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> Keys stopping to work is one thing, but for me the Touch Bar and the screwed arrow keys are similarly disappointing. Apple should've seen this coming. What we

> Keys stopping to work is one thing, but for me the Touch Bar and the screwed arrow keys are similarly disappointing. Apple should've seen this coming. What were they thinking? It appears they weren't thinking. The Touch Bar is a huge mystery to me and a colossal nuisance, who wants to look down at their fingers to type? Did we not spend our earliest computing years mastering touch typing specifically for the efficiency of NOT having to look down at your hands when typing? Growing up, our computer lab teacher would place a box over your hands to force you to memorize the key locations to drive home the point, and once memorization occurred it really clicked and WPM and general computing efficiency skyrocketed for everyone. So then comes the Touch Bar to solve no problem but instead introduce new problems, where your hands and fingers literally block the Touch Bar visibility from any normal usage viewing angle, meaning you have to move your hands away from the keyboard, then awkwardly poke around imprecisely with a single floating finger on a little tiny screen to hit "escape" or the "X" button to find the escape key or the brightness and audio output adjustments and other function keys. Did nobody at Apple test it out? Or even think it through? Where is their person to say "no" to what are clearly bad ideas?

deong 8y ago
I think it's a general Apple failure mode. They're so wrapped up in the idea of making something completely unheard of, that they overly weight novelty. Most of these "clearly bad ideas" aren't all that clear at the time. I don't think I ever thought the touchbar was going to be a positive addition to a laptop, but when it was announced, there sure were a lot of people who seemed convinced it would. You can make an argument for why it's great, and if your company culture is predisposed towards valuing novelty, you'll anchor to those arguments, and there isn't going to be one guy in the room who can say "no". That same culture has obvious upsides as well; I'm not trying to just knock Apple as incompetent. I just think the flip side of that coin makes things like the TouchBar more likely to survive scrutiny there.
- notadoc 8y ago
  That's an interesting way to look at it, and the novelty factor may well have something to do with it. I suppose Touch Bar just doesn't seem particularly novel to me though, many consumer level PC laptops used to have little touch bars as FN keys in the early and mid 2000s, and they were just as much of a hassle then which is probably why no manufacturer kept them around.

deong 8y ago

I think it's a general Apple failure mode. They're so wrapped up in the idea of making something completely unheard of, that they overly weight novelty. Most of these "clearly bad ideas" aren't all that clear at the time. I don't think I ever thought the touchbar was going to be a positive addition to a laptop, but when it was announced, there sure were a lot of people who seemed convinced it would. You can make an argument for why it's great, and if your company culture is predisposed towards valuing novelty, you'll anchor to those arguments, and there isn't going to be one guy in the room who can say "no". That same culture has obvious upsides as well; I'm not trying to just knock Apple as incompetent. I just think the flip side of that coin makes things like the TouchBar more likely to survive scrutiny there.

notadoc 8y ago
That's an interesting way to look at it, and the novelty factor may well have something to do with it. I suppose Touch Bar just doesn't seem particularly novel to me though, many consumer level PC laptops used to have little touch bars as FN keys in the early and mid 2000s, and they were just as much of a hassle then which is probably why no manufacturer kept them around.