8 ms·

Super interesting how they kept the touchbar on the Macbook Pro keyboard but not on the Air. As a software developer, I'm going to be more likely to buy an Air

Super interesting how they kept the touchbar on the Macbook Pro keyboard but not on the Air. As a software developer, I'm going to be more likely to buy an Air just due to the keyboard.

api 6y ago
Has anyone ever seen anyone use the Touch Bar? Like really use it?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- dotancohen 6y ago
  I think that the Photoshop crowd likes it.
  - egypturnash 6y ago
    Depends on how you use it, if you use a lot of actions (basically macros) via keyboard shortcuts then you probably hate the touchbar, because they can only be bound to f-keys.
- stblack 6y ago
  My fondest wish is a high-end MBP 16" with no touch bar. The touch bar's sole role is to generate errors and missteps resulting from merely grazing over it. Even setting the touch bar to vanilla F-keys, grazing triggers F-key actions which is so frustrating.
  - andy_ppp 6y ago
    Yes - I always assumed the eventual goal was a touch bar with the same haptic feedback as the trackpad (and no the trackpad doesn't move).
    - hackstack 6y ago
      FWIW there are third-party software options for the Touch Bar such as MTMR (my touch bar, my rules), which at least allows you to activate the haptic feedback in the trackpad when touch bar buttons are pressed. I found that it helped dramatically with accidental touch bar presses. MTMR also solves the other main problem with the Touch Bar which is that it hides brightness and volume controls behind a tap (so you can't, for example, instantly mash "volume down" when you find it is unexpectedly loud.) With MTMR (and others I believe) you can make multi-touch gestures on the bar to adjust volume and brightness swiftly. All that said, I'm not convinced that the touch bar adds enough value to justify its cost. If your day-to-day computer use includes tasks it is good it, maybe. As a developer, probably not. Just my $0.02 as a touchbar-skeptic-cum-macbook-owner.
  - rusk 6y ago
    Give me the 2015 model any day
- jonfw 6y ago
  I use it for exactly what I've always used function keys for- brightness and volume. I also occasionally use the emoji picker or app specific stuff. For example- my markdown editor has Touchbar selections for code blocks and all that sort of stuff. I don't write enough markdown to remember everything- so the touchbar makes it nicely discoverable without having to click through menus.
- qz2 6y ago
  Personally I tried using it for F keys which is quite frankly the only requirement I’d have and it was awful. At a fully extended hand, which you need to do if you’ve hit a meta key, it’s impossible to hit the right F keys every time. I don’t know how anyone writes code on those machines. It went back to the Apple store within a week and I got an air. Which went to the Apple store in a week because the keybbboooaaarrdd wwaaass aawwwful. Then I bought a thinkpad. Which is less of a shiny toy.
  - wtetzner 6y ago
    Which Thinkpad did you get, and how do you like it? Are you running Windows, or Linux? I'm trying to figure out what my next laptop should be, but I have no prior experience with Thinkpads.
    - qz2 6y ago
      T495s running Ubuntu 20.04. Absolutely perfect machine as far as I am concerned. Everything works flawlessly that I've tried and the quality is excellent. Really like it.
- core-questions 6y ago
  VirtualDJ supports using it for a crossfader, but then, it would be a way better move to buy an Air, and a real audio interface and mixing board, or at least an external controller.
- gumby 6y ago
  There are quite a few people who look at the keyboard as they type and for them it's great. Seems like it would be more useful in a consumer laptop.
- thesquib 6y ago
  I dislike it immensely, mainly because it changes all the time and this makes ot hard to use worhout looking at it every single time. The best way is to use an external keyboard.
- wintermutestwin 6y ago
  Like most oldsters, I have presbyopia, which is exacerbated in low light. When I need to turn up the brightness of my monitor, I can actually see the "button" on a touchbar. On all my non-touchbar laptops, I randomly press F keys and hope for the best or pull out my phone for a flashlight. Yes, I miss the physical esc, but F-keys are usually SW configurable and I can configure splat-1-10. That said, I am not a frequent programmer...
- Eric_WVGG 6y ago
  I love the Touch Bar. All those cmd-opt-shift bizarro keyboard shortcuts, I have mapped to custom buttons across lots of apps. A couple popup apps on globally-available buttons. Even a swiping gesture while on iTerm to fly through command history. It's great if you take the time to actually customize it.
  - Eric_WVGG 6y ago
    incidentally, I place the “blame” for the poor uptake of the Touch Bar at Apple’s feet. They relied on uninterested developers to make it useful, and didn't but the necessary tools in the hands of users to make it useful themselves. In five years, they’ve done nothing to expand its capabilities since the debut. Everything cool I can do with the Touch Bar is thanks to a third-party tool, BetterTouchTool. Also enables some cool stuff like three-finger-trackpad-swipes to cycle through window tabs! Worth the price of admission for that feature alone, give it a look. https://www.folivora.ai https://www.folivora.ai
    - MperorM 6y ago
      I really have no clue what apple is thinking with regards to the touchbar. Why should any developer spend time developing sorely lacking features for the touch bar, when they just released the most popular mac without one? The only way I can make sense of the decision to release the air without a touch bar, is that it must be really expensive to manufacture and they were struggling to hit the $1000 price point. As a result the touchbar lives in this weird limbo state. Apple themselves clearly are uncertain what they want from it, and it shows. Since its release the touch bar has been left mostly abandoned and it’s been up to third party developers to make it useful. It can be useful, at least after heavy customization – something a screen lends itself well to. Why isn’t apple doing more to help users customize it? macOS comes with an application called Automator. Automator is confusing for power and regular users alike and as a result, nobody uses it. Why not rethink Automator completely with the touchbar in mind? Bring the power of programming to regular users with an easily accessible ‘create your own button’ feature that lets users add custom commands accessible from their touchbar?
- gknoy 6y ago
  I only use it for brightness and volume controls (and TIL about the Emoji picker thanks to a sibling comment). I LOVE the analog-feeling controls on brightness and volume. Even though I know it's the same under the hood as an incrementation button, the UX of it makes me feel substantially happier. I absolutely miss the volume and brightness sliders when I go to use my Chromebook or my wife's laptop. I normally keep the touchbar configured to only show the ~4 most used buttons (night mode, brightness, volume, and mute), and find that I use the other buttons rarely enough that I forgot what else was on there -- mainly because I use touchpad gestures instead. I rarely (never?) used F-keys in my IDE (Jetbrains) or other apps, so I don't miss them. I have a physical Esc key (which is nice), though I used it rarely enough on my previous generation touchbar mac that it wasn't very infuriating. Having the physical escape + power keys removed any complaints I previously had about it.
  - bradstewart 6y ago
    Interesting. Volume and brightness adjustment is my least favorite part of the touchbar. With physical keys I can adjust the volume/brightness without looking down. If it were a physical slider, I'd totally agree with you. (Not that there's any right or wrong or answer here.)
- Razengan 6y ago
  Has anyone ever seen anyone use the F# keys in a Mac app?
- Razengan 6y ago
  Samplr is an example of how cool it can be: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fMlmzTBF_LE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fMlmzTBF_LE
- TMWNN 6y ago
  If Touch Bar were in addition to the function keys + Escape key, everyone would praise it as yet another brilliant Apple innovation, and rivals would be copying it the way every notebook nowadays looks like the late-2008 unibody Macbook Pro (and really, all the way back to the 2001 titanium PowerBook). But it's not, so they don't and they aren't.
- crazygringo 6y ago
  It was designed for, and is widely used by, the graphics and audio professionals crowd. The ability to use touch sliders, filmstrips, etc. is a huge boon. It just gets a ton of hate here on HN because obviously there's very little overlap between the populations. A lot of people forget that "Pro" has never referred to software professionals, it's always referred to multimedia professionals.
  - timc3 6y ago
    I do graphics, video and development and my hobby is audio. I have used the Touch Bar about once for all those things. The novelty wears off.
skrtskrt 6y ago
Same, the only issue with the current air for me is that the graphics struggle a bit when driving a large 4K monitor. If the new graphics capabilities are that much better I would be very tempted to upgrade
kbar13 6y ago
as a software dev who went for air before the current gen of pro macbooks with hardware esc, dont do it the air is really sluggish for anything but the lightest of tasks. there was even extremely noticeable latency using gmail.com
- minimaxir 6y ago
  The OP is likely referring to the newly-announced Air with the same M1 chip.
- marc11111 6y ago
  Agree for the current Macs. The new Air seems to have the same specs as the new 13" Pro though or is there a difference?
  - AnonHP 6y ago
    Since the new MacBook Air doesn’t have a fan while the MacBook Pro does, I’m sure there are some differences that Apple isn’t admitting right now. The battery life claimed by Apple is also higher on the Air compared to the Pro. Maybe the Air is throttled or runs at lower clock speeds.
    - wilsonnb3 6y ago
      The base model air has 7 GPU cores instead of the 8 that the higher end Air, Pro, and Mini have.
  - ogjunkyard 6y ago
    If you configured them the same (chose the more expensive Air), the Air and the 13" Pro have the exact same specs from what I can tell other than a slightly brighter screen (500 nits vs. 400 nits) and slightly bigger battery (58.2 whr vs. 49.9 whr) on the 13" Pro.
- breck 6y ago
  I've been using Airs as my primary machine since 2010. I don't use bulky software (XCode, Adobe suite, Office, etc), so if you use any of that I wouldn't recommend it, but for software dev it's been plenty fast and a real joy to use. The only time I'm speed constrained is deep learning, but generally I just run tiny test sets locally and then run full jobs on a cluster or the cloud. In the mid 2010's I had a desktop with like 64GB of Ram and four million processors, and I found programming on the Air I was still more productive. Productivity wise I think it's a very high dimensional space to consider. (P.S. Can't wait to get this new Air!!!)
tshaddox 6y ago
The MacBook Air never had the Touch Bar, right?
- saagarjha 6y ago
  No, it never did.
vmarsy 6y ago
They kept the touch bar but it seems that they added (back) a physical Esc key, isn't that the most criticized missing key? Which other key do you miss now that Esc is back?
- rusk 6y ago
  That’s great!
- usaphp 6y ago
  I actually miss "Esc" key being in the touchbar, it felt quicker to tap it on previous gen macbook pro instead of pressing it on my new macbook pro.
- michaelcampbell 6y ago
  Having used an MBP keyboard, I'd say "all of them".
- plorkyeran 6y ago
  All of them? I use the function keys regularly and it's much harder to hit the correct one without looking at the keyboard with the touch bar.
  - jedberg 6y ago
    What do you use function keys for? I was thinking about this, and I don't think I've used a function key in years.
    - ataylor32 6y ago
      I'm not the person you replied to, but I frequently use the play/pause key and also the volume keys. I occasionally use the function keys in my text editor too.
      - jedberg 6y ago
        Ok yeah I guess I use volume sometimes.
Dirlewanger 6y ago
[deleted]
- entropea 6y ago
  I am also not a fan of the keyboard or touch bar, but especially the touch bar. It's a cool idea and I can see useful functions, but not pushed up against a place where you're typing. I am constantly bringing up Siri or changing volume when hitting numbers, -= or delete from a finger swiping across the touch bar accidentally. There used to be a tactile force needed to activate F key functions, but now there's just a capacitive touch bar.
- buu700 6y ago
  What's wrong with the new keyboard (touch bar aside)? I haven't tried one yet, but I thought it was supposed to be more or less the same as the 2013 - 2015 MBP's.
- Aperocky 6y ago
  Didn't they revert the keyboard to the previous version? (Magic vs butterfly)
tarasmatsyk 6y ago
Almost exactly what I thought, however specs are too low for me to ditch the bar no matter how useless it is comparing to physical keys
yellowapple 6y ago
I can't fathom why Apple couldn't just include both. I'm using a company-provided touchbar'd Macbook Pro for work, and it's handy (I've got it setup with screenshot and screen lock buttons so I don't have to memorize the absolutely bonkers keyboard shortcuts for them); it just seems boneheaded to treat it as a replacement of the function keys instead of an addition.

Super interesting how they kept the touchbar on the Macbook Pro keyboard but not on the Air. As a software developer, I'm going to be more likely to buy an Air just due to the keyboard.

api 6y ago

Has anyone ever seen anyone use the Touch Bar? Like really use it?

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
dotancohen 6y ago
I think that the Photoshop crowd likes it.
- egypturnash 6y ago
  Depends on how you use it, if you use a lot of actions (basically macros) via keyboard shortcuts then you probably hate the touchbar, because they can only be bound to f-keys.
stblack 6y ago
My fondest wish is a high-end MBP 16" with no touch bar. The touch bar's sole role is to generate errors and missteps resulting from merely grazing over it. Even setting the touch bar to vanilla F-keys, grazing triggers F-key actions which is so frustrating.
- andy_ppp 6y ago
  Yes - I always assumed the eventual goal was a touch bar with the same haptic feedback as the trackpad (and no the trackpad doesn't move).
  - hackstack 6y ago
    FWIW there are third-party software options for the Touch Bar such as MTMR (my touch bar, my rules), which at least allows you to activate the haptic feedback in the trackpad when touch bar buttons are pressed. I found that it helped dramatically with accidental touch bar presses. MTMR also solves the other main problem with the Touch Bar which is that it hides brightness and volume controls behind a tap (so you can't, for example, instantly mash "volume down" when you find it is unexpectedly loud.) With MTMR (and others I believe) you can make multi-touch gestures on the bar to adjust volume and brightness swiftly. All that said, I'm not convinced that the touch bar adds enough value to justify its cost. If your day-to-day computer use includes tasks it is good it, maybe. As a developer, probably not. Just my $0.02 as a touchbar-skeptic-cum-macbook-owner.
- rusk 6y ago
  Give me the 2015 model any day
jonfw 6y ago
I use it for exactly what I've always used function keys for- brightness and volume. I also occasionally use the emoji picker or app specific stuff. For example- my markdown editor has Touchbar selections for code blocks and all that sort of stuff. I don't write enough markdown to remember everything- so the touchbar makes it nicely discoverable without having to click through menus.
qz2 6y ago
Personally I tried using it for F keys which is quite frankly the only requirement I’d have and it was awful. At a fully extended hand, which you need to do if you’ve hit a meta key, it’s impossible to hit the right F keys every time. I don’t know how anyone writes code on those machines. It went back to the Apple store within a week and I got an air. Which went to the Apple store in a week because the keybbboooaaarrdd wwaaass aawwwful. Then I bought a thinkpad. Which is less of a shiny toy.
- wtetzner 6y ago
  Which Thinkpad did you get, and how do you like it? Are you running Windows, or Linux? I'm trying to figure out what my next laptop should be, but I have no prior experience with Thinkpads.
  - qz2 6y ago
    T495s running Ubuntu 20.04. Absolutely perfect machine as far as I am concerned. Everything works flawlessly that I've tried and the quality is excellent. Really like it.
core-questions 6y ago
VirtualDJ supports using it for a crossfader, but then, it would be a way better move to buy an Air, and a real audio interface and mixing board, or at least an external controller.
gumby 6y ago
There are quite a few people who look at the keyboard as they type and for them it's great. Seems like it would be more useful in a consumer laptop.
thesquib 6y ago
I dislike it immensely, mainly because it changes all the time and this makes ot hard to use worhout looking at it every single time. The best way is to use an external keyboard.
wintermutestwin 6y ago
Like most oldsters, I have presbyopia, which is exacerbated in low light. When I need to turn up the brightness of my monitor, I can actually see the "button" on a touchbar. On all my non-touchbar laptops, I randomly press F keys and hope for the best or pull out my phone for a flashlight. Yes, I miss the physical esc, but F-keys are usually SW configurable and I can configure splat-1-10. That said, I am not a frequent programmer...
Eric_WVGG 6y ago
I love the Touch Bar. All those cmd-opt-shift bizarro keyboard shortcuts, I have mapped to custom buttons across lots of apps. A couple popup apps on globally-available buttons. Even a swiping gesture while on iTerm to fly through command history. It's great if you take the time to actually customize it.
- Eric_WVGG 6y ago
  incidentally, I place the “blame” for the poor uptake of the Touch Bar at Apple’s feet. They relied on uninterested developers to make it useful, and didn't but the necessary tools in the hands of users to make it useful themselves. In five years, they’ve done nothing to expand its capabilities since the debut. Everything cool I can do with the Touch Bar is thanks to a third-party tool, BetterTouchTool. Also enables some cool stuff like three-finger-trackpad-swipes to cycle through window tabs! Worth the price of admission for that feature alone, give it a look. https://www.folivora.ai https://www.folivora.ai
  - MperorM 6y ago
    I really have no clue what apple is thinking with regards to the touchbar. Why should any developer spend time developing sorely lacking features for the touch bar, when they just released the most popular mac without one? The only way I can make sense of the decision to release the air without a touch bar, is that it must be really expensive to manufacture and they were struggling to hit the $1000 price point. As a result the touchbar lives in this weird limbo state. Apple themselves clearly are uncertain what they want from it, and it shows. Since its release the touch bar has been left mostly abandoned and it’s been up to third party developers to make it useful. It can be useful, at least after heavy customization – something a screen lends itself well to. Why isn’t apple doing more to help users customize it? macOS comes with an application called Automator. Automator is confusing for power and regular users alike and as a result, nobody uses it. Why not rethink Automator completely with the touchbar in mind? Bring the power of programming to regular users with an easily accessible ‘create your own button’ feature that lets users add custom commands accessible from their touchbar?
gknoy 6y ago
I only use it for brightness and volume controls (and TIL about the Emoji picker thanks to a sibling comment). I LOVE the analog-feeling controls on brightness and volume. Even though I know it's the same under the hood as an incrementation button, the UX of it makes me feel substantially happier. I absolutely miss the volume and brightness sliders when I go to use my Chromebook or my wife's laptop. I normally keep the touchbar configured to only show the ~4 most used buttons (night mode, brightness, volume, and mute), and find that I use the other buttons rarely enough that I forgot what else was on there -- mainly because I use touchpad gestures instead. I rarely (never?) used F-keys in my IDE (Jetbrains) or other apps, so I don't miss them. I have a physical Esc key (which is nice), though I used it rarely enough on my previous generation touchbar mac that it wasn't very infuriating. Having the physical escape + power keys removed any complaints I previously had about it.
- bradstewart 6y ago
  Interesting. Volume and brightness adjustment is my least favorite part of the touchbar. With physical keys I can adjust the volume/brightness without looking down. If it were a physical slider, I'd totally agree with you. (Not that there's any right or wrong or answer here.)
Razengan 6y ago
Has anyone ever seen anyone use the F# keys in a Mac app?
Razengan 6y ago
Samplr is an example of how cool it can be: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fMlmzTBF_LE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fMlmzTBF_LE
TMWNN 6y ago
If Touch Bar were in addition to the function keys + Escape key, everyone would praise it as yet another brilliant Apple innovation, and rivals would be copying it the way every notebook nowadays looks like the late-2008 unibody Macbook Pro (and really, all the way back to the 2001 titanium PowerBook). But it's not, so they don't and they aren't.
crazygringo 6y ago
It was designed for, and is widely used by, the graphics and audio professionals crowd. The ability to use touch sliders, filmstrips, etc. is a huge boon. It just gets a ton of hate here on HN because obviously there's very little overlap between the populations. A lot of people forget that "Pro" has never referred to software professionals, it's always referred to multimedia professionals.
- timc3 6y ago
  I do graphics, video and development and my hobby is audio. I have used the Touch Bar about once for all those things. The novelty wears off.

skrtskrt 6y ago

Same, the only issue with the current air for me is that the graphics struggle a bit when driving a large 4K monitor. If the new graphics capabilities are that much better I would be very tempted to upgrade

kbar13 6y ago

as a software dev who went for air before the current gen of pro macbooks with hardware esc, dont do it the air is really sluggish for anything but the lightest of tasks. there was even extremely noticeable latency using gmail.com

minimaxir 6y ago
The OP is likely referring to the newly-announced Air with the same M1 chip.
marc11111 6y ago
Agree for the current Macs. The new Air seems to have the same specs as the new 13" Pro though or is there a difference?
- AnonHP 6y ago
  Since the new MacBook Air doesn’t have a fan while the MacBook Pro does, I’m sure there are some differences that Apple isn’t admitting right now. The battery life claimed by Apple is also higher on the Air compared to the Pro. Maybe the Air is throttled or runs at lower clock speeds.
  - wilsonnb3 6y ago
    The base model air has 7 GPU cores instead of the 8 that the higher end Air, Pro, and Mini have.
- ogjunkyard 6y ago
  If you configured them the same (chose the more expensive Air), the Air and the 13" Pro have the exact same specs from what I can tell other than a slightly brighter screen (500 nits vs. 400 nits) and slightly bigger battery (58.2 whr vs. 49.9 whr) on the 13" Pro.
breck 6y ago
I've been using Airs as my primary machine since 2010. I don't use bulky software (XCode, Adobe suite, Office, etc), so if you use any of that I wouldn't recommend it, but for software dev it's been plenty fast and a real joy to use. The only time I'm speed constrained is deep learning, but generally I just run tiny test sets locally and then run full jobs on a cluster or the cloud. In the mid 2010's I had a desktop with like 64GB of Ram and four million processors, and I found programming on the Air I was still more productive. Productivity wise I think it's a very high dimensional space to consider. (P.S. Can't wait to get this new Air!!!)

tshaddox 6y ago

The MacBook Air never had the Touch Bar, right?

saagarjha 6y ago
No, it never did.

vmarsy 6y ago

They kept the touch bar but it seems that they added (back) a physical Esc key, isn't that the most criticized missing key? Which other key do you miss now that Esc is back?

rusk 6y ago
That’s great!
usaphp 6y ago
I actually miss "Esc" key being in the touchbar, it felt quicker to tap it on previous gen macbook pro instead of pressing it on my new macbook pro.
michaelcampbell 6y ago
Having used an MBP keyboard, I'd say "all of them".
plorkyeran 6y ago
All of them? I use the function keys regularly and it's much harder to hit the correct one without looking at the keyboard with the touch bar.
- jedberg 6y ago
  What do you use function keys for? I was thinking about this, and I don't think I've used a function key in years.
  - ataylor32 6y ago
    I'm not the person you replied to, but I frequently use the play/pause key and also the volume keys. I occasionally use the function keys in my text editor too.
    - jedberg 6y ago
      Ok yeah I guess I use volume sometimes.

Dirlewanger 6y ago

[deleted]

entropea 6y ago
I am also not a fan of the keyboard or touch bar, but especially the touch bar. It's a cool idea and I can see useful functions, but not pushed up against a place where you're typing. I am constantly bringing up Siri or changing volume when hitting numbers, -= or delete from a finger swiping across the touch bar accidentally. There used to be a tactile force needed to activate F key functions, but now there's just a capacitive touch bar.
buu700 6y ago
What's wrong with the new keyboard (touch bar aside)? I haven't tried one yet, but I thought it was supposed to be more or less the same as the 2013 - 2015 MBP's.
Aperocky 6y ago
Didn't they revert the keyboard to the previous version? (Magic vs butterfly)

tarasmatsyk 6y ago

Almost exactly what I thought, however specs are too low for me to ditch the bar no matter how useless it is comparing to physical keys

yellowapple 6y ago

I can't fathom why Apple couldn't just include both. I'm using a company-provided touchbar'd Macbook Pro for work, and it's handy (I've got it setup with screenshot and screen lock buttons so I don't have to memorize the absolutely bonkers keyboard shortcuts for them); it just seems boneheaded to treat it as a replacement of the function keys instead of an addition.