After a week with a 13 inch, what I've mainly noticed is how physically unwelcoming it is:
The edges are very sharp, and the air vents on the bottom are right where you grab the laptop to pick it up, which gives it a knife-like feel. Also, by expanding the track pad far beyond it's useful size, there is now no gap between it and the space key. I have discovered that I have a habit of resting my thumb just below the space bar and now I tend to bump the pointer on accident now. The arrow keys are now a continuous run of keys with no way to orient quickly like previously (where the side arrows were slightly smaller and made it obvious where the up key was without looking.) . Finally, the keyboard action is very short, as you would expect with such a thin laptop.
I do most of my work with an external keyboard and monitor, so it isn't that big a deal to me, but I can see it being hard on people who use their laptop exclusively.
> I have discovered that I have a habit of resting my thumb just below the space bar and now I tend to bump the pointer on accident now
This is surprising and disappointing. I really enjoyed using Apple's touchpads with tap to click because their accidental press recognition was good enough that I never really worried about this. I typically had to turn tap to click off when using Linux because I would randomly click while typing.
I wonder why they haven't been able to get it to work as well on the new touchpad
Just speculating here, but this is precisely the sort of thing Apple generally fine-tunes and fixes with software updates in very short order. I would expect it will be so this time, too.
Not sure why you're being downvoted; I appreciate the advice.
However, I don't think all drivers have palm detection unless I'm mistaken?
Also, unfortunately while I would have enjoyed configuring the system to my personal desires, these days with the limited free time I have, I'd rather be able to just do what I was going to do on my laptop instead of having to spend time tinkering with it to get it right. Apple seems to do very well in this respect since it almost always knows when I want to tap vs when I just have my palm there.
"...what I've mainly noticed is how physically unwelcoming it is: The edges are very sharp..." - I noticed this too on the early Microsoft Surface power-bricks (not sure if it applies to the later Surface models), the power-bricks had unusually sharp-edges, at the time it struck me as unnecessary and not human-centric. I wondered if the designer ever had the opportunity to interact with the tactile experience before it went into production. Has the design process broken down and designers no longer see a production prototype before they sign-off?
Sharp edges seems to be a trend that has migrated to other manufacturers as they ape Apple's design. My three year old Lenovo, and new work supplied Dell are both unforgiving to type on for the same reason.
Yes, I have the 2014 version of the 13 inch macbook pro. The increased sharpness is very noticable to me, particularly where the underside vents are now placed, creating that knife-like feel when you pick it up.
The edges are very sharp, and the air vents on the bottom are right where you grab the laptop to pick it up, which gives it a knife-like feel. Also, by expanding the track pad far beyond it's useful size, there is now no gap between it and the space key. I have discovered that I have a habit of resting my thumb just below the space bar and now I tend to bump the pointer on accident now. The arrow keys are now a continuous run of keys with no way to orient quickly like previously (where the side arrows were slightly smaller and made it obvious where the up key was without looking.) . Finally, the keyboard action is very short, as you would expect with such a thin laptop.
I do most of my work with an external keyboard and monitor, so it isn't that big a deal to me, but I can see it being hard on people who use their laptop exclusively.
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