13" and 15" Touch Bar MacBook Pro review: nice designs, good battery life, great storage performance, but need for dongles is inconvenient
what's an upgrade cycle that gets everyone to the future? Too many years! https://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Apple's 2016 Touch Bar MacBook Pro lands as a split verdict across reviewers: Ars Technica credits the design, battery life, and storage performance, while The Verge's parallel review calls the 13-inch model overpriced and underpowered with limited battery life. Both converge on one complaint — dropping legacy ports forces buyers into dongles.
That complaint proved durable in this coverage arc: the 2020 13-inch refresh was still dinged for pricing and thermals, and by the 2021 hands-on Apple had reversed course entirely, re-adding ports and removing the Touch Bar. This review is the origin point of a five-year correction loop.
First-order effects
- Buyers of the new 13-inch and 15-inch models must immediately purchase USB-C adapters to reconnect existing peripherals, adding hidden cost and friction on day one.
- Pro users — the audience the Touch Bar targets — are hit hardest, since docks, drives, and SD workflows all need bridging hardware.
Second-order effects
- The dongle requirement spawns a ready-made accessory market around Apple's own design choice, letting third parties monetize the gap Apple created.
- Rival laptop makers gain a concrete talking point against Apple's port-less direction, and the negative reception pressures Apple's next Pro revision to restore connectivity.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, aggressive feature removal that alienates professional users gets walked back within a few cycles — exactly what the 2021 restoration of ports and removal of the Touch Bar shows.
- Laptop design settles toward convergence rather than radical simplification: once the correction cost is demonstrated, vendors treat legacy ports as retained infrastructure instead of removable clutter.
The trend: Premium laptop design is oscillating between radical port-stripping and pro-feature restoration, with user backlash setting the correction cadence.