Reactions to today’s Apple Event

[Jason Watson]

[Tim Wilson] “but Apple appears to be a lot more excited by the laptop and ATV news than any of you seem to be. Am I seeing all of your reactions (or the lack thereof) through my meh-colored glasses?”

I don’t really watch TV, so I could give a dongle-shaped fig about ATV. I’m mostly meh about the new MacBook Pro. I’m sure it’ll be a fine machine, but more and more I’m giving up any illusion that Apple wants to keep making products I might want to buy.

The day before the keynote I watched the Surface Studio announcement, and for the first time since the 5K iMac came out (which I have and enjoy using) I was really excited about a product, and thought that (subject to how well it delivers, of course) Microsoft really seemed like they wanted to make something that creatives would find useful and was at least making attempts to understand what those types of things are. Whereas Apple has this really fluff-filled keynote which to me at least seemed to be ultimately about a Touch bar, which I see limited utility for, and which was first introduced by adding emojis to an iMessage in an ostensibly “pro” product. In my mind that tells me exactly what Apple has in mind with the “pro” moniker.

It reminded me of DJI announcing the Mavic immediately after GoPro announced the Karma. When I saw the Karma product, I was impressed. But then DJI made their announcement, and I haven’t given the Karma a second thought. The keynote yesterday was like that in reverse; Microsoft unveils this really cool product which I would say takes some strides towards innovation for creatives (in hopefully seamlessly blending Surface technology, Cintique-like functionality and a fair amount of oomph), while the next day Apple has a Touch Bar for their only less than 1+ year old pro product that they debut using emojis.

Not sure I’ll be able to shake that image for a long time.

[Jeremy Garchow]

[Jason Watson] “Not sure I’ll be able to shake that image for a long time.”

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

I understand why you may not trust Apple (go buy a Surface and report back, I’m sure many of us would be curious of your experiences), but they also demoed FCPX, Photoshop, and Phil Schiller mentioned DaVinci Resolve in a keynote. Has that ever happened? No.

FCPX seemingly really long release delay was tied to a hardware release. While there was some emoji action, most of the demos were aimed directly at professionals and creatives. I’m not saying you have to believe any of it, but those presentations were aimed at a very broad professional market.

I have a number if input devices, including Wacoms, and I always want a keyboard built in to the Wacom as bouncing back and forth between pen, a form of touch, and the keyboard is a bit disruptive, but I deal with it. The Touch Bar, while small, seems pretty prefect to have customizable buttons and hotkeys right next to the keyboard. I think it will be a very user friendly and helpful device.

[Mark Suszko]

I wonder about putting a LeapMotion sensor in front of an iMac to add some gestural control in the edit for things like volume and effects sliders.

[Ryan Holmes]

[Jeremy Garchow] “FCPX seemingly really long release delay was tied to a hardware release. “

FCPX, which handles Hollywood cinema, broadcast TV, indie film, corporate video, wedding video, and everything else in between in 4K, 6K or 8K was waiting on an updated laptop???

Or, my belief, that the programming team had to hammer out the bugs before release? If they were going to wait for a software release tied to hardware it would seem like the perfect opportunity to tie the Mac Pro or a Super iMac into the event….?

Ryan Holmes
http://www.ryanholmes.me
@CutColorPost

[Oliver Peters]

[Ryan Holmes] “Or, my belief, that the programming team had to hammer out the bugs before release?”

Too bad they missed a number of them, including old ones.

– Oliver

Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com

[Jerry Hofmann]

I was told by an Apple employee that they tried a touchscreen (and there is every reason to believe they did) and their arms got too tired holding them them up all day long. They found they wanted to rest their wrists while working. A lot of editing with a client in the room wouldn’t work as nice if the touch panel was horizontal or flatter on the desktop probably. Dunno, but having the right-clicking contextual menus just pop up on a keyboard sounds useful and surely faster than a 3 key keyboard command, or am I wrong?

I’ll let you know. I bought one yesterday.

Jerry

[Jeremy Garchow]

[Ryan Holmes] “FCPX, which handles Hollywood cinema, broadcast TV, indie film, corporate video, wedding video, and everything else in between in 4K, 6K or 8K was waiting on an updated laptop???”

You think it’s a coincidence that FCPX was demoed and released the same day as the new MacBook Pro?

If you look at the Final Cut Pro website, it’s new MacBook Pro’s everywhere, not a MacPro in sight.

[Jason Watson]

[Jeremy Garchow] “I understand why you may not trust Apple (go buy a Surface and report back, I’m sure many of us would be curious of your experiences), but they also demoed FCPX, Photoshop, and Phil Schiller mentioned DaVinci Resolve in a keynote. Has that ever happened? No.”

I’m actually quite intrigued by the Surface Studio, and once I get a chance I plan on giving it some hands-on time at the Microsoft Store, which will be the first time I’ve ever walked into a Microsoft Store. Should be an interesting experience! ?

I was very underwhelmed by the professional app demos. I understand that demos are necessarily slower, but both the FCPX demo and the Photoshop demo made pretty basic tasks appear to be much less efficient, and in each case the presenter was constantly moving their eyes back and forth between the Touch Bar and the screen. For the FCPX demo, she looked very uncomfortable using it; everytime she went to use it, she had to hunch over closer to the Touch Bar, and then you could see her having to carefully place her finger on what she wanted to do. My impression was that for demoing what actually is a professional application, the Touch Bar really seemed to slow down the process of editing and made tasks that can be accomplished in split seconds with muscle memory more convulted and time-consuming. I also found it interesting that she ended the presentation by talking about how the Touch Bar surfaces “hard to discover” features faster than by just searching through menus, as if the person using it has little to no familiarity with where the features of an app reside. It also took her around three seconds to actually find the button and have confidence enough in her finger position to actually push it, and the entirety of that time she was staring directly at the Touch Bar, rather than at the Full Screen, which was immediately before touted as the reason the Touch Bar was so great. I also found it somewhat telling that when she went to insert the final clip, she used the keyboard shortcut rather than using the Touch Bar. All in all, my impression was that this new feature isn’t going to really impact heavy usage (except perhaps negatively), but looked to me far more gimmicky in that it visibly made the most basic of tasks much less efficient.

I think some of the Photoshop functionality was somewhat interesting. However, like the FCPX demo, the Touch Bar almost always seemed to be fighting the workflow. When she went to go into Select and Mask, it took her seconds to look down at the Touch Bar, make sure she found the right key and had her finger positioned, and the clicked it. The same was true with the Brush size and hardness, and at times the interface caused mistakes because it didn’t read her touch imput correctly and she had to go back and redo it, which meant her eyes were once again on the Touch Bar. I was most impressed by the change color on the fly aspect of the Touch Bar, but one thing I noticed was that due to how one would hold one’s hand while using this, in Full Screen mode her hand usng the Touch Bar was in the way of the screen, which seems somewhat counter-productive. She definitely seemed much more comfortable with it than the FCPX presenter, although it was really painful to watch this workflow using a trackpad.

The DJ demo was to me a combination of something pretty cool but also something that seemed to really defeat the whole purpose. I could be remembering wrong, but it appeared as if the presenter was staring at the Touch Bar the entire time. Granted, the point was to show how he could do everything by means of the Touch Bar, but I was left wondering why. I’m definitely not in that world, but he mentioned how they use dedicated controllers when on stage, and now the Touch Bar is one of those built right into the Mac. Yet because of the interface, the entire time of perfroming on stage (like he did in the demo), one would be eyes down on the Touch Bar, with little to no room for crowd interaction, etc. He definitely seemed the most comfortable of all the presenters using the Touch Bar (even more than Federeghi), but still for most of the demo his eyes were down on the Touch Bar. It was kind of strange to see; at least for me.

This is may only my perception, but the demoing of the professional apps had the opposite effect of making me think this signaled Apple’s commitment to the pro market. For the most part, the Touch Bar- which was by far the most touted feature of this machine- came off as far more gimmicky than useful, as for at least two major professional apps the demo showcased functionality and productivity moving backwards, as the functionality of the Touch Bar seemed to really get in the way of efficiency for even really basic tasks (save the Color changing in Photoshop, which could actually be pretty useful). That’s not to say that it couldn’t be useful, but there was nothing about either the Touch bar or the demos of it that wowed me in the slightest or gave me any reason to think that this headline feature in this machine is going to increase the efficiency of my workflow. That could of course change, but there was certainly nothing in the demos that gave anything close to that impression to me.

I think the thing about the emoji bar part that got me wasn’t that they showed off emojis. Rather, it’s a culmination of a lot of things. On the morning before the keynote the MacRumors buyer’s guide listed every Mac save the MacBook as Don’t Buy, because of the major length of time between updates; e.g., Apple’s most “pro” machine sits languishing at 3.5+ years old. They then announce a reveal event using iconic advertising from their past, IMO intentionally evoking something revolutionary or least on the order of magnitude of what they were evoking. They then begin the keynote with the standard self-congratulatory stats about iPhone and iOS 10, which is expected, but then launch into 20+ minutes of what they have in the past termed their “hobby,” and much of the time is spent showcasing functionality that is mildly interesting at best. Finally, they get to the Mac, and Tim Cook talks about how the world’s creative forces use the Mac to push the world forward, and then he immediately talks about how they continue to push this Mac experience forward by means of MacOS, which he demonstrates by means of talking about new Sierra features like iCloud Drive, Universal Clipboard, Apple Pay and Siri. And once the first demo begins, Federeghi talks about how he’s excited to demo the Touch Bar on the new MacBook Pro, and one of the first things he does is add emojis to an iMessage. Then the professional demos showcase fairly underwhelming uses that in many cases seem to move backwards in terms off productivity. And finally, there is nothing about either the iMac or the Mac Pro, and the nMBP is capped at 16GB, which means that if one wants a “pro” Apple product, one must either buy one of these, or opt for 1.5+ or 3.5+ year old tech, some of which Apple is in the process of deprecating. For me at least, that all sends a particular message, whether intentional or not, and makes the emoji bar fairly indicative of Apple’s vision for who this product is for, which is still likely a fairly large market.

[Jeremy Garchow] “FCPX seemingly really long release delay was tied to a hardware release. While there was some emoji action, most of the demos were aimed directly at professionals and creatives. I’m not saying you have to believe any of it, but those presentations were aimed at a very broad professional market.”

The delay of FCPX is of very little relevance to me as I don’t use it; I still try to keep up on it’s development and how people are using it, though, and I’ve found this forum a great resource for that. I get that the pro demos were aimed at a broad creative market, but the demos (I’m thinking here mostly of FCPX and Ps) also showcased some very basic functionality that, as I noted above, seemed to move productivity backwards or that at least would be a wash (save the color shift on Ps, with caveats). This could just be my perception, but that made it seem way more like a gimmick and much less like a way to increase creative productivity, and thus came across as far more patronizing. Nothing to be wowed about, IMO. I definitely believe that the demos were aimed at professionals and creatives, but I also think that they just really missed the mark and didn’t really showcase anything that would increase creative productivity, but rather IMO showed how the Touch Bar is likely to get in one’s way. Can I imagine some utility for this? Yes, of course. Did I see much of that? Not really.

As I mentioned earlier, I’m sure it’ll be a fine machine and is likely a very good fit for a lot of people, but right now for me and my needs Apple doesn’t really have anything for me, and this keynote didn’t give me much reason to believe it will in the future.

[Jeremy Garchow]

I guess I see it differently. The touch bar is a customizable and interactive keyboard extension. Eventually, perhaps the keyboard will be a touch bar, but you will lose any tactile feedback, and that would be a problem. That’s why one thin bar make sense right now as it’s enough to still be somewhat tactile. As far as taking your eyes off the screen, yeah, there might be a little of that as there is with the keyboard, but it’s going to be much faster than doing this with the surface studio, and then moving to a keyboard to hit more kb combinations as their demo video shows:

I don’t even think it would be comparable as they are totally different approaches.

When FCPX first came out, it seemed like it would be primed for touch. I thought it would be awesome, and then after thinking about it longer, I thought otherwise. The Studio will be great for draw/paint, but I think it’s hard to beat a keyboard+mouse for editing, and the Touch Bar is a highly customizable keyboard extension. There’s a few hands on reports, and the general feelings seem positive when used with FCPX. I can’t wait to test it out myself.

I understand not being blown away by the stage demos. Honestly, Apple’s stage presence hasn’t been all that great for some time. It really doesn’t matter to me in the end as I may or may not use FCPX like that, or photoshop like that, or dj my lunch break like that. I wasn’t impressed by what happened during the demos, but I was impressed with the potential capabilities of the Touch Bar as it immediately made sense to me, and provides a level of customization and ergonomic efficiency that isn’t currently possible with other devices.