Segways for the mind?
“I think one of the things that really separates us from the high primates is that we’re tool builders. I read a study that measured the efficiency of locomotion for various species on the planet. The condor used the least energy to move a kilometer. And, humans came in with a rather unimpressive showing, about a third of the way down the list. It was not too proud a showing for the crown of creation. So, that didn’t look so good. But, then somebody at Scientific
American had the insight to test the efficiency of locomotion for a man on a bicycle. And, a man on a bicycle, a human on a bicycle, blew the condor away, completely off the top of the charts.
“And that’s what a computer is to me. What a computer is to me is it’s the most remarkable tool that we’ve ever come up with, and it’s the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds.”
That’s a Steve Jobs quote, and it’s one I’ve been thinking about a lot in the context of the new MacBook Pros Apple has released. Tools are created to solve a problem for the people who use them. To relieve a burden. The new MacBook Pros have an all-new way of doing this in the form of the Touch Bar, but with their only data connections being Thunderbolt 3 ports, you now need adapters for many different totally standard connection types.
The previous Pros handled this burden with their SD card readers, standard USB 3 ports, Thunderbolt 2 ports, and HDMI. Now Apple has placed this burden on you. You must make sure that you never forget your adapters wherever you go. If your work depends on it, and you’ve forgotten or dropped one, you suffer.
The question is whether the balance of new features is worth it. This will depend on your situation – for me, the Touch Bar models are a good fit (we didn’t receive them in time to fully review this issue). But it still makes we wonder whether we can confidently say the new Pros are bicycles for the mind, or more like Segways, adding as many complications as they solve.