8 ms·

99%+ of my usage of the touchbar is pressing escape, adjusting screen brightness, speaker volume, or accessing music controls. All of these worked flawlessly w

99%+ of my usage of the touchbar is pressing escape, adjusting screen brightness, speaker volume, or accessing music controls. All of these worked flawlessly when I had physical keys, but now it's hard to know what I'm pressing without looking, and sometimes the controls become unresponsive to touches or drags. I'm a programmer/business owner, so perhaps it's useful for other sorts of creative professionals, but it feels like a total gimmick to me. I applaud Apple's innovative spirit, but the touchbar wasn't useful at launch, it isn't useful now, and they don't seem to have put any effort into making it better. I hope they kill it with the next Macbook pro release and just go the touchscreen route like everyone else.

ravenstine 7y ago
Why on earth do I need to tap twice to adjust the screen brightness? I couldn't find a way to just have two increase/decrease buttons. Why can't I adjust how long the touchbar stays active for? Why does it disappear at all? I can't imagine the touchbar would exist in its current form if Steve were alive.
- a-wu 7y ago
  If you hold the brightness button on the Touch Bar you can slide your finger left and right to adjust the brightness so it’s one (long) press. Same with volume.
  - Signez 7y ago
    And if you don't want to wait for a long press, you can do one or more quick swipe to the left or the right, and it do the same as a press on the previous buttons.
- wlesieutre 7y ago
  FYI you can press and drag on the brightness/volume buttons to make adjustments immediately, no need for a second touch
  - ravenstine 7y ago
    I'm not complaining about the drag. I'm complaining that I have to tap once to open the slider and then drag it. Whereas it was easier just to have two buttons, one for increment, and one for decrement, that I could just tap or hold down.
    - wlesieutre 7y ago
      Right - you don't have to let go and then grab the slider after it opens. You can just press and hold then slide left or right to move the slider immediately. I guess there's a still tradeoff: this way you need to move your finger around, but you can immediately skip to exactly the level you want. With holding a button down you have to time it to get to the right spot instead. Personally I like the slider better but that's just my opinion.
      - ravenstine 7y ago
        I understand why some people like the slider, but as someone who can type without looking, I'm used to being able to navigate with my fingers up to the brightness and volume controls without having to pay close attention. Now I have to look down in order to hit the right area of the touchbar.
        wlesieutre 7y ago
        I don't mind since it's barely below the bottom of the screen, but if you're in the middle of something it does mean taking your eyes off it. If that bugs you enough to bother with a workaround, you could try something like this using HammerSpoon: https://gist.github.com/spinscale/fd82f00da29447990f27f36b3f4b927d https://gist.github.com/spinscale/fd82f00da29447990f27f36b3f...
    - snowwrestler 7y ago
      Just put your finger on the icon and slide it one way or the other. You don't have to wait or tap more than once. Edit for clarity: when you do this, your finger is not actually "on" the slider handle itself. The slider shows up in its usual place, which is offset from where your finger is. But the sliding still adjusts it. It's a shame that this is not intuitive or discoverable. Its much more efficient but I had to have someone tell me about it.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- whenlambo 7y ago
  You can touch and slide the finger to adjust brightness and volume.
  - ravenstine 7y ago
    I don't want to touch and then slide. I want to touch or hold once and either increment or decrement those properties. That was possible with the old keys. Now I have to tap and then perform an action, even though my touchbar has plenty of real-estate.
- sbr464 7y ago
  My issue more is, if not looking and you press the wrong one (brightness/volume), you have to either wait for it to go away and try again or move your hand to clear it. I feel that if you do the press and slide, the interface shouldn’t change to a slider (that needs to fade away).
- Kronopath 7y ago
  Turns out if you do a small rightwards/leftwards swipe on the brightness or volume buttons, then you can increase or decrease them by one notch without opening the slider. It’s not an intuitive or discoverable command.
  - ravenstine 7y ago
    Yeah, but that's still two gestures instead of one.
    - jvzr 7y ago
      You don't need to tap then swipe, just swipe.
  - prashnts 7y ago
    Genuinely curious about the intuitive part: I found it intuitive because it’s a similar gesture in iOS (control centre). In addition, many other gestures on force touch trackpad such as peek-and-pop, are similar to iOS. I can carry my habit from iPhone to Mac without giving it much thought. In fact, to me it feels natural and expected behaviour after being used to the gestures in general. I don’t have a touchbar (still using 2015 rPro), and I agree about discoverability part — no way I’d have tried to swipe on a button. So my question: once you discovered that you could do a swipe gesture, did you find yourself using it often?
- kennysmoothx 7y ago
  Hey ravenstine, this was 1000% the same frustrations I had with brightness and volume. The best fix for this for me (the sliding was still a pain) has been to customize the touchbar like this: In keyboard settings: 1. Change "Touch Bar Shows" to "Expanded Control Strip" 2. Add the 3 button volume and the 2 button brightness controls. This setup behaves the most like the functional keys for me and has been the best at alleviating frustrations. I still hope Apple nukes the touch bar though, it's the worst aspect of the Macbook aside from the missing I/O ports.
- eridius 7y ago
  You don't need to tap twice. Put your finger down on the button and just drag; yeah your finger isn't actually touching the visible slider that opened up, but it work anyway, and the slider will collapse itself again automatically a second after you let go.
- cloverich 7y ago
  There's a preference "Touch Bar Shows" -- change it to "Expanded Control Strip". That makes them work like the actual keys used to. I barely notice its a touchbar and not the old keys now (absurd of course, I'd prefer to have an actual choice).
kkylin 7y ago
I blame this mostly on Apple's human interface guidelines: https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guidelines/macos/touch-bar/touch-bar-overview/ https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline... Scroll down to "Design Considerations": "Use the Touch Bar as an extension of the keyboard and trackpad, not as a display." But what I really want is for the touch bar to be a display and input device for things normally elsewhere: time, date, maybe CPU usage, etc. This to me is not a hardware problem, but one with policy. Edit: what I really want is for Apple to let people experiment with new hardeware, rather than impose their vision on how it should be used. Unlike many others I don't actually hate the touch bar and see some potentials, but not if Apple restricts its use.
- hellofunk 7y ago
  Doesn't Apple itself use it as a terrible little mini-display in some multimedia apps, like Logic, to show a ridiculous multi-track "view" on the damn touchbar itself? Like several individual tracks all squished together? And they talk about "human interface" ?
  - saagarjha 7y ago
    It's not just a view, it's a control. There's a difference between sticking random, non-interactive information in the Touch Bar and having it be a contextually dynamic control.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- windexh8er 7y ago
  Personally, I feel as though Apple got it wrong in the HIG. It is a display and it can't be treated as an extension of the keyboard (in a useful manner) given its lack of tactile differentiation. If Apple doesn't want people to look at it like a display, and the content of it is dynamic such that I don't know what the bar represents, then you can't fulfill the HIG. If Apple had an in-OS feedback mechanism that asked users, once a month, if they found Touch Bar useful or an impediment and then also collected number of keystrokes (opt-in) in that month my guess is the distribution of users who interact with their computer primarily through keyboard input will respond that the Touch Bar is an impediment. Those largely clicking for a majority or interaction would likely find it useful. Either way Apple got it wrong by assuming users would always find it better than giving buyers the option without.
manojlds 7y ago
Touchbar has been used effectively by Zoom. Only app that I use and love using touchbar with right now.
- danielhlockard 7y ago
  Probably don't want to advertise using Zoom right now LOL
  - erikpukinskis 7y ago
    I didn't know what this refers to. Apparently Zoom has a vulnerability where someone can send you a web link and if you click on it, it will start the camera immediately, allowing them to see you. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20387298 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20387298
    - ghostpepper 7y ago
      It's worse than that, IMHO. The zoom client installs a web server that remains after zoom is uninstalled with the ability to reinstall zoom.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
Shivetya 7y ago
and here I am always on the look out for a good external keyboard that has separate buttons for volume, brightness, and more. This is because on the desk top front Apple long ago decided that multi-key combinations was better than separate keys for some functions and too many vendors followed suit.
- mclehman 7y ago
  Agreed. I don't use them often but I made sure to program discrete volume/media/brightness controls into my keyboard.
babyslothzoo 7y ago
Agreed, the Touch Bar is a hassle at best. They should at least make it optional.
jdlyga 7y ago
Part of an innovative spirit is trying things, and letting them breathe even under criticism. But then killing them if they don't work out. You need to adjust to feedback.
- bredren 7y ago
  I think they may be clearing inventory. At least I hope so.
equalarrow 7y ago
I agree with all this. However, even though I still use Macs for everything, it's been clear to me for a while that Apple 'Pro' users are not tech people. There is a big difference in keyboard necessity between a developer and any 'Pro' user. Key travel, actually having real keys, are all a big deal to devs. I think Apple lost their function and form way a while ago. It's never coming back. The new Mac Pro is the latest example of this. I bought a 2018 MB Pro 13" last year and the touch bar is a waste of space in my mind. We see now that Apple is ditching the scissor keys, but regardless, their design decisions for a while have just been wanting to have something look cool instead of a balance of looking good and functioning great.
- scarface74 7y ago
  The Mac Pro is the perfect example of function over form. It’s big, not that beautiful and expandable like crazy. Did you mean the MacBook Pro?
  - m463 7y ago
    I thought the mac pro wasn't super expandable. No spinning drives possible, miniscule flash drive space, no pcie power plugs.
    - giobox 7y ago
      Although apple doesn’t publicise the fact all that much on the new Mac Pro coming later this year, it does actually have two SATA ports and some 8 pin power connectors. Apple don’t provide the necessary “cage” to mount the drives (at least as far as we know so far), but third parties have already announced some products that mount internally and use these ports to connect a bunch of disks. As for power, I believe the two MPX bays provide dual 8pin connectors for up to an extra 300 watts, so should support most power hungry pci-e card designs. Honestly though, if you can afford this machine it’s not like really any of this matters, this isn’t exactly a hobbyist computer people are going to buy and upgrade themselves all that much.
      - 7y ago
scarface74 7y ago
The touchscreen is even worse on laptops. Windows is a horrible touch screen OS, the interface itself is a mismatch of operating systems seemingly going back to Windows 95. MacOS wouldn’t fare any better as a touch screen OS.
- 0815test 7y ago
  Windows is a tolerable touch OS because at least it has a touch mode. Linux (GTK+3 at least) is a lot better of course, even though this does involve a bit of a disadvantage for pure keyboard+mouse users.
Theodores 7y ago
It could have worked so much better as a display above the function keys. An extra long-and-thin screen that showed stuff and happened to be touch enabled. App specific stuff, window-manager customisable stuff, all kinds of things. This would have given app developers an opportunity to do stuff with it that you can't do on a PC. Developers could have liked it instead of feeling mightily pissed off and betrayed by the company they had given so much money to over the years.
cookiecaper 7y ago
I really don't know why Apple doesn't do the typical Apple thing here: make it a $600 add-on item. If they can transform 3.5mm headphone jacks into a huge upsell opportunity, I don't know why they'd miss out on that opportunity for something like the Touch Bar. People can then have their standard keyboard with function keys AND an external controller if they make use of an application that would make it useful.
- Tepix 7y ago
  That's exactly what they did. When they introduced the Macbook with touch bar in 2016, they raised prices by $700.
takeda 7y ago
99% of my interactions with the touch bar was pressing it accidentally with my right pinky. Fortunately I got an external keyboard.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
StreamBright 7y ago
If you check the lates "innovations" you see almost all of those are like that (previous version was better). - magsafe vs new charger - ports on 2015 MBP vs now - keyboard on 2015 vs now - physical keys vs touchbar The only improvement that is really an improvement is CPU speed and memory, which I could not care less about. In the same timeframe (2015 to 2019) Apple went from the most innovative company to the 17th position. https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/gadgets-news/apple-is-not-the-worlds-most-innovative-company-anymore-report/articleshow/68097008.cms https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/gadgets-news/apple-is-no...
lukaszkups 7y ago
Yeah, in my opinion actually Asus has gone in better direction with placing touch screens inside the touch bar. That makes more sense imho and doesn't reduce keyboard capabilities/make it weird to use.

ravenstine 7y ago

Why on earth do I need to tap twice to adjust the screen brightness? I couldn't find a way to just have two increase/decrease buttons. Why can't I adjust how long the touchbar stays active for? Why does it disappear at all? I can't imagine the touchbar would exist in its current form if Steve were alive.

a-wu 7y ago
If you hold the brightness button on the Touch Bar you can slide your finger left and right to adjust the brightness so it’s one (long) press. Same with volume.
- Signez 7y ago
  And if you don't want to wait for a long press, you can do one or more quick swipe to the left or the right, and it do the same as a press on the previous buttons.
wlesieutre 7y ago
FYI you can press and drag on the brightness/volume buttons to make adjustments immediately, no need for a second touch
- ravenstine 7y ago
  I'm not complaining about the drag. I'm complaining that I have to tap once to open the slider and then drag it. Whereas it was easier just to have two buttons, one for increment, and one for decrement, that I could just tap or hold down.
  - wlesieutre 7y ago
    Right - you don't have to let go and then grab the slider after it opens. You can just press and hold then slide left or right to move the slider immediately. I guess there's a still tradeoff: this way you need to move your finger around, but you can immediately skip to exactly the level you want. With holding a button down you have to time it to get to the right spot instead. Personally I like the slider better but that's just my opinion.
    - ravenstine 7y ago
      I understand why some people like the slider, but as someone who can type without looking, I'm used to being able to navigate with my fingers up to the brightness and volume controls without having to pay close attention. Now I have to look down in order to hit the right area of the touchbar.
      - wlesieutre 7y ago
        I don't mind since it's barely below the bottom of the screen, but if you're in the middle of something it does mean taking your eyes off it. If that bugs you enough to bother with a workaround, you could try something like this using HammerSpoon: https://gist.github.com/spinscale/fd82f00da29447990f27f36b3f4b927d https://gist.github.com/spinscale/fd82f00da29447990f27f36b3f...
  - snowwrestler 7y ago
    Just put your finger on the icon and slide it one way or the other. You don't have to wait or tap more than once. Edit for clarity: when you do this, your finger is not actually "on" the slider handle itself. The slider shows up in its usual place, which is offset from where your finger is. But the sliding still adjusts it. It's a shame that this is not intuitive or discoverable. Its much more efficient but I had to have someone tell me about it.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
whenlambo 7y ago
You can touch and slide the finger to adjust brightness and volume.
- ravenstine 7y ago
  I don't want to touch and then slide. I want to touch or hold once and either increment or decrement those properties. That was possible with the old keys. Now I have to tap and then perform an action, even though my touchbar has plenty of real-estate.
sbr464 7y ago
My issue more is, if not looking and you press the wrong one (brightness/volume), you have to either wait for it to go away and try again or move your hand to clear it. I feel that if you do the press and slide, the interface shouldn’t change to a slider (that needs to fade away).
Kronopath 7y ago
Turns out if you do a small rightwards/leftwards swipe on the brightness or volume buttons, then you can increase or decrease them by one notch without opening the slider. It’s not an intuitive or discoverable command.
- ravenstine 7y ago
  Yeah, but that's still two gestures instead of one.
  - jvzr 7y ago
    You don't need to tap then swipe, just swipe.
- prashnts 7y ago
  Genuinely curious about the intuitive part: I found it intuitive because it’s a similar gesture in iOS (control centre). In addition, many other gestures on force touch trackpad such as peek-and-pop, are similar to iOS. I can carry my habit from iPhone to Mac without giving it much thought. In fact, to me it feels natural and expected behaviour after being used to the gestures in general. I don’t have a touchbar (still using 2015 rPro), and I agree about discoverability part — no way I’d have tried to swipe on a button. So my question: once you discovered that you could do a swipe gesture, did you find yourself using it often?
kennysmoothx 7y ago
Hey ravenstine, this was 1000% the same frustrations I had with brightness and volume. The best fix for this for me (the sliding was still a pain) has been to customize the touchbar like this: In keyboard settings: 1. Change "Touch Bar Shows" to "Expanded Control Strip" 2. Add the 3 button volume and the 2 button brightness controls. This setup behaves the most like the functional keys for me and has been the best at alleviating frustrations. I still hope Apple nukes the touch bar though, it's the worst aspect of the Macbook aside from the missing I/O ports.
eridius 7y ago
You don't need to tap twice. Put your finger down on the button and just drag; yeah your finger isn't actually touching the visible slider that opened up, but it work anyway, and the slider will collapse itself again automatically a second after you let go.
cloverich 7y ago
There's a preference "Touch Bar Shows" -- change it to "Expanded Control Strip". That makes them work like the actual keys used to. I barely notice its a touchbar and not the old keys now (absurd of course, I'd prefer to have an actual choice).

kkylin 7y ago

I blame this mostly on Apple's human interface guidelines: https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guidelines/macos/touch-bar/touch-bar-overview/ https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline... Scroll down to "Design Considerations": "Use the Touch Bar as an extension of the keyboard and trackpad, not as a display." But what I really want is for the touch bar to be a display and input device for things normally elsewhere: time, date, maybe CPU usage, etc. This to me is not a hardware problem, but one with policy. Edit: what I really want is for Apple to let people experiment with new hardeware, rather than impose their vision on how it should be used. Unlike many others I don't actually hate the touch bar and see some potentials, but not if Apple restricts its use.

hellofunk 7y ago
Doesn't Apple itself use it as a terrible little mini-display in some multimedia apps, like Logic, to show a ridiculous multi-track "view" on the damn touchbar itself? Like several individual tracks all squished together? And they talk about "human interface" ?
- saagarjha 7y ago
  It's not just a view, it's a control. There's a difference between sticking random, non-interactive information in the Touch Bar and having it be a contextually dynamic control.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
windexh8er 7y ago
Personally, I feel as though Apple got it wrong in the HIG. It is a display and it can't be treated as an extension of the keyboard (in a useful manner) given its lack of tactile differentiation. If Apple doesn't want people to look at it like a display, and the content of it is dynamic such that I don't know what the bar represents, then you can't fulfill the HIG. If Apple had an in-OS feedback mechanism that asked users, once a month, if they found Touch Bar useful or an impediment and then also collected number of keystrokes (opt-in) in that month my guess is the distribution of users who interact with their computer primarily through keyboard input will respond that the Touch Bar is an impediment. Those largely clicking for a majority or interaction would likely find it useful. Either way Apple got it wrong by assuming users would always find it better than giving buyers the option without.

manojlds 7y ago

Touchbar has been used effectively by Zoom. Only app that I use and love using touchbar with right now.

danielhlockard 7y ago
Probably don't want to advertise using Zoom right now LOL
- erikpukinskis 7y ago
  I didn't know what this refers to. Apparently Zoom has a vulnerability where someone can send you a web link and if you click on it, it will start the camera immediately, allowing them to see you. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20387298 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20387298
  - ghostpepper 7y ago
    It's worse than that, IMHO. The zoom client installs a web server that remains after zoom is uninstalled with the ability to reinstall zoom.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

Shivetya 7y ago

and here I am always on the look out for a good external keyboard that has separate buttons for volume, brightness, and more. This is because on the desk top front Apple long ago decided that multi-key combinations was better than separate keys for some functions and too many vendors followed suit.

mclehman 7y ago
Agreed. I don't use them often but I made sure to program discrete volume/media/brightness controls into my keyboard.

babyslothzoo 7y ago

Agreed, the Touch Bar is a hassle at best. They should at least make it optional.

jdlyga 7y ago

Part of an innovative spirit is trying things, and letting them breathe even under criticism. But then killing them if they don't work out. You need to adjust to feedback.

bredren 7y ago
I think they may be clearing inventory. At least I hope so.

equalarrow 7y ago

I agree with all this. However, even though I still use Macs for everything, it's been clear to me for a while that Apple 'Pro' users are not tech people. There is a big difference in keyboard necessity between a developer and any 'Pro' user. Key travel, actually having real keys, are all a big deal to devs. I think Apple lost their function and form way a while ago. It's never coming back. The new Mac Pro is the latest example of this. I bought a 2018 MB Pro 13" last year and the touch bar is a waste of space in my mind. We see now that Apple is ditching the scissor keys, but regardless, their design decisions for a while have just been wanting to have something look cool instead of a balance of looking good and functioning great.

scarface74 7y ago
The Mac Pro is the perfect example of function over form. It’s big, not that beautiful and expandable like crazy. Did you mean the MacBook Pro?
- m463 7y ago
  I thought the mac pro wasn't super expandable. No spinning drives possible, miniscule flash drive space, no pcie power plugs.
  - giobox 7y ago
    Although apple doesn’t publicise the fact all that much on the new Mac Pro coming later this year, it does actually have two SATA ports and some 8 pin power connectors. Apple don’t provide the necessary “cage” to mount the drives (at least as far as we know so far), but third parties have already announced some products that mount internally and use these ports to connect a bunch of disks. As for power, I believe the two MPX bays provide dual 8pin connectors for up to an extra 300 watts, so should support most power hungry pci-e card designs. Honestly though, if you can afford this machine it’s not like really any of this matters, this isn’t exactly a hobbyist computer people are going to buy and upgrade themselves all that much.
    - 7y ago

scarface74 7y ago

The touchscreen is even worse on laptops. Windows is a horrible touch screen OS, the interface itself is a mismatch of operating systems seemingly going back to Windows 95. MacOS wouldn’t fare any better as a touch screen OS.

0815test 7y ago
Windows is a tolerable touch OS because at least it has a touch mode. Linux (GTK+3 at least) is a lot better of course, even though this does involve a bit of a disadvantage for pure keyboard+mouse users.

Theodores 7y ago

It could have worked so much better as a display above the function keys. An extra long-and-thin screen that showed stuff and happened to be touch enabled. App specific stuff, window-manager customisable stuff, all kinds of things. This would have given app developers an opportunity to do stuff with it that you can't do on a PC. Developers could have liked it instead of feeling mightily pissed off and betrayed by the company they had given so much money to over the years.

cookiecaper 7y ago

I really don't know why Apple doesn't do the typical Apple thing here: make it a $600 add-on item. If they can transform 3.5mm headphone jacks into a huge upsell opportunity, I don't know why they'd miss out on that opportunity for something like the Touch Bar. People can then have their standard keyboard with function keys AND an external controller if they make use of an application that would make it useful.

Tepix 7y ago
That's exactly what they did. When they introduced the Macbook with touch bar in 2016, they raised prices by $700.

takeda 7y ago

99% of my interactions with the touch bar was pressing it accidentally with my right pinky. Fortunately I got an external keyboard.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

StreamBright 7y ago

If you check the lates "innovations" you see almost all of those are like that (previous version was better). - magsafe vs new charger - ports on 2015 MBP vs now - keyboard on 2015 vs now - physical keys vs touchbar The only improvement that is really an improvement is CPU speed and memory, which I could not care less about. In the same timeframe (2015 to 2019) Apple went from the most innovative company to the 17th position. https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/gadgets-news/apple-is-not-the-worlds-most-innovative-company-anymore-report/articleshow/68097008.cms https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/gadgets-news/apple-is-no...

lukaszkups 7y ago

Yeah, in my opinion actually Asus has gone in better direction with placing touch screens inside the touch bar. That makes more sense imho and doesn't reduce keyboard capabilities/make it weird to use.