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I think they got it wrong. I would pay money to NOT have the touchbar.
by noncoml 6y ago
I think they got it wrong. I would pay money to NOT have the touchbar.
- ValentineC 6y agoThe touchbar is probably why I'm probably getting the Air for my next upgrade, and not a Pro.
- Aperocky 6y agohahaha 2 times Air user, touchbar is a big NO.
- kmonsen 6y agoI got one of the MBP with the touchbar this year after holding out for many years (changed jobs so had to change laptop). Man it is so much hard to do the volume changes, and there has so far for me been zero benefit.
- technimad 6y agoDid you notice you can hold and slide to change volume? You don’t need to hit the volume slider where it appears. Same with brightness. Totally undiscoverable gesture.
- sib 6y agoYup - I love this feature but I'd guess based on people I've shown it to that no more than 20% of users are aware of it.
- Thetawaves 6y agoYou CAN configure it to show the old-style mute/down/up with the touch bar, so you are not relegated to the ultra-shitty slider. No replacement for a tactile switch, but at least you are not stuck with the default arrangement.
- eastendguy 6y agoExactly this. I tried so hard to like it (since I paid for it), but I have found 0 good uses cases for it. I would assume that macOS sends at least some basic usage data for the touch bar back to Apple HQ. I wonder how often it is actually used... and I would love the hear the responsible product manager defend it.
- jez 6y agoNot what you're looking for, but I'll mention it anyways just in case: It's possible to set the default touch bar display to only ever show the expanded control strip (System Preferences > Keyboard > Keyboard > Touch Bar shows: Expanded Control Strip). In that mode you tap volume up and down instead of using a volume slider. Again, I know you're looking for physical keys (aren't we all) but it's better than nothing. I've been using the MacBook Pro 16 (with a physical esc key plus a touch bar) and I think it's a pretty good compromise between me who wants physical keys and apple who wants to push the touch bar. The other thing that kept happening to me: I would accidentally tap the brightness button when reaching for ESC. For that, you can "Customize Control Strip..." and remove individual buttons, so that there's a big gap on the touch bar near the ESC key so that stray taps near ESC don't change the brightness.
- headmelted 6y agoI realise I'm an outlier here but I actually have grown to like the touchbar. It's often unused, yes, but when I fire up Rider for my day job it automatically flicks to the row of function keys and back depending on which app has focus and it fits quite nicely for me between work and entertainment (I like having the video progress bar if I'm watching something on the laptop). Maybe I'm just strange but the non-tactile function keys didn't really bother me much either. In any case, I could live without it, which is probably not a roaring endorsement in any case, but I'd rather have it than not.
- w0utert 6y agoI like it as well, especially in applications like CLion/IntelliJ which have tons of keybindings I keep forgetting because they are different between Linux and macOS. The context-sensitive touch bar is actually very useful in these applications for things like rebuilding, changing targets, stepping through the debugger etc. without having to use the mouse. There's a lot of things to complain about with Apple products, but if you ask me there's been enough touch bar bashing by now and people should just get over it. It's pretty useful in some situations, and IMO no real downsides, especially now that the esc key is a real physical key again. Why all the hate?
- Alex3917 6y agoInstead of press and hold, it's press, hold, and drag. Definitely annoying when it freezes, but when it's working it doesn't seem that much different.
- skohan 6y agoThe main difference is that I need to look down at the keyboard to operate the touchbar. With the keys I can rely on muscle memory. Also I think every device which makes sound should have a physical mute control. The worst is when I want to mute, and the touchbar freezes, and I have to go turn the volume down with the mouse.
- hyperbovine 6y agoSame situation, my trusty 2012 rMBP finally gave up the ghost and I had to get a new one with this icky touch bar. It's useless to me and makes it harder to do everything. My main complaint is that I am constantly bumping it when I type, leading to unexpected changes in volume and brightness.
- kmonsen 6y agoOh yeah I forgot that. I keep hitting the chrome back button in the touch bar all the time. In the beginning I was not sure what was happening then I realized it was the touch bar.
- WhiteNoiz3 6y agoMy problem with the touchbar is that I tap it accidentally while typing all the time. It needs to be like another centimeter away from the keys.
- quicklyfrozen 6y agoOr use the same haptic feedback as the touchpad.
- IggleSniggle 6y agoI've been really happy with the following mod for the last couple years of TouchBar usage: https://community.folivora.ai/t/goldenchaos-btt-the-complete-touch-bar-ui-replacement/1281 https://community.folivora.ai/t/goldenchaos-btt-the-complete... Fully customizable while being much better for muscle memory by giving you exactly what you want where you want it, gives you icon-shortcuts to script, and still allows you to have as much dynamic functionality / information as you like. So, for example, mine looks roughly like this: - Fullscreen - Bck/[play|pause]/Fwd - CURRENTLY_PLAYING_SONG - AirDrop - ConfigMenu - Emoticons - (Un)Caffeinate - (Dis)connectBluetoothHeadphones - (Dis)connectMicrophone - (Un)muteVol - VolDown - VolUp - ScreenDim - ScreenBright - Date - Time - Weather - Battery% CURRENTLY_PLAYING_SONG playing shows the album cover, song name, and artist, but only shows up if there IS something playing. Same with AirDrop, which shows up only if there's something that I could AirDrop to, and then gives me a set of options of who to AirDrop to. The Emoticon menu opens an emoticon submenu on the TouchBar with most-recently-used first. That all fits fine into the main touchbar, with other dynamic touchbars available modally (ie, holding CMD shows touchable icons of all the stuff in my Dock (my Dock is entirely turned off)), CTRL shows LOCK AIRPLAY DO_NOT_DISTURB FLUX KEYBOARD_DIM/BRIGHT, etc. ALT shows me various window snap locations. Edit: BetterTouchTool also replaced a bunch of other tools for me. Gives you the same kind of tools for scripting eg Keyboard macros, Mouse macros, remote-control via iPhone/Watch etc with a lot of reasonable defaults.
- alanbernstein 6y agoI've heard a lot of complaints about the touchbar. The loss of tactile feedback is a fair one, and admittedly removing the escape key was a terrible idea. I recently upgraded to a machine with a touchbar, learned quickly why the default settings are pretty bad, and then quickly found BTT and set it up. The touchbar is not a revolutionary innovation, but it definitely improves functionality in some cases, and it's fun to mess with. Oh, and a button to "toggle mic in zoom" actually solves a real problem. The people who complain about the touchbar functionality must not be putting any effort at all into it. I customize so many other things on my system, regardless of the OS. Why would a new hardware feature be any different? I didn't know about this GoldenChaos thing though, thanks for that.
- ziml77 6y agoThat's actually one of the things I like better on the touchbar. Just press down on the volume icon and slide. I continue to be disappointed about the lack of haptics though. It's such a strange thing to not have when they've proven to know how to make very convincing haptic feedback. It works very well in both the Apple Watch and the MacBook's trackpad.
- perbu 6y agoYou can use the touchbar to skip commercials on Youtube in Safari. I love it.
- hyko 6y agoEasiest way is to press and hold the Touch Bar on the volume control button and slide your finger left or right–that way you barely need to look at the Touch Bar.
- culopatin 6y agoAs someone using a hackintosh considering a real Macbook, what's so wrong about it?
- TomVDB 6y agoIt doesn't provide tactile feedback.
- hardlianotion 6y agoThey do such a good job on the iPhone with this that it is quite mystifying why not.
- cercatrova 6y agohttps://www.haptictouchbar.com/ https://www.haptictouchbar.com/ is a great app I use, provides haptic feedback for the touch bar.
- lloeki 6y agoTry https://github.com/niw/HapticKey https://github.com/niw/HapticKey
- noneeeed 6y agoFor me it hides the things I use all the time (media and volume controls) to make room for application specific controls that I never use. If it was more customisable I wouldn't mind it, but the apparant inability to force it to show me the things I actually want is annoying. I can imagine there are some people for whom the application specific buttons are useful, but for me they are not worth it for what they displace.
- 1123581321 6y agoCheck out BetterTouchTool if customization is holding you back.
- imjared 6y agoNot sure if it's helpful for you but you can customize the behavior by going to your System Prefs > keyboard settings and toggling "Touch bar shows:". I did this on like day 2 of having my MBP for what sounds like the same reason you want to. The setting I have turned on is "Expanded control strip" and I never see any application-specific controls, only volume, brightness, etc.
- raydev 6y agoAir doesn't have a fan, so if you want consistent performance, you have to buy the touchbar.
- justinclift 6y agoMaybe some kind of clip-on, thin, third party cooling solutions will become a thing?
- lukifer 6y agoI intentionally took a performance hit by moving from a Pro to an Air almost entirely for this reason (although the low power and light weight are pleasant benefits). I'm glad that the new Air still has F-keys with Touch ID; but I'm flabbergasted that they're still not making the Touchbar optional for the Pro series, given how polarizing it's been, and the underwhelming adoption of new Touchbar functionality by third-party developers.
- servercobra 6y agoHonestly, I think it's only polarizing here and among some developers.
- lukifer 6y agoI'd be curious to know what portion of their user base for the Pro series are developers. Anecdotally, quite a lot of devs seems to use Macs; but I have no idea what that fraction is, relative to the rest of their market.
- dham 6y agoI mean if you think about other professions that use Macbook Pro they don't need it either. Are video professionals using it to scrub through video? Nope. For any audio professional it's useless. No one who is serious about their profession would use it.
- nsxwolf 6y ago
- rbanffy 6y agoMy daughter loves it. It's her emoji keyboard
- jfb 6y agoHonestly, the idea of a soft keyboard is a great one, particularly one as well integrated into the OS as the Touch Bar is. However, while I have a Mac with the Touch Bar, I never ever ever ever use it intentionally, as I spend 90% of my time on the computer using an external keyboard.
- acjohnson55 6y agoJust put that control panel at the bottom of the screen. It would still be close enough, and it would be out of the way of my accidental touches.
- TedShiller 6y agoI think it’s good actually
- ofisboy 6y agoso true! i hate the touchbar. if i would have to change my laptop today, i'd buy air just because i hate the touchbar.