently changed their mind, but don't have the stones to say they were planning on leaving the desktop market, so blamed it on technical limitations instead.

Google is your frenemy.
Caveat Emptor - Latin for tough titty
I tend to interpret things in the way that's most hilarious to me

Last edited by alcimedes : 2017-06-07 at 17:05.
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chucker
 
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2017-06-07, 13:55

(It's also a weird sign that the iMac Pro keyboard doesn't have a Touch Bar. Maybe they had a hard time getting that to sync wirelessly, but either way, that doesn't bode well to spreading the Touch Bar to all Macs. Which in turn will hamper adoption.)
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709
¡Damned!
 
Join Date: May 2004
Location: Purgatory
 
2017-06-07, 14:44

Quote:
Originally Posted by chucker View Post
Those supposedly aren't coming standalone, alas.
Well that's just stupid.
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kscherer
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Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Boyzeee
 
2017-06-07, 15:58

Quote:
Originally Posted by 709 View Post
Well that's just stupid.
No, that's "Limited Edition".
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Eugene
careful with axes
 
Join Date: May 2004
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2017-06-07, 15:59

Alcimedes sums it up pretty well. When you have no excuse, you make one up.
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Matsu
Veteran Member
 
Join Date: May 2004
 
2017-06-07, 16:22

To use a camera analogy. What would happen to consumer camera sales at Nikon or Canon if they stopped making professional cameras and lenses? These are very different, so I don't want to make too direct of a comparison, but being absent from such a segment hurts brand identity/credibility and in the long run, consumer confidence.
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Dr. Bobsky
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Join Date: Feb 2015
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2017-06-07, 16:35

Quote:
Originally Posted by Eugene View Post
I mean that water will transfer heat away from the die/block more slowly than a larger heatsink + fans would. Random claims of the Mac Pro's heatsink design having some silly thermal balance issues are unimportant with that consideration. What matters is thermal capacity and air volume moved.

When you consider the Mac Pro is still whisper quiet at its loudest, that cooler running / more powerful processors were available, and that Apple even threw the MacBook Air a CPU upgrade...Schiller's point of being handcuffed by the trashcan's cooling limitations sure seems like nonsense.
Water would definitely transfer faster. The heat capacity of air is really low...
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alcimedes
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2017-06-07, 17:09

Quote:
Originally Posted by chucker View Post
(It's also a weird sign that the iMac Pro keyboard doesn't have a Touch Bar. Maybe they had a hard time getting that to sync wirelessly, but either way, that doesn't bode well to spreading the Touch Bar to all Macs. Which in turn will hamper adoption.)
The touchbar is a solution in search of a problem from my experience.

Maybe they'll figure out what the real underlying problem is for it to solve, but aside from the fingerprint scanner for my password, I found the touchbar to be a wash at best, and often times annoying in that it would register a finger barely passing over the bar as a touch. (and typically my stupid left pinky/esc key would be the culprit.) I'm sure I'd have eventually learned to position my hands so that wouldn't be a problem, but in 9 out of 10 situations, I'd have been just as happy, if not happier with physical function keys.

I think the fingerprint scanner isn't even really part of the touchbar, but rather is a stand alone piece. Give me a laptop with function keys and the fingerprint scanner and that would be the perfect combo.

Google is your frenemy.
Caveat Emptor - Latin for tough titty
I tend to interpret things in the way that's most hilarious to me
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Eugene
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Join Date: May 2004
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2017-06-07, 17:13

Quote:
Originally Posted by Dr. Bobsky View Post
Water would definitely transfer faster. The heat capacity of air is really low...
Air is a constant in both applications. Come on, you should know this.

A large volume of flowing water can move heat away from the water block adequately, but it is worse than a copper block. It will conduct heat more slowly and consequently also retain heat. That's one reason why radiators/heat-exchangers have to be so massive, any why the finned surface area is several times greater. Even with my 240x60mm and 360x45mm radiators, it would take only an hour or so of gaming for the system to overheat without fans.
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Eugene
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2017-06-07, 18:48

Quote:
Originally Posted by alcimedes View Post
The touchbar is a solution in search of a problem from my experience.
The problem: Nobody knows how to make touch not suck on a traditional desktop OS.
The solution: Not the TouchBar

The TouchBar is merely a sandbox...its sole purpose is to add contextual touch UIs to Mac OS while still keeping it segregated. It'll grow downward, eventually replacing the keyboard and touchpad long before Apple adds touch directly to the primary display.
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Dr. Bobsky
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2017-06-08, 00:10

Quote:
Originally Posted by Eugene View Post
Air is a constant in both applications. Come on, you should know this.

A large volume of flowing water can move heat away from the water block adequately, but it is worse than a copper block. It will conduct heat more slowly and consequently also retain heat. That's one reason why radiators/heat-exchangers have to be so massive, any why the finned surface area is several times greater. Even with my 240x60mm and 360x45mm radiators, it would take only an hour or so of gaming for the system to overheat without fans.
Yes, air is a constant, but the system design doesn't have to be stupid. Water cooling is used to improve performance because it is far more capable of moving heat rapidly away from a heat source. There are many reasons you might want to use this, for one, you can use a much larger radiator surface to keep temperatures lower than would be possible in a confined setting even with highly efficient fins and fans. As I said, the rationales for the two cooling mechanisms are different.

Last edited by Dr. Bobsky : 2017-06-08 at 00:32.
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Eugene
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2017-06-08, 00:58

I made a point about irrecoverable inefficiencies in water cooling at the water block to point out how silly the concept of thermal balance is on a shared heatsink. The fact is the shared heatsink in the Mac Pro is much better at conducting heat than a water block attached to anything.

Why you feel the need to explain the pros of water cooling to me specifically, I don't know.
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Dr. Bobsky
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2017-06-08, 04:21

Quote:
Originally Posted by Eugene View Post
I made a point about irrecoverable inefficiencies in water cooling at the water block to point out how silly the concept of thermal balance is on a shared heatsink. The fact is the shared heatsink in the Mac Pro is much better at conducting heat than a water block attached to anything.

Why you feel the need to explain the pros of water cooling to me specifically, I don't know.
Fine. I just wanted clarification to your point.

I think Schiller's point is valid though. The system was designed around two lower power graphics cards and the ability of the system to handle the heat produced by them. Moving to a single, larger and hotter gpu (as is what happened to gpu computation over the years), would require a different design with a larger heat sink. This would necessitate a redesign of the case. And if you are already doing that, then you might as well start over.
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chucker
 
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2017-06-08, 07:14

Quote:
Originally Posted by alcimedes View Post
The touchbar is a solution in search of a problem from my experience.
F keys being a cryptic holdover from 1965 (not being hyperbolic here) is a problem. It's not a huge problem, and maybe the Touch Bar isn't a great solution, but the problem is real.

Quote:
Originally Posted by alcimedes View Post
I'm sure I'd have eventually learned to position my hands so that wouldn't be a problem, but in 9 out of 10 situations, I'd have been just as happy, if not happier with physical function keys.
Right. Maybe having physical F keys but with electronically adjustable shapes like the Optimus Maximus is a better approach. However, that wouldn't allow for gestures or not do them well.

I do think they missed the boat on haptic feedback and hope that happens eventually. The trackpad has it, and even an iPhone's home button has it, yet the Touch Bar does not.

I also worry, eight months in, that developer adoption isn't more. On a positive note, there are two Touch Bar-specific sessions and one Touch Bar-specific lab this WWDC, so they are without question still drumming up support.

Quote:
Originally Posted by alcimedes View Post
I think the fingerprint scanner isn't even really part of the touchbar, but rather is a stand alone piece. Give me a laptop with function keys and the fingerprint scanner and that would be the perfect combo.
Technologically, Touch ID and Touch Bar do both rely on the T1 chip. Thus, adding Touch ID to a physical F key MacBook is totally possible, but also almost as expensive. That's probably part of why the MacBook Escape doesn't do that (deliberate differentiation aside).
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chucker
 
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2017-06-08, 07:17

Quote:
Originally Posted by Eugene View Post
The problem: Nobody knows how to make touch not suck on a traditional desktop OS.
The solution: Not the TouchBar
Arguably, the trackpad is already an awesome, if partial solution to that. I've been using Apple's trackpads for a decade and a half now and much, much prefer them over mice*.

But it's indeed incomplete.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Eugene View Post
The TouchBar is merely a sandbox...its sole purpose is to add contextual touch UIs to Mac OS while still keeping it segregated. It'll grow downward, eventually replacing the keyboard and touchpad long before Apple adds touch directly to the primary display.
Nah.

*) With one exception: first-person shooters.
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Dr. Bobsky
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2017-06-08, 07:50

Haptatic feedback on the trackpad gets quite annoying at times -- especially when Keynote or similar programs have built in activators for the response; I do not need to feel when my image is aligned with another one and I certainly don't appreciate my finger getting kicked off the trackpad because the application designer wants me to feel a bump.
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Matsu
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2017-06-08, 09:42

I'm not sure I want to lose the physical keys of a keyboard, but I'd be interested in trying a touch-surface sub-display control for navigation on laptops and desktops.

I'm not criticizing Apple's design choice here, but I would imagine that the trackpad would be a better natural location for it?

Nice spot for a file list to contextually appear, or a zoomed view from an image editor for example. They'd have to work out all the logic so the trackpad gave me the right display at the right time, and was easy to toggle, but it could be a nice addition to a laptop, iThink...

.........................................
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PB PM
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2017-06-08, 10:29

As a mechanical keyboard user, I also don't look forward to the loss of that physical feedback. I just don't see the need to remove physical keys, since it doesn't solve a problem. Sure a touch keyboard could be physically smaller, and it's fine for texting on a phone, but for any long typing sessions a touch keyboard is difficult to use.
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