8 ms·

Is the Touch Bar a gimmick? Two years in, I can answer that

45 points by okket 8y ago

onemoresoop 8y ago
It is a gimmick to satisfy novelty seekers. But it creates problems for old time users, it messes with muscle memory and having to look down is downright unproductive, it steals microseconds and takes you out of the context for a fraction of time. While kids love this, I know that it's less deficient than tactile buttons that are always there! However, I think this could be great for new users, it is intuitive if you're new to computers: kids and old people who were never power users.
kmlx 8y ago
the biggest issue i’ve had with the touch bar was touching it by mistake. i solved it by having a static set of buttons and an app that vibrates the touchpad when i touch the bar. the touch bar is the force touch of macbooks.
martinraag 8y ago
Inspired by a blog post, which I think made rounds on HN as well, I customised my Touch Bar using a Mac app called BetterTouchTool. Now I have shortcuts to my most used apps on the left, a Now Playing display connected to Spotify in the middle and audio controls (including a volume slider that you don't have to expand first to use) on the right. This setup is always displayed, regardless of the app currently on the foreground. This means the controls are once again in a predictable place for my fingers and has made using the touch bar a much more pleasant experience.
nailer 8y ago
Apple's in an awkward spot right now: macOS isn't being iterated on, iOS is where they're putting all their engineering effort, and they're marketing iOS devices s being better than computers. There is no way they will retrofit proper touch into macOS. Instead, in a few years time, you'll run xCode on an iOS device like any other creation tool, with the whole lifecycle on iOS.
mthoms 8y ago
I'm still not in love with it, but there are two things that make the touchbar much more tolerable. BetterTouchTool and HapticKey. The advantages of BTT are obvious but HapticKey has been a really pleasant surprise. It gives every interaction with the touchbar haptic feedback. I now use the touchbar much more frequently.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
nikivi 8y ago
I love it. I programmed it to show my current TODO task, when I am on break as well as my battery and time. So I basically replaced my menu bar with it. https://github.com/nikitavoloboev/my-mac-os/tree/master/btt https://github.com/nikitavoloboev/my-mac-os/tree/master/btt
aetherson 8y ago
You can, and very much should, remove the Siri button.
photigragraphy 8y ago
Having used a touchbar MacBook Pro for the last year daily (both for developing and casual use) I also agree with the article. For the most part I ignore it as I usually have a tethered monitor and keyboard setup. However for those times when I do work directly off the keyboard I more often than not accidentally hit a button (the worst being accidentally triggering a build and being tied up for 10 seconds trying to frantically cancel). I think it would transcend gimmick into useful feature if they added haptic feedback of some kind when it is used. I have plenty of memorized keyboard shortcuts so that I do not need to avert my eyes from the screen when typing, something that the touchbar requires to actually properly use. With some kind of physical feedback I would be more easily able to integrate it's use into my workflows, especially so if you could customize haptic feedback based on virtual buttons.
- Klathmon 8y ago
  I was surprised they didn't use force touch from the iPhone as the way you interface with it. It would feel so much better if you had to click the buttons, and it would cut down accidental brushes against it to basically nothing. In fact, they nailed the haptic feedback on the macbook pro's touchpad so well, i'm still shocked they aren't doing more with it. A touchscreen that has buttons that only "click" when you click right on them, or being able to drag your finger slowly over the pad and feel "taps" when you hit an edge of something. I'm sure there's something i'm missing on why they aren't using it more, but it seems like they have all the ingredients for an awesome experience but just aren't using them all together!
shshhdhs 8y ago
Short answer: yes, especially when the author has the laptop on the desk with a wireless keyboard/trackpad.
- rhacker 8y ago
  Yeah that's all I was thinking about - what about for people like me that's in front of the laptop 100% of the time?
byteCoder 8y ago
I miss a real ESC key. I can’t tell if I’ve pressed it or not, which is problematic when using vi and touch typing. Haptic feedback would be a nice add-on to make it a little more tolerable. Also, Apple’s default configuration with Siri in the upper right was a horrible design decision. It only took me a few hours of use to decide to reconfigure the Touch Bar’s layout. I found it interesting that even an Apple Genius Bar employee was recommending a third-party app to me: BetterTouchTool.
- ephimetheus 8y ago
  Just remap capslock to escape. It's more convenient for vi anyway.
- jimsmart 8y ago
  You might find HapticKey useful. https://github.com/niw/HapticKey https://github.com/niw/HapticKey
Angostura 8y ago
To avoid the clickbait: > "So is the Touch Bar a gimmick? I say yes."
- TrevorAustin 8y ago
  Violating Betteridge's Law of Headlines! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...
  - berbec 8y ago
    "Is the touch bar worth two cents?"
vondur 8y ago
My wife has one, and she only uses the touchID capabilities of the touchbar. Other than that, she doesn't like it.
- Reedx 8y ago
  Same here. Though it helps a little to customize it - in particular removing Siri from the bar, heh. No more accidentally calling Siri. Another improvement was realizing that you can change volume/brightness with one continuous move (touch -> hold -> slide). In any case, I'd like to keep Touch ID, but drop the rest.
  - beamatronic 8y ago
    I would like touch ID if it worked more than about half of the time. I don’t understand how it can just go dark and just not be responsive at all.
redial 8y ago
Yes. Two years in and it is only available in one out of six models; even Apple has no faith in it.
Justsignedup 8y ago
I wish I had an option to buy a 15 inch mbp without a touchbar.
- rhardih 8y ago
  Same. No touchbar, io of the 2015 model, card reader, usb, headphone etc. Plus Magsafe. Basically the '15 model with improved battery, cpu, memory and hdd. I'd buy one today if I could!
- strikelaserclaw 8y ago
  and a better keyboard, i hate the butterfly keyboard
- beamatronic 8y ago
  Agree. I found out that the small MacBook Pro without the Touch Bar still has an escape key and still has a headphone jack! So that is at least something to be excited about.
carlospwk 8y ago
The TouchBar has its uses but I think gimmick status has been confirmed since it never made its way to external Apple keyboards. Like the author, my MBP is mostly docked so I can’t actually use it. That being said, I managed to create useful shortcuts with BetterTouchTool. There is potential.
village-idiot 8y ago
The touchbar is a gimmick, but that’s far from the worst sin of that laptop. For me the credit goes to that keyboard being complete and utter garbage. Typing on it cramps my hands up really badly, and instantly makes me want to go back to my Ergodox.
writeslowly 8y ago
I find the touchbar kind of clunky to use (like the author), but I believe it's partly because it's suffers from a sort of "gorilla arm" problem ergonomically. It's a touchscreen, so you can't lay your fingers on the buttons before pressing something (unless they add pressure-sensitive controls), and you have to reach across the keyboard, so you can't brace your hand on the computer chassis while hitting buttons. Instead you have to awkwardly hover your hand over the touchstrip to use it correctly, which is really awkward
frou_dh 8y ago
Not every iteration of a beloved product series ends up a classic. This is a down period for the MBP. I hope the clout of some decision-maker within Apple has taken a hit.
- rhardih 8y ago
  It's a down period closing on three years, and Apple have yet to even indicate a change of course.
dean177 8y ago
I like having touch id and the brightness / volume sliders and do miss those on my non-touchbar laptop, but thats all i use it for.
beamatronic 8y ago
I am not a fan of the Touch Bar. I’m one of those who thinks the 2015 MacBook Pro is the epitome of human achievement.But that being said, one thing that is cool about the Touch Bar is when you are viewing a video and it puts a “smeared” thumbnail onto the Touch Bar making it easy to visually seek. That’s really useful sometimes.
- snuxoll 8y ago
  I really like my 2015 MBP, but outside the dated hardware in comparison I still think the 2012 model was "the best". Yes, it was thicker and heavier - but I didn't have to worry about buying as much RAM as I thought I'd ever need at purchase time, or storage for that matter (because while OWC sold replacement SSD's for the rMBP they were the only vendor, why Apple didn't adopt M.2 when it was released is beyond me). Hell, Dell managed to put SODIMM slots + standard M.2 in the XPS 15 and at it's thickest it's still thinner than the 2015 MBP. You can't even argue that Apple does things for the sake of size when the competition beats them on it while maintaining upgradability. One day I hope Apple brings back a proper MBP, because at this point I don't buy their products for the hardware but because it's the only sane choice for a *NIX-based workstation that doesn't require I constantly mess with things or give up loads of software to use.
- jcden 8y ago
  MacBook Pro is a piece of dog shit. Why would you pay $2000-3000 for a computer that has the performance of a $900 PC? Even the brand new top of the line Mac book pros only have a AMD 555x gpu. That is completely unacceptable for the price. They get utterly and completely destroyed by cheaper PC's in virtually every benchmark.
gameswithgo 8y ago
There are many things in the tech world that have gotten fantastically better in my lifetime (I am 40). GPUs have been amazing, machine learning has made great leaps. virtual reality is now semi-awesome and improving. But a few things have been getting worse. One of the things I most lament is the move to touch interfaces instead of tactile buttons. See phones, cars, remote controls (apple tv) and now keyboards on laptops. It is a worse interface most of the time. I absolutely abhor it. The trend shows no signs of ever reversing though.
- bitwize 8y ago
  I think the keyboards in 2016 and later MBPs are deliberately terrible so that Apple can say "Our market research shows that customers view hardware keyboards negatively" and use that as a basis for either phasing out the Mac or introducing a new piezo touch keyboard or something.
  - jki275 8y ago
    That's a bit bizarre as a conspiracy theory. Apple certainly isn't focused on their Macs anymore, but if they were going to phase it out they'd simply do so. They've never asked anyone for permission before.
    - bitwize 8y ago
      It may be a complete coincidence that Apple introduced crappy keyboards, the idiot bar, and a HUGE trackpad to the MacBook line all at the same time, but I find this difficult to believe. At the very least, it's a clear message from Cupertino: Apple wants you to touch, not type. Resistance is futile.
      - jki275 8y ago
        I love the trackpad, the touchbar is worthless and the keyboard doesn't bother me too much. If they wanted to do touch, they'd do a touch screen like everybody else.
- 8y ago
NoblePublius 8y ago
I use a new basic 13” MBP because the Touch Bar is such garbage. God willing Apple releases a 15” model with no Touch Bar later this month.
- mathewsanders 8y ago
  I’m in the same place with my personal laptop, however I did use a work-issued 15” with touchbar for a couple months before changing jobs and I actually liked the touchbar shortcuts for Xcode because it exposed stuff that for some reason I’ve never been able to remember the keyboard shortcut. Everything else (especially changing volume) I remember being a pain in the ass
bitwize 8y ago
My new work laptop has an idiot bar. It's constantly offering me unwanted autocomplete items and the like. I have sensitive peripheral vision and am easily distracted by "squirrels" that lie outside my field of focus, and that fucking bar is like a constant squirrel generator. Thanks, Apple.
- java-man 8y ago
  I am surprised how many product ignore this fact - that human peripheral vision is more sensitive to movement than the center vision. Sony would put some animation on the bluetooth handsfree unit that distracts me when I am driving at night. "Helpful" popups would bounce up and down at the corner of a screen on Mac and Windows. What is the reason? To look "cool"? To check off a feature in some feature list? It's like 2000's manufacturers putting blue LEDs everywhere...
- j_koreth 8y ago
  You can set it to just show your function keys too.
  - bitwize 8y ago
    If you have to set your keyboard to not distract and annoy you, somebody somewhere fell off the good industrial design train.
0xCMP 8y ago
I would be surprised if they don't start phasing it out. This along with the keyboard issues are major reasons I won't just buy a new MBP today.
mFixman 8y ago
The author used the touch bar for two years and didn't think of removing the Siri button he accidentally clicked so much, or of adding volume controls to the expanded touch strip. This review is worthless.
- choward 8y ago
  That's what I want to do: configure something that I used to not have to configure before. The touchbar replaced a row of keys that was fine before and required no extra effort. Once you configure something and it's no longer the default then you have to reconfigure every one you use or you have an inconsistent experience. I'm okay with this for many things but for a keyboard is ridiculous.
- nck4222 8y ago
  On the other hand, a standard feature that's been nearly unchanged for decades (a keyboard), that suddenly is radically different and has to have multiple customization's made by a user who may or may not know that customization's even exist, should not be considered a user friendly product.
- lllr_finger 8y ago
  It was one complaint out of several, and the default behavior of a UI shouldn't be an annoyance.
bg4 8y ago
Yes.
Xixi 8y ago
I agree with the article. When I bought my MacBook Pro I was actually rather enthusiastic about the Touch Bar, and very cautious about the butterfly keyboard. Two and a half years later I love the Butterfly keyboard and dislike the Touch Bar. I don't hate it, but I'd rather have the physical function keys back.
xoa 8y ago
I think a real fundamental issue (and one that has led to major Apple blowups before too, albeit impacting fewer users) is that Apple made it a zero-sum game unnecessarily, and one not following a strict-superset pattern. They forced an either-or adversarial situation, which of course will drive up emotions more since it by definition dramatically raises the stakes for how useful the new thing must be. It's true that simplicity is itself a virtue, and cutting old stuff is often at least as important as adding new stuff. It has too often been the case in the tech world that there is always a push for adding new features but not for subtracting old ones at the same time. This has and will continue to cause anger and has been a bone people have picked with Apple since the start of the modern era with the iMac, yet has served them well. However any virtue can be taken too far or become a bromide, applied as a superficial cultural practice without an understanding of the foundation that previously made it work. Take Apple's aggression on ports for example: a lot of people are (with some justification) upset about having all TB3 ports and thus needing a lot of adapters for older gear. But at the end of the day TB3 is a superset of what came before and then some, it can do everything the older ones did, and the USB-C form factor is genuinely good. How exactly that plays out long term and whether 10 years later everything uses it and it will have all been worth it can be debated, but nothing is lost. But the touch bar simply lacks the features of tactile feedback and muscle memory the function keys offered, so it's not a superset, it's a tradeoff. It offers something new, but it also takes something important away. So whatever is new can't just be "oh that's kind of nice sometimes" and get an easy on-ramp with users, it must immediately be so good it justifies losing what they had before. The Touch Bar doesn't meet that standard, and worse suffers from the fundamental issue of attention requirement. Granted it's not entirely useless, but I don't see how it could ever meet the same ROI particularly for a pro system given that it doesn't really seem to support productivity scaling. Going back to the start the big tragedy is it's not as if there isn't plenty of vertical space in even a 13" (or 11" for that matter) system on the opposite-screen surface. There was no need to get make it zero-sum, they could have just offered the Touch Bar as a new feature above the function keys. If they had all the angst would have been avoided, it would have been something cool and occasionally useful, and since nobody would lose anything that's all it'd need to be to justify itself. Sure there'd be some grumbling about BOM but that's pretty minor in the scheme of things for these systems. Incidentally I think this same effect has happened elsewhere for Apple. Consider the reception of the Mac Cube vs the Cylinder Mac, which was effectively the Cube 2. Both tried to do an Apple take on an SFF system, which in the PC world are quite popular, and tried to cram a lot in. Neither ultimately was very successful. But the Cube had some fond users and was generally regarded as "well that's pretty neat even if I don't want one", whereas the Cylinder was awful. I think that's because with the Cube Apple kept the Power Mac. Nobody was forced to use it, so only those who wanted it's unique tradeoffs got it and everyone could be happy. If Apple had killed the Power Mac and said "oh yeah the Cube is totally what all you want" the reaction would have been at least as much (or more) then what happened when they killed the Mac Pro. I appreciate what a horror the 90s were for product line proliferation, and I still hate going to a lot of OEM sites and trying to navigate their multi dimensional product matrixes and a hundred minor variations of the same basic thing. But Apple has cut so much that they've reached meat and bone in some cases and have created problems for themselves unnecessarily and without getting any payoff in return.
baxtr 8y ago
I’m I the only one who is neutral or even slightly positive about the Touch Bar? I definitely can’t understand why so many people hate it. Take the two points of the article: 1) he uses an external keyboard 80-90% of the time, so he doesn’t care. Well, it’s called Laptop for a reason. 2) errors: I’ve been using the bar for quite a while and wouldn’t say the error rate is any higher than for any other key on my keyboard. I delete a lot of text because I hit the wrong key on the physical keyboard I wonder if I’m the only one who doesn’t understand where all the hate is coming from
- zzzcpan 8y ago
  It's physically impossible for it to be better and faster to use than the keyboard. People who spend a lot of time on computer interaction care about wasting too much of it and of course hate it. Those people who learn keyboard shortcuts for all the software they use.
sigi45 8y ago
I love it for brightness and volume control. Besides that, it would be really cool if i could program it with microapps. Temperature would be cool and/or clock and upcoming events. Otherwise i'm not using its app specific features. Just realised that there is a fav button when i have chrome open.
sicnus 8y ago
Yes it's a gimmick, I knew the second I saw it. I hate it. It is a nightmare when using VIM. Ugh... When my work said they were going to buy me a MacBook Pro I was stoked. When I found it came with that crap... cringe
aequitas 8y ago
I fully agree. Even though I don't own a touchbar MBP. I even choose to go with the older model because the touchbar could not be incorporated into my current workflow, even if it was great, as there is no separate keyboard with integrated touch bar (and frankly it would be to expensive if it was).
sxp62000 8y ago
I have a feeling that Apple has been testing the feasibility of adding multitouch to OSX with the Touch Bar gimmick. Physical controls are so much better! I mean just look at the things musicians and DJs are doing everyday with a keyboard, sliders, dials and a little practice.

45 points by okket 8y ago

It is a gimmick to satisfy novelty seekers. But it creates problems for old time users, it messes with muscle memory and having to look down is downright unproductive, it steals microseconds and takes you out of the context for a fraction of time. While kids love this, I know that it's less deficient than tactile buttons that are always there! However, I think this could be great for new users, it is intuitive if you're new to computers: kids and old people who were never power users.

kmlx 8y ago

the biggest issue i’ve had with the touch bar was touching it by mistake. i solved it by having a static set of buttons and an app that vibrates the touchpad when i touch the bar. the touch bar is the force touch of macbooks.

martinraag 8y ago

Inspired by a blog post, which I think made rounds on HN as well, I customised my Touch Bar using a Mac app called BetterTouchTool. Now I have shortcuts to my most used apps on the left, a Now Playing display connected to Spotify in the middle and audio controls (including a volume slider that you don't have to expand first to use) on the right. This setup is always displayed, regardless of the app currently on the foreground. This means the controls are once again in a predictable place for my fingers and has made using the touch bar a much more pleasant experience.

nailer 8y ago

Apple's in an awkward spot right now: macOS isn't being iterated on, iOS is where they're putting all their engineering effort, and they're marketing iOS devices s being better than computers. There is no way they will retrofit proper touch into macOS. Instead, in a few years time, you'll run xCode on an iOS device like any other creation tool, with the whole lifecycle on iOS.

mthoms 8y ago

I'm still not in love with it, but there are two things that make the touchbar much more tolerable. BetterTouchTool and HapticKey. The advantages of BTT are obvious but HapticKey has been a really pleasant surprise. It gives every interaction with the touchbar haptic feedback. I now use the touchbar much more frequently.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

nikivi 8y ago

I love it. I programmed it to show my current TODO task, when I am on break as well as my battery and time. So I basically replaced my menu bar with it. https://github.com/nikitavoloboev/my-mac-os/tree/master/btt https://github.com/nikitavoloboev/my-mac-os/tree/master/btt

aetherson 8y ago

You can, and very much should, remove the Siri button.

photigragraphy 8y ago

Having used a touchbar MacBook Pro for the last year daily (both for developing and casual use) I also agree with the article. For the most part I ignore it as I usually have a tethered monitor and keyboard setup. However for those times when I do work directly off the keyboard I more often than not accidentally hit a button (the worst being accidentally triggering a build and being tied up for 10 seconds trying to frantically cancel). I think it would transcend gimmick into useful feature if they added haptic feedback of some kind when it is used. I have plenty of memorized keyboard shortcuts so that I do not need to avert my eyes from the screen when typing, something that the touchbar requires to actually properly use. With some kind of physical feedback I would be more easily able to integrate it's use into my workflows, especially so if you could customize haptic feedback based on virtual buttons.

Klathmon 8y ago
I was surprised they didn't use force touch from the iPhone as the way you interface with it. It would feel so much better if you had to click the buttons, and it would cut down accidental brushes against it to basically nothing. In fact, they nailed the haptic feedback on the macbook pro's touchpad so well, i'm still shocked they aren't doing more with it. A touchscreen that has buttons that only "click" when you click right on them, or being able to drag your finger slowly over the pad and feel "taps" when you hit an edge of something. I'm sure there's something i'm missing on why they aren't using it more, but it seems like they have all the ingredients for an awesome experience but just aren't using them all together!

shshhdhs 8y ago

Short answer: yes, especially when the author has the laptop on the desk with a wireless keyboard/trackpad.

rhacker 8y ago
Yeah that's all I was thinking about - what about for people like me that's in front of the laptop 100% of the time?

byteCoder 8y ago

I miss a real ESC key. I can’t tell if I’ve pressed it or not, which is problematic when using vi and touch typing. Haptic feedback would be a nice add-on to make it a little more tolerable. Also, Apple’s default configuration with Siri in the upper right was a horrible design decision. It only took me a few hours of use to decide to reconfigure the Touch Bar’s layout. I found it interesting that even an Apple Genius Bar employee was recommending a third-party app to me: BetterTouchTool.

ephimetheus 8y ago
Just remap capslock to escape. It's more convenient for vi anyway.
jimsmart 8y ago
You might find HapticKey useful. https://github.com/niw/HapticKey https://github.com/niw/HapticKey

Angostura 8y ago

To avoid the clickbait: > "So is the Touch Bar a gimmick? I say yes."

TrevorAustin 8y ago
Violating Betteridge's Law of Headlines! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...
- berbec 8y ago
  "Is the touch bar worth two cents?"

vondur 8y ago

My wife has one, and she only uses the touchID capabilities of the touchbar. Other than that, she doesn't like it.

Reedx 8y ago
Same here. Though it helps a little to customize it - in particular removing Siri from the bar, heh. No more accidentally calling Siri. Another improvement was realizing that you can change volume/brightness with one continuous move (touch -> hold -> slide). In any case, I'd like to keep Touch ID, but drop the rest.
- beamatronic 8y ago
  I would like touch ID if it worked more than about half of the time. I don’t understand how it can just go dark and just not be responsive at all.

redial 8y ago

Yes. Two years in and it is only available in one out of six models; even Apple has no faith in it.

Justsignedup 8y ago

I wish I had an option to buy a 15 inch mbp without a touchbar.

rhardih 8y ago
Same. No touchbar, io of the 2015 model, card reader, usb, headphone etc. Plus Magsafe. Basically the '15 model with improved battery, cpu, memory and hdd. I'd buy one today if I could!
strikelaserclaw 8y ago
and a better keyboard, i hate the butterfly keyboard
beamatronic 8y ago
Agree. I found out that the small MacBook Pro without the Touch Bar still has an escape key and still has a headphone jack! So that is at least something to be excited about.

carlospwk 8y ago

The TouchBar has its uses but I think gimmick status has been confirmed since it never made its way to external Apple keyboards. Like the author, my MBP is mostly docked so I can’t actually use it. That being said, I managed to create useful shortcuts with BetterTouchTool. There is potential.

village-idiot 8y ago

The touchbar is a gimmick, but that’s far from the worst sin of that laptop. For me the credit goes to that keyboard being complete and utter garbage. Typing on it cramps my hands up really badly, and instantly makes me want to go back to my Ergodox.

writeslowly 8y ago

I find the touchbar kind of clunky to use (like the author), but I believe it's partly because it's suffers from a sort of "gorilla arm" problem ergonomically. It's a touchscreen, so you can't lay your fingers on the buttons before pressing something (unless they add pressure-sensitive controls), and you have to reach across the keyboard, so you can't brace your hand on the computer chassis while hitting buttons. Instead you have to awkwardly hover your hand over the touchstrip to use it correctly, which is really awkward

frou_dh 8y ago

Not every iteration of a beloved product series ends up a classic. This is a down period for the MBP. I hope the clout of some decision-maker within Apple has taken a hit.

rhardih 8y ago
It's a down period closing on three years, and Apple have yet to even indicate a change of course.

dean177 8y ago

I like having touch id and the brightness / volume sliders and do miss those on my non-touchbar laptop, but thats all i use it for.

beamatronic 8y ago

I am not a fan of the Touch Bar. I’m one of those who thinks the 2015 MacBook Pro is the epitome of human achievement.But that being said, one thing that is cool about the Touch Bar is when you are viewing a video and it puts a “smeared” thumbnail onto the Touch Bar making it easy to visually seek. That’s really useful sometimes.

snuxoll 8y ago
I really like my 2015 MBP, but outside the dated hardware in comparison I still think the 2012 model was "the best". Yes, it was thicker and heavier - but I didn't have to worry about buying as much RAM as I thought I'd ever need at purchase time, or storage for that matter (because while OWC sold replacement SSD's for the rMBP they were the only vendor, why Apple didn't adopt M.2 when it was released is beyond me). Hell, Dell managed to put SODIMM slots + standard M.2 in the XPS 15 and at it's thickest it's still thinner than the 2015 MBP. You can't even argue that Apple does things for the sake of size when the competition beats them on it while maintaining upgradability. One day I hope Apple brings back a proper MBP, because at this point I don't buy their products for the hardware but because it's the only sane choice for a *NIX-based workstation that doesn't require I constantly mess with things or give up loads of software to use.
jcden 8y ago
MacBook Pro is a piece of dog shit. Why would you pay $2000-3000 for a computer that has the performance of a $900 PC? Even the brand new top of the line Mac book pros only have a AMD 555x gpu. That is completely unacceptable for the price. They get utterly and completely destroyed by cheaper PC's in virtually every benchmark.

gameswithgo 8y ago

There are many things in the tech world that have gotten fantastically better in my lifetime (I am 40). GPUs have been amazing, machine learning has made great leaps. virtual reality is now semi-awesome and improving. But a few things have been getting worse. One of the things I most lament is the move to touch interfaces instead of tactile buttons. See phones, cars, remote controls (apple tv) and now keyboards on laptops. It is a worse interface most of the time. I absolutely abhor it. The trend shows no signs of ever reversing though.

bitwize 8y ago
I think the keyboards in 2016 and later MBPs are deliberately terrible so that Apple can say "Our market research shows that customers view hardware keyboards negatively" and use that as a basis for either phasing out the Mac or introducing a new piezo touch keyboard or something.
- jki275 8y ago
  That's a bit bizarre as a conspiracy theory. Apple certainly isn't focused on their Macs anymore, but if they were going to phase it out they'd simply do so. They've never asked anyone for permission before.
  - bitwize 8y ago
    It may be a complete coincidence that Apple introduced crappy keyboards, the idiot bar, and a HUGE trackpad to the MacBook line all at the same time, but I find this difficult to believe. At the very least, it's a clear message from Cupertino: Apple wants you to touch, not type. Resistance is futile.
    - jki275 8y ago
      I love the trackpad, the touchbar is worthless and the keyboard doesn't bother me too much. If they wanted to do touch, they'd do a touch screen like everybody else.
8y ago

NoblePublius 8y ago

I use a new basic 13” MBP because the Touch Bar is such garbage. God willing Apple releases a 15” model with no Touch Bar later this month.

mathewsanders 8y ago
I’m in the same place with my personal laptop, however I did use a work-issued 15” with touchbar for a couple months before changing jobs and I actually liked the touchbar shortcuts for Xcode because it exposed stuff that for some reason I’ve never been able to remember the keyboard shortcut. Everything else (especially changing volume) I remember being a pain in the ass

bitwize 8y ago

My new work laptop has an idiot bar. It's constantly offering me unwanted autocomplete items and the like. I have sensitive peripheral vision and am easily distracted by "squirrels" that lie outside my field of focus, and that fucking bar is like a constant squirrel generator. Thanks, Apple.

java-man 8y ago
I am surprised how many product ignore this fact - that human peripheral vision is more sensitive to movement than the center vision. Sony would put some animation on the bluetooth handsfree unit that distracts me when I am driving at night. "Helpful" popups would bounce up and down at the corner of a screen on Mac and Windows. What is the reason? To look "cool"? To check off a feature in some feature list? It's like 2000's manufacturers putting blue LEDs everywhere...
j_koreth 8y ago
You can set it to just show your function keys too.
- bitwize 8y ago
  If you have to set your keyboard to not distract and annoy you, somebody somewhere fell off the good industrial design train.

0xCMP 8y ago

I would be surprised if they don't start phasing it out. This along with the keyboard issues are major reasons I won't just buy a new MBP today.

mFixman 8y ago

The author used the touch bar for two years and didn't think of removing the Siri button he accidentally clicked so much, or of adding volume controls to the expanded touch strip. This review is worthless.

choward 8y ago
That's what I want to do: configure something that I used to not have to configure before. The touchbar replaced a row of keys that was fine before and required no extra effort. Once you configure something and it's no longer the default then you have to reconfigure every one you use or you have an inconsistent experience. I'm okay with this for many things but for a keyboard is ridiculous.
nck4222 8y ago
On the other hand, a standard feature that's been nearly unchanged for decades (a keyboard), that suddenly is radically different and has to have multiple customization's made by a user who may or may not know that customization's even exist, should not be considered a user friendly product.
lllr_finger 8y ago
It was one complaint out of several, and the default behavior of a UI shouldn't be an annoyance.

bg4 8y ago

Yes.

Xixi 8y ago

I agree with the article. When I bought my MacBook Pro I was actually rather enthusiastic about the Touch Bar, and very cautious about the butterfly keyboard. Two and a half years later I love the Butterfly keyboard and dislike the Touch Bar. I don't hate it, but I'd rather have the physical function keys back.

xoa 8y ago

I think a real fundamental issue (and one that has led to major Apple blowups before too, albeit impacting fewer users) is that Apple made it a zero-sum game unnecessarily, and one not following a strict-superset pattern. They forced an either-or adversarial situation, which of course will drive up emotions more since it by definition dramatically raises the stakes for how useful the new thing must be. It's true that simplicity is itself a virtue, and cutting old stuff is often at least as important as adding new stuff. It has too often been the case in the tech world that there is always a push for adding new features but not for subtracting old ones at the same time. This has and will continue to cause anger and has been a bone people have picked with Apple since the start of the modern era with the iMac, yet has served them well. However any virtue can be taken too far or become a bromide, applied as a superficial cultural practice without an understanding of the foundation that previously made it work. Take Apple's aggression on ports for example: a lot of people are (with some justification) upset about having all TB3 ports and thus needing a lot of adapters for older gear. But at the end of the day TB3 is a superset of what came before and then some, it can do everything the older ones did, and the USB-C form factor is genuinely good. How exactly that plays out long term and whether 10 years later everything uses it and it will have all been worth it can be debated, but nothing is lost. But the touch bar simply lacks the features of tactile feedback and muscle memory the function keys offered, so it's not a superset, it's a tradeoff. It offers something new, but it also takes something important away. So whatever is new can't just be "oh that's kind of nice sometimes" and get an easy on-ramp with users, it must immediately be so good it justifies losing what they had before. The Touch Bar doesn't meet that standard, and worse suffers from the fundamental issue of attention requirement. Granted it's not entirely useless, but I don't see how it could ever meet the same ROI particularly for a pro system given that it doesn't really seem to support productivity scaling. Going back to the start the big tragedy is it's not as if there isn't plenty of vertical space in even a 13" (or 11" for that matter) system on the opposite-screen surface. There was no need to get make it zero-sum, they could have just offered the Touch Bar as a new feature above the function keys. If they had all the angst would have been avoided, it would have been something cool and occasionally useful, and since nobody would lose anything that's all it'd need to be to justify itself. Sure there'd be some grumbling about BOM but that's pretty minor in the scheme of things for these systems. Incidentally I think this same effect has happened elsewhere for Apple. Consider the reception of the Mac Cube vs the Cylinder Mac, which was effectively the Cube 2. Both tried to do an Apple take on an SFF system, which in the PC world are quite popular, and tried to cram a lot in. Neither ultimately was very successful. But the Cube had some fond users and was generally regarded as "well that's pretty neat even if I don't want one", whereas the Cylinder was awful. I think that's because with the Cube Apple kept the Power Mac. Nobody was forced to use it, so only those who wanted it's unique tradeoffs got it and everyone could be happy. If Apple had killed the Power Mac and said "oh yeah the Cube is totally what all you want" the reaction would have been at least as much (or more) then what happened when they killed the Mac Pro. I appreciate what a horror the 90s were for product line proliferation, and I still hate going to a lot of OEM sites and trying to navigate their multi dimensional product matrixes and a hundred minor variations of the same basic thing. But Apple has cut so much that they've reached meat and bone in some cases and have created problems for themselves unnecessarily and without getting any payoff in return.

baxtr 8y ago

I’m I the only one who is neutral or even slightly positive about the Touch Bar? I definitely can’t understand why so many people hate it. Take the two points of the article: 1) he uses an external keyboard 80-90% of the time, so he doesn’t care. Well, it’s called Laptop for a reason. 2) errors: I’ve been using the bar for quite a while and wouldn’t say the error rate is any higher than for any other key on my keyboard. I delete a lot of text because I hit the wrong key on the physical keyboard I wonder if I’m the only one who doesn’t understand where all the hate is coming from

zzzcpan 8y ago
It's physically impossible for it to be better and faster to use than the keyboard. People who spend a lot of time on computer interaction care about wasting too much of it and of course hate it. Those people who learn keyboard shortcuts for all the software they use.

sigi45 8y ago

I love it for brightness and volume control. Besides that, it would be really cool if i could program it with microapps. Temperature would be cool and/or clock and upcoming events. Otherwise i'm not using its app specific features. Just realised that there is a fav button when i have chrome open.

sicnus 8y ago

Yes it's a gimmick, I knew the second I saw it. I hate it. It is a nightmare when using VIM. Ugh... When my work said they were going to buy me a MacBook Pro I was stoked. When I found it came with that crap... cringe

aequitas 8y ago

I fully agree. Even though I don't own a touchbar MBP. I even choose to go with the older model because the touchbar could not be incorporated into my current workflow, even if it was great, as there is no separate keyboard with integrated touch bar (and frankly it would be to expensive if it was).

sxp62000 8y ago

I have a feeling that Apple has been testing the feasibility of adding multitouch to OSX with the Touch Bar gimmick. Physical controls are so much better! I mean just look at the things musicians and DJs are doing everyday with a keyboard, sliders, dials and a little practice.