6 ms·

Damn, I liked the touchbar :-( I think that Apple's biggest mistake is not making it more obvious that the bar is editable in all programs. It becomes pretty u

Damn, I liked the touchbar :-( I think that Apple's biggest mistake is not making it more obvious that the bar is editable in all programs. It becomes pretty useful when you can keep only the functions that you use the most.

ubermonkey 5y ago
Because I work at home and never travel anymore, I've been using a late 2019 15" for 2 years and I'm not sure I've had it in "laptop mode" often enough to have a real opinion about the touchbar. I use an external keyboard and a pair of 4K screens with it, so it runs closed at the back of my desk. :)
ant6n 5y ago
Function keys should be usable in many programs as well...
TheJoeMan 5y ago
Since the non-touchbar folks across the internet are more vocal, I love the Touch Bar. What's sad is by killing it on the new MBP, they essentially kill it on my laptop as less and less developers will care to implement it. I wonder how long Apple software like Xcode will support the Touch Bar. Edit: times it's superior to buttons: scrubbing videos, changing Safari tabs
- mrtranscendence 5y ago
  I can't imagine having so few Safari tabs open that changing tabs with the touchbar would be useful ... Honestly, I'm on the side of "the touchbar is inoffensive". Never bothered me one bit, but I don't use it anyway so I don't care that they're removing it*. I'm sympathetic, though. I always liked the butterfly keyboard, and the general opinion on that has been made patently obvious. * I wonder if this has to do with the fact that I never look at the keyboard, so it just doesn't occur to me to use the touchbar, same as I never saw the point of keyboard backlighting.
- zarzavat 5y ago
  It's not that people are against the Touch Bar. People are for physical function keys. If they had added the Touch Bar in addition to physical function keys then there would have been less resistance to it.
  - 8ytecoder 5y ago
    At that point I might prefer a touch screen that can be disabled. The extra real estate for touchbar with the minimal functionality didn’t make sense to me
  - tomtheelder 5y ago
    I also just cannot stop hitting it by accident. It's been a year and I'm still doing it constantly. I don't know what's wrong with me.
    - mithr 5y ago
      You and everybody else :) I think its combination of placement and behavior/sensitivity contributed to its demise.
  - krrrh 5y ago
    I’m against the touchbar, and haven’t used it at all for 5 years. It seems like it could be useful for casual users, but it offers almost nothing to pro users who already have keyboard shortcuts memorized.
    - elcomet 5y ago
      So you never changed volume or luminosity ?
      - Closi 5y ago
        They could have easily changed volume on their display - I had the touchbar but never liked the fact that you had to look away from your screen just to change the volume. Changing volume is definitely one of those use cases where the physical function keys were much better IMO - It's one physical button press rather than touch the button, look down at the slider, and try to drag it into the right position. I also use my laptop in a dock about 50% of the time, so end up just using the on-screen volume adjustment and keyboard shortcuts anyway... If Apple really believed in the concept they would have put the touchbar into their keyboards too.
- tinco 5y ago
  I also love the touchbar, the only button it's not superior to is the escape button. Who touch types the function keys anyway? Love it for the volume and screen brightness controls. Not too worried about my laptop being killed though, they screwed the keyboard up so hard it's essentially dead anyway. Have to take it to the Apple Care center to have it revived again sometime soon because I've got 3 sticky keys that won't unstick.
  - manmal 5y ago
    I touch-type volume and brightness keys all the time. Back in the olden days I touch-typed function keys for debugging (F5 = continue, F6 = step over, etc).
    - cassianoleal 5y ago
      Volume and brightness are probably the main reason why I absolutely hate the touchbar. It's clumsy to adjust, they never respond quite as fast, and sometimes take 2 or 3 touches to actually acutate, despite the button on the LCD changing the background - which means physically it actually registered my finger but decided to ignore it. Second gripe is precisely its main selling point - that it can change based on context. I don't want my keyboard changing. I don't want to have to look down to operate my laptop, it breaks the flow and slows me down. I had 2 laptops with the Touch Bar. I tried every software for customising it. BTT, MTBMR (or whatever it's called), and at least one other. I always eventually fix them with the few buttons I use (no sliders): volume/mute, screen brightness, keyboard backlight. Then, there's also the fact that you can't adjust its brightness or turn it off, and it's always emitting the full spectrum of light, which I find uncomfortable in the dark or late in the day. Granted, this is a smaller thing which is why it's at the bottom but it builds up the list of annoyances. Edit: just remembered another one - it can freeze. Most of the time it can be fixed by killing a process. Other times, you need to reboot the computer.
- dumpsterdiver 5y ago
  > changing Safari tabs FYI, command-<number> will let you switch between browser tabs. So command-2 will bring you to the second tab (starting from the left), etc. I tend to only navigate between the first five tabs or so in this manner (basically, what I can reach with my left hand), and I drag tabs I'm likely to navigate to like this to the left. What this looks like in practice is: <tab1> some admin console </tab1> <tab2> email </tab2> ... <tab10> documentation about the admin console </tab10> (drag documentation in tab10 to occupy tab2) Now I can use command-2/1 to go between the console documentation and the console itself. IMO, the cost of dragging a tab to the left is much cheaper than having to break your visual connection with the screen in order to hunt through the touchbar.
kolinko 5y ago
Yeah, me too - used it only for sound and video controls though. I think they gave way too few APIs to devs for it to be truly functional. The only time I was missing it was some emulators that didn’t display function keys even though the keys were needed for them.
amelius 5y ago
> Damn, I liked the touchbar :-( Yep, that's the downside of a quasi-monopolist. Limited choice.
TheRealDunkirk 5y ago
As someone who bought a new MBP 2 years ago, and never wanted a TB, why do you like it? What's the use case? In my situation, I run in clamshell mode, connected to a large 4K monitor 90% of the time, so I can't even touch it most of the time, but I never found a use for it that wasn't inferior than the function keys it replaced.
- mFixman 5y ago
  In my particular case: * Top row of physical buttons wasn't a big deal since I map Caps Lock to Esc. * Changing volume and brightness is better in the touchbar: the buttons are large enough to get them by touch, and sliding the finger is faster and more granular than repeatly pressing buttons. * Here's a tip: you don't have to move your finger from the button to the slider. You can just slide from the volume button. * BetterTouchTool allowed me to have any shortcut in the touchbar.
- Eric_WVGG 5y ago
  I mapped out loads of complex shortcuts and automations to various apps on both a per-app and global basis. - Instead of cmd-ctrl-opt-D in Safari, I’d hit the touch bar button that looked like an iPhone. - instead of hunting and pecking for XScope screen calipers, I would touch the bar button that looked like calipers. Etc. I had several dozen per-app automations and shortcuts mapped to easily visible and understandable buttons, now I’m back to wondering if it was F3 or F4 that meant “hide the sidebar” in XCode. This is a huge step backward. The Mac community has decided that it wants to stay in the past; Apple is saying, “fine, you dinosaurs want the ultimate 2015 MacBook Pro? Here it is. We will leave our engineers who think about the future to the iPad.”
soheil 5y ago
Touchbar was awful. Making it editable in all programs was a nice gimmick, but in the end who wants to look down on their keyboard to see which key they need to press next? There is also no mechanical feedback breaking the symmetry between the touchbar keys and any other key.
IshKebab 5y ago
Ha is this going to be like Google's blob emojis where everyone hated them when they were in use and as soon as they finally removed them loads of blob-lovers came out of the woodwork...
suzzer99 5y ago
So you're the one.
whydoyoucare 5y ago
It was buggy as hell, good riddance. For me the biggest annoyance was when volume buttons would freeze the touchbar, and the only way was to reset the audio system! Ugh!! (Make it inherently safe - physical keys, so less chances of programmers ruining it).
beezischillin 5y ago
I loved the idea of it but in practice I found that I barely if ever used it and the bugs and issues were plain annoying. Stuff like it getting stuck in 'volume control' mode after engaging the slider and being unable to close it or persistent touchbar apps not being so persistent. At one point I attempted to use one of those dock to touchbar apps which worked great and I assumed would help my productivity since I use the dock in a hover to show mode but I found that it often just disappeared to be taken over by default functionality. Which might've been an app bug, I don't know. The promise of it was really cool but it never really ended up being all that useful for me so I sort of forget it even exists.
TMWNN 5y ago
>Damn, I liked the touchbar :-( If Apple had released computers with the touch bar above the existing physical function keys, everyone would love it and other companies would provide a similar feature, the same way that they have all converged on the same industrial design as what Apple pioneered 20 years ago. Instead, Jony Ive insisted on the touch bar replacing the function keys, and here we are. At least the butterfly switches are finally dead. (It only took years of worldwide embarrassment and Ive's departure to make it happen!)

ubermonkey 5y ago

Because I work at home and never travel anymore, I've been using a late 2019 15" for 2 years and I'm not sure I've had it in "laptop mode" often enough to have a real opinion about the touchbar. I use an external keyboard and a pair of 4K screens with it, so it runs closed at the back of my desk. :)

ant6n 5y ago

Function keys should be usable in many programs as well...

TheJoeMan 5y ago

Since the non-touchbar folks across the internet are more vocal, I love the Touch Bar. What's sad is by killing it on the new MBP, they essentially kill it on my laptop as less and less developers will care to implement it. I wonder how long Apple software like Xcode will support the Touch Bar. Edit: times it's superior to buttons: scrubbing videos, changing Safari tabs

mrtranscendence 5y ago
I can't imagine having so few Safari tabs open that changing tabs with the touchbar would be useful ... Honestly, I'm on the side of "the touchbar is inoffensive". Never bothered me one bit, but I don't use it anyway so I don't care that they're removing it*. I'm sympathetic, though. I always liked the butterfly keyboard, and the general opinion on that has been made patently obvious. * I wonder if this has to do with the fact that I never look at the keyboard, so it just doesn't occur to me to use the touchbar, same as I never saw the point of keyboard backlighting.
zarzavat 5y ago
It's not that people are against the Touch Bar. People are for physical function keys. If they had added the Touch Bar in addition to physical function keys then there would have been less resistance to it.
- 8ytecoder 5y ago
  At that point I might prefer a touch screen that can be disabled. The extra real estate for touchbar with the minimal functionality didn’t make sense to me
- tomtheelder 5y ago
  I also just cannot stop hitting it by accident. It's been a year and I'm still doing it constantly. I don't know what's wrong with me.
  - mithr 5y ago
    You and everybody else :) I think its combination of placement and behavior/sensitivity contributed to its demise.
- krrrh 5y ago
  I’m against the touchbar, and haven’t used it at all for 5 years. It seems like it could be useful for casual users, but it offers almost nothing to pro users who already have keyboard shortcuts memorized.
  - elcomet 5y ago
    So you never changed volume or luminosity ?
    - Closi 5y ago
      They could have easily changed volume on their display - I had the touchbar but never liked the fact that you had to look away from your screen just to change the volume. Changing volume is definitely one of those use cases where the physical function keys were much better IMO - It's one physical button press rather than touch the button, look down at the slider, and try to drag it into the right position. I also use my laptop in a dock about 50% of the time, so end up just using the on-screen volume adjustment and keyboard shortcuts anyway... If Apple really believed in the concept they would have put the touchbar into their keyboards too.
tinco 5y ago
I also love the touchbar, the only button it's not superior to is the escape button. Who touch types the function keys anyway? Love it for the volume and screen brightness controls. Not too worried about my laptop being killed though, they screwed the keyboard up so hard it's essentially dead anyway. Have to take it to the Apple Care center to have it revived again sometime soon because I've got 3 sticky keys that won't unstick.
- manmal 5y ago
  I touch-type volume and brightness keys all the time. Back in the olden days I touch-typed function keys for debugging (F5 = continue, F6 = step over, etc).
  - cassianoleal 5y ago
    Volume and brightness are probably the main reason why I absolutely hate the touchbar. It's clumsy to adjust, they never respond quite as fast, and sometimes take 2 or 3 touches to actually acutate, despite the button on the LCD changing the background - which means physically it actually registered my finger but decided to ignore it. Second gripe is precisely its main selling point - that it can change based on context. I don't want my keyboard changing. I don't want to have to look down to operate my laptop, it breaks the flow and slows me down. I had 2 laptops with the Touch Bar. I tried every software for customising it. BTT, MTBMR (or whatever it's called), and at least one other. I always eventually fix them with the few buttons I use (no sliders): volume/mute, screen brightness, keyboard backlight. Then, there's also the fact that you can't adjust its brightness or turn it off, and it's always emitting the full spectrum of light, which I find uncomfortable in the dark or late in the day. Granted, this is a smaller thing which is why it's at the bottom but it builds up the list of annoyances. Edit: just remembered another one - it can freeze. Most of the time it can be fixed by killing a process. Other times, you need to reboot the computer.
dumpsterdiver 5y ago
> changing Safari tabs FYI, command-<number> will let you switch between browser tabs. So command-2 will bring you to the second tab (starting from the left), etc. I tend to only navigate between the first five tabs or so in this manner (basically, what I can reach with my left hand), and I drag tabs I'm likely to navigate to like this to the left. What this looks like in practice is: <tab1> some admin console </tab1> <tab2> email </tab2> ... <tab10> documentation about the admin console </tab10> (drag documentation in tab10 to occupy tab2) Now I can use command-2/1 to go between the console documentation and the console itself. IMO, the cost of dragging a tab to the left is much cheaper than having to break your visual connection with the screen in order to hunt through the touchbar.

kolinko 5y ago

Yeah, me too - used it only for sound and video controls though. I think they gave way too few APIs to devs for it to be truly functional. The only time I was missing it was some emulators that didn’t display function keys even though the keys were needed for them.

amelius 5y ago

> Damn, I liked the touchbar :-( Yep, that's the downside of a quasi-monopolist. Limited choice.

TheRealDunkirk 5y ago

As someone who bought a new MBP 2 years ago, and never wanted a TB, why do you like it? What's the use case? In my situation, I run in clamshell mode, connected to a large 4K monitor 90% of the time, so I can't even touch it most of the time, but I never found a use for it that wasn't inferior than the function keys it replaced.

mFixman 5y ago
In my particular case: * Top row of physical buttons wasn't a big deal since I map Caps Lock to Esc. * Changing volume and brightness is better in the touchbar: the buttons are large enough to get them by touch, and sliding the finger is faster and more granular than repeatly pressing buttons. * Here's a tip: you don't have to move your finger from the button to the slider. You can just slide from the volume button. * BetterTouchTool allowed me to have any shortcut in the touchbar.
Eric_WVGG 5y ago
I mapped out loads of complex shortcuts and automations to various apps on both a per-app and global basis. - Instead of cmd-ctrl-opt-D in Safari, I’d hit the touch bar button that looked like an iPhone. - instead of hunting and pecking for XScope screen calipers, I would touch the bar button that looked like calipers. Etc. I had several dozen per-app automations and shortcuts mapped to easily visible and understandable buttons, now I’m back to wondering if it was F3 or F4 that meant “hide the sidebar” in XCode. This is a huge step backward. The Mac community has decided that it wants to stay in the past; Apple is saying, “fine, you dinosaurs want the ultimate 2015 MacBook Pro? Here it is. We will leave our engineers who think about the future to the iPad.”

soheil 5y ago

Touchbar was awful. Making it editable in all programs was a nice gimmick, but in the end who wants to look down on their keyboard to see which key they need to press next? There is also no mechanical feedback breaking the symmetry between the touchbar keys and any other key.

IshKebab 5y ago

Ha is this going to be like Google's blob emojis where everyone hated them when they were in use and as soon as they finally removed them loads of blob-lovers came out of the woodwork...

suzzer99 5y ago

So you're the one.

whydoyoucare 5y ago

It was buggy as hell, good riddance. For me the biggest annoyance was when volume buttons would freeze the touchbar, and the only way was to reset the audio system! Ugh!! (Make it inherently safe - physical keys, so less chances of programmers ruining it).

beezischillin 5y ago

I loved the idea of it but in practice I found that I barely if ever used it and the bugs and issues were plain annoying. Stuff like it getting stuck in 'volume control' mode after engaging the slider and being unable to close it or persistent touchbar apps not being so persistent. At one point I attempted to use one of those dock to touchbar apps which worked great and I assumed would help my productivity since I use the dock in a hover to show mode but I found that it often just disappeared to be taken over by default functionality. Which might've been an app bug, I don't know. The promise of it was really cool but it never really ended up being all that useful for me so I sort of forget it even exists.

TMWNN 5y ago

>Damn, I liked the touchbar :-( If Apple had released computers with the touch bar above the existing physical function keys, everyone would love it and other companies would provide a similar feature, the same way that they have all converged on the same industrial design as what Apple pioneered 20 years ago. Instead, Jony Ive insisted on the touch bar replacing the function keys, and here we are. At least the butterfly switches are finally dead. (It only took years of worldwide embarrassment and Ive's departure to make it happen!)