A common theme about Apple is that the critics demand that features from other platforms be copied. You can find a list; it’s easy, because Apple never attempts to compete on the quantity of features but, mostly, on the quality of features. So the iPhone wasn’t the first smartphone, obviously. Before it arrived, you had BlackBerry and a host of imitators. But the iPhone was closer in concept to a tiny personal computer, dispensing with a physical keyboard in place of a virtual one that essentially matched a traditional layout. So people who found it difficult to take to the unusual layout devised by BlackBerry — and I’m one of them — were able to adapt fairly quickly to the iPhone. Apple made it familiar, thus making smartphones warm and fuzzy to the masses.

That’s why the rest of the mobile handset industry followed up on Apple’s tradition with their copying machines.

When PC makers copied the MacBook Air design, they added another wrinkle, perhaps to be different. They followed up on Microsoft’s original concept for a tablet, which was basically a notebook with a movable touchscreen. All right, they didn’t exactly succeed as big, clunky machines, but making them slimmer and lighter might have helped them catch on somewhat.

Apple’s response was that a personal computer is meant to use standard input devices such as a keyboard, mouse and trackpad. Tablets and smartphones are natively based on touchscreens. The standalone keyboard is optional. To drive the point home, Apple executives said a notebook with a touchscreen that doubles as a tablet is akin to trying to combine a refrigerator with a toaster oven.

The choice to add a Touch Bar has proven to be controversial. To some it might be a cop-out, the result of a political decision not to have a touchscreen. To Apple, it’s a matter of expanding the use of traditional input devices to become more productive. Certainly the demonstrations at the recent Apple media event, where the Late 2016 MacBook Pro was launched, indicated the Touch Bar’s value in helping professionals do complicated work more efficiently. Both Apple’s Final Cut Pro X and Adobe Photoshop were prime examples. The App Store has begun to post recommended MacBook Pro apps with similar support.

Now I gather some people more or less get used to this, but if you don’t have a convertible or 2-in-1 PC notebook, just take a second to raise your hand and touch the screen of your regular notebook a few times, every few seconds, while switching back to the keyboard for text entry and trackpad manipulation. Do you feel that’s a comfortable move, which won’t potentially cause wrist and arm stress over time? Do you feel this is a natural move to which you become accustomed without discomfort?

If you do, well and good. I’ve tried it, and maybe I’m too old to learn new tricks. But I am comfortable with an iPhone or an iPad — although I’m no big fan of the latter. I am comfortable with my vintage MacBook Pro using the traditional input methods. Mixing and matching them doesn’t work for me, I can feel the extra tension in my limbs. True, you can use an iPad with an attachable or add-on keyboard, and it’s all right under some circumstances. But it’s usually just a clumsy workaround to make typing long passages of text easier.

Still, the reviewers have given a mixed reaction to the Touch Bar so far. The New York Times referred to it as a “blank slate,”meaning that time will determine its value. That depends very much on whether the developers for the apps you need to run will provide proper and efficient support. A key is to offer easy access to critical workflows, even if the actual commands are several menus deep. Developers have loads of options here, limited very much by their creativity and responsiveness to the needs of customers.

So if there are ways for you to get more work done faster, more efficiently and with fewer errors using the Touch Bar, it’ll be a success. If it’s just a fancy function key replacement with few operations you care about, it will just be an unneeded expense. What will help is for Apple to add Touch Bar support to a version of the Magic Keyboard, so users of desktop Macs can take advantage of it too. That will go a long way towards encouraging developers to get with the program.

At least the reviews are showing one thing not to be true, concerns about achieving professional performance levels on the MacBook Pro, particularly the 15-inch version. With dedicated AMD Polaris graphics, this machine can drive two 5K displays, each with a single connector. That was no mean trick using DisplayPort 1.2 technology. Obviously most consumers aren’t going to care about 5K displays, but pros do. And having ultrafast SSDs is also going to enhance overall performance. True, the Intel Skylake chips aren’t hugely faster compared to its predecessors — not Apple’s fault obviously — but more powerful graphics and speedier SSDs will make a difference that people who do real work on their Macs will notice.

As to the issue of touchscreens, Apple’s made its move. PC makers have yet to demonstrate that 2-in-1 notebooks are superior from the standpoint of user convenience, comfort and productivity. But such fine details usually aren’t of concern to companies who tout the number of features above their value.

I dare say that Apple didn’t expect the outcry over the MacBook Pro refresh. It may have, in part, been about pent-up demand for the computer, but it’s also a symptom that’s peculiarly Apple. Right or wrong, Apple did things in designing the new model that were either misunderstood, or went against what customers wanted. Or at least that’s what it seemed.

Now on the surface, the new lineup seemed to be a blessing. Both models were thinner and lighter and more powerful. Maybe not a lot more powerful, but Apple’s implementation of the NVM Express (NVMe) interface meant much faster SSDs, more than twice as fast as previous notebooks. Since so much of the performance of a personal computer depends on the speed of the storage device, that can make a huge difference in a way that’s not completely reflected in the benchmarks.

All right, the new keyboard, derived from the design used on the MacBook, is controversial. Larger keys, less keyboard travel, and it takes some getting used to. It’s also polarizing, as some prefer it and some don’t. Or maybe the fact of being different puts some people off. Regardless, Apple’s changed direction should already have been obvious, since a similar design is used for the Magic Keyboard, which comes free with your new iMac.

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So whenever there’s a problem with an Apple product or service, or something unexpected is released, the world must end. Or at least that’s what the critics say. This happens every so often, and each time there’s some sort of media outcry. It dies down over time, as Apple manages to overcome the problem, or at the very least does better than expected.

When it comes to an unexpected product release, do you remember what the critics said when the iPhone arrived in 2007? Apple didn’t know a thing about making mobile handsets, so this product was doomed to failure. A touchscreen for a keyboard? Real smartphone users owned a BlackBerry or an imitation with those silly physical keys shoehorned into a tiny space. When Steve Jobs said that Apple would be only too happy to have a 1% share of the market by the end of 2008, they laughed.

A typical reaction came from Microsoft’s then-CEO Steve Ballmer about the iPhone, that it would never sell because it was too expensive. But that was before Apple worked with its carriers to support the standard subsidy pricing.

Despite lower sales this past year, the iPhone was a stellar success, and Microsoft’s efforts to sell premium smartphones went exactly nowhere. These days, Microsoft is trying to rain on Apple’s parade by selling Surface tablets and notebooks, plus a $3,000 all-in-one dubbed Surface Studio, all with mixed results.

When Tim Cook officially replaced Jobs as CEO, the very first product introduced was the iPhone 4s. It was regarded as a pretty lame upgrade to the iPhone 4, but it wasn’t. In addition to rejiggering the antenna layout so it was more difficult to lose the signal if you held it the “wrong way,” Siri debuted. Despite being imperfect — and it was labeled beta at the time — Siri became a cultural icon. Even though Amazon, Google and Microsoft got into the personal digital assistant act — and arguably are in some respects better — it’s still very much about Siri.

But did the media forget Antennagate a year earlier? When iPhone 4 users put up YouTube videos showing how easy it was to kill the signal by holding it a certain way, and customers complained, Apple held a press conference. Some reporters were shown the company’s multimillion dollar antenna development and test facility, heretofore secret. Jobs offered free bumper cases for those still having the problem for a few months. For a time, Apple posted videos showing just how easy it was to duplicate the problem with other smartphones. It was about the laws of physics, he said. At least till Apple found better ways to reduce the symptoms.

In 2012, Cook got a lesson in humility, but demonstrated a knack for proper damage control. The first version of Apple Maps — designed to replace Google Maps — was a buggy mess. In addition to 3D images where landmarks seemed to be melting, directions were sometimes wrong. In practice, accuracy wasn’t altogether worse than Google, but the areas where Apple Maps failed were easy to illustrate.

Cook apologized, promised to fix the problem and suggested iPhone users just download mapping software from other companies, even Google. Oh, and iOS executive Scott Forstall was given his walking papers, in part because he refused to sign the apology for Mapgate.

Although people still remember the map problem, it’s much better nowadays, and it hasn’t messed up directions for me in a while. But Google Maps garbled the location of my wife’s new family doctor last week, so we were late for her first appointment.

Two years ago, an iOS  8.0.1 update bricked the fancy new iPhone 6. Apple pulled the update in about an hour, and released a fix, 8.0.2, the very next day. But this problem garnered headlines. Ignored was the fact that Microsoft is notorious for releasing buggy patches that sometimes cause PCs to fail to boot. That isn’t important, I suppose, because you expect a Windows update to sometimes fail. Apple is supposed to be perfect.

New product decisions from Apple have also garnered their share of complaints. The 2015 MacBook came without the desirable MagSafe power connector, and only one USB-C port. Why not a second? Why does the keyboard have such little travel? The skeptics missed the fact that this MacBook was meant to be a harbinger of the future, where notebooks are meant to exist in a mostly wireless environment. So why would you need more ports anyway? The controversial keyboard is spreading to other Apple products. The $99 Magic Keyboard has a similar style keyboard, but I tried it briefly and I actually like it. An enhanced version appears in the 2016 MacBook Pro.

Speaking of which, the negative chatter about the new MacBook Pro is never-ending. How dare Apple not have 32GB of RAM, something they’ve never done on a notebook? What’s that Touch Bar good for anyway? But that complaint comes from some of the very people who rarely used the function keys, which it replaced.

What about the high price? Well, the first MacBook Pro with Retina display also cost more, but prices came down over the next four years of production, so you expect the same thing will happen with the new model over the next year or two. It won’t be long before the complaints about such things as pricing, memory, not to mention the exclusive use of USB-C/Thunderbolt 3 ports, will be history. It’s usually thus with Apple.

And I won’t bother to mention the iPhone 7 and the loss of the headphone jack. That is so yesterday.

It takes all kinds of people to make a village of blog readers. Some like what you do, some don’t, and some are smack in the middle more or less. Regardless, I’m happy to receive comments, because I know people are reading. Some arrive via the Comments panels on the site, while others are sent via email. Either way, I make a good effort to respond when I can.

But it’s also true that some readers want to stir the pot, sometimes a little too eagerly. So I see messages where someone wants to make a contrary point, but when you engage them in a conversation, you find they’re merely egging you on for an online flamewar.

This reminds me of the days in the mid-1990s when I was working as a Mac forum leader for AOL. I was providing support for a beleaguered platform, and I also ventured out to those old Usenet message boards. They were rambling, large, and usually uncensored, except for a few that were moderated. But the uncensored boards could be both enjoyable and infuriating.

So I remember responding to someone who wrote a scathing piece about AOL. Now the core of the complaint was mostly correct, since  AOL offered a simplified online experience, highly curated, and didn’t always allow you to wade into the ditches. This is the sort of thing that was useful for newcomers, but power users resented the situation, referring to the service as “the kindergarten of the Internet.” Well, after replying to that poster, he made a response trying to goad me into an online argument.

I refused, and simply corrected his misstatements. His response? Well, I didn’t understand the way things worked out there in the Internet wilderness. He said, “I flame you, you flame me.” But I was having none of it. I simply made my point and went elsewhere. I actually had a life.

In recent days, the launch of the Late 2016 MacBook Pro has generated a lot of discussion, more so than any recent Apple product, other than perhaps the Phone 7 and the loss of the headphone jack. But that chatter more or less died when it appeared the new model was — and remains — surprisingly successful. Also, it doesn’t appear that this long-expected feature change, or removal, is really so big a deal for most people.

Now Apple has done quite a few things in redesigning the MacBook Pro to keep people talking, and not all of it is favorable. The 16GB RAM limitation has become an issue, even though no previous model has supported more RAM. The complete switch to USB-C/Thunderbolt 3 ports, other than a headphone jack, has also proven to be polarizing. It has received even more discussion, it seems, than the release of the 2015 MacBook, which had a single USB-C port.

Then it was all about worrying what to do if you needed to connect a few devices. It was clear from the start, though, that Apple’s intent was to provide a notebook computer meant to do most of its work online. Indeed, the main purpose of the lone peripheral port was probably charging the battery, and if Apple had a working wireless charging scheme, it might not be there.

Four ports is a good thing (it’s two ports on the entry-level model without Touch Bar). But having a port design that is not yet in wide use is bad, because it means you may have to buy a bunch of dongles to connect your stuff. At least Apple got the message and made the adapters cheaper, at least until the end of the year. But maybe it would have also been a good idea to provide a couple of the most popular configurations in the box, free of charge. It wouldn’t be the first time Apple provided an extra accessory connector or two with a new Mac.

But cable makers with compatible adapters will love Apple’s decision.

The Touch Bar, also predicted in advance, remains controversial. Some of the complaints are extreme, such as the possibility mentioned in one reader’s email that it might cause RSI. Forgotten was the fact that there was already a row of keys there, the venerable function keys, so why would a touch-only keypad be such a big deal anyway? Indeed, it appears to me that if any PC-based display with touch capability had the potential to cause a wrist injury, it would be the so-called convertible PC, those 2-in-1 models.

You can test this for yourself if you just raise your hand while typing and attempt to touch something on your Mac’s display, particularly at the top. Do that a few dozen times in a few second’s time and tell me if it’s a comfortable move.

And one more thing: Where does Apple have the gall to increase prices by upwards of $300 on the new models? At a time when PC makers are struggling to sell product, you’d think the price should be lower, not higher. Or at least that’s what the critics say.

Now I’m not going to guess how much it cost Apple to design and build the new MacBook Pro. It may well be that the price is commensurate with the costs, although it might become cheaper in a year or two. That is what’s happened before.

More to the point, Apple VP Philip Schiller claims that online sales are at record levels. That pronouncement seems to be confined by a report from Slice Intelligence, a survey firm that evaluates purchase receipts to compile its numbers. If you can believe the survey, the new notebook has generated seven times more revenue than the 12-inch MacBook when it was released.

So it may be the fact that there’s lots of demand for the MacBook Pro that’s generating so much chatter and controversy. If you can believe the early sales reports, lots of people are buying them. So if you want a model equipped with a Touch Bar, you’ll be lucky to have to delivered in time for Christmas.