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This is pure speculation, ungrounded from any evidence. The touch bar is a very flexible (effectively) analog input + rich display device. If adequately suppor

This is pure speculation, ungrounded from any evidence. The touch bar is a very flexible (effectively) analog input + rich display device. If adequately supported by software it can be an amazing input, affording a range of useful functions not replicable with discrete buttons. In general, I really wish modern computers had more analog inputs available. Analog knobs, jog wheels, sliders, trackballs, etc. are tragically missing. I have seen no evidence that Jony Ive was its patron, and no evidence that including it had anything to with making laptops expensive as a goal. The problem with the touch bar is that (a) it only shipped on a limited subset of devices so software authors could not depend on it, (b) after its initial functions, Apple made limited effort to adopt it in all of their own software, improve its integration into the system, or push boundaries of what it could do as an input device. > The butterfly keyboard was Ive shaving off 0.5mm of the width for a worse user experience with a higher production cost and less reliability. No, this was some Apple-internal mechanical engineering group trying to design the best extremely thin keyboard they could, but getting bitten hard by a mismatch between reliability in a prototype vs. full-scale factory production + poor estimation of reliability in a wide variety of contexts over a longer period of time. Nobody ever set out to make a “worse experience” or higher cost. There are many suboptimal features of the common rubber dome + scissor stabilizer laptop keyboards, and I wish more companies were brave enough to experiment with alternative designs in search of improvements. (Disclaimer: my favorite "laptop" keyboards are https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_PS/2_portable_computers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_PS/2_portable_computers and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_Portable https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_Portable)

stack_framer 5y ago
> This is pure speculation, ungrounded from any evidence. It's not ungrounded from the anecdotal evidence that these changes are coming after Ive's departure. > I have seen no evidence that Jony Ive was its patron, and no evidence that including it had anything to with making laptops expensive as a goal. Holy, evidence Batman! Leadership 101: When your title is "Chief Design Officer", the design buck stops with you. When your company releases an updated design to an existing product, you had some kind of say in that design. Period. Even if your "say" was just that you were aware of it, and didn't veto it.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- BoorishBears 5y ago
  > Holy, evidence Batman! Leadership 101: When your title is "Chief Design Officer", the design buck stops with you. When your company releases an updated design to an existing product, you had some kind of say in that design. Period. Even if your "say" was just that you were aware of it, and didn't veto it. This is just shifting goalposts because you got called out. You didn't word your comment as "these things happened on Ive's watch" you consistently word your comment like Ives was personally pushing for something. It's a common refrain on HN and it's never backed with proof. And speaking of your first comment: > Ive is gone and every one of those decisions has been reversed or at least significantly amended. This is no accident. ... you realize that this is a new generation of MBP landing on the exact same cadence they've come out on in the last few decades? So it makes perfect sense to have drastic changes land now regardless of who's in charge? Not mention the fact it hasn't even been two full years since Ives left. And the fact the HDMI port was coming back leaked at the start of the year. So unless you seriously think Apple designs a laptop in the course of a single year, it's highly unlikely he had no input on the current machine.
  - Dylan16807 5y ago
    > You didn't word your comment as "these things happened on Ive's watch" you consistently word your comment like Ives was personally pushing for something. This is not a meaningful difference when he's in charge and it's a flagship product.
    - BoorishBears 5y ago
      I knew this would be the response, and it's utter nonsense. But definitely extra points for trying to act like it being a flagship is why maybe this is an exception. - Flagship product or not, people do not say "Sundar Pichai recently made an unliked change to YouTube" despite his Director role People do not say "Kevin Scott's new Windows version is being disliked" despite him being MS's CTO > these things happened on Ive's watch Is a factual statement > Ives was personally pushing for X. Is gossip that HNs tell themselves to feel better. Or is Johnny Ives magically a special case because people don't like him? I mean seriously, if you think being a leader means you are personally pushing for every single solution as opposed to personally accepting every solution... and that you always have the exact same level of personal love for everything that you allow, you've never lead anything with any sort of scale. Being a leader is about compromise, not turning every project into a 1:1 reflection of what your preferred choices would have been.
sedatk 5y ago
All Apple had to was to have the touch bar over function keys, and nobody would complain at all.
- edgriebel 5y ago
  THIS! Touch bar is cool but when they went and removed _the ESC key_ they failed. Both would be ideal
  - ceejayoz 5y ago
    Touch Bars have had a separate, physical ESC key since 2019. I'm looking at one right now.
    - minimaxir 5y ago
      Due to years of vocal complaints from developers since 2016.
      - ceejayoz 5y ago
        Sure, but "both would be ideal" exists. You can have an Escape key and Touch Bar, if you want.
        dmitriid 5y ago
        It's not "ideal". Function keys are exactly that: physical keys. Something you can use without looking down at your keyboard.
        trevyn 5y ago
        I think two rows of function keys would be ideal! Each with a little OLED display, please. (Why hasn't this happened yet??)
    - sedatk 5y ago
      ESC itself doesn't cut it for me. With my resting hand position on the keyboard, my fingers touch the touch bar, and it always causes something either catastrophic or very frustrating. On a similar note, I'd gotten used to pressing Fn keys without looking at the keyboard. With touch bar, I have to carefully analyze the touch bar before doing anything with Fn keys. It's a very problematic experience overall. If it was a separate bar, I wouldn't have any of these issues.
IggleSniggle 5y ago
I actually really like the TouchBar except for the dramatic input lag. The input lag is so damn high that I never ever use it. If you could swipe left/right on it without holding down first, as on an iPhone, and if touch events generally had the same responsiveness as on an iPhone, I think everyone would have loved it much more. RIP TouchBar.
- Zelizz 5y ago
  I used BetterTouchTool to add a second volume slider with no delay and no on-screen UI, for changing the volume while I watch something :) I highly recommend using BetterTouchTool to get the most out of it if you still have a device with the touch bar.
  - IggleSniggle 5y ago
    I love BetterTouchTool, and it does help, but the input lag is still too high. And as far as I know, even with BTT, there’s no way to get a proper swipe interface that removes the “touch and hold” delay.
GloriousKoji 5y ago
I thought the touchbar was great idea but I hated that the function keys (and especially esc for a while) were sacrificed for it. They could have taken that 1cm of vertical space from the ridiculously huge touchpad instead and given us a ridiculously huge touchpad along with function keys and a touchbar.
Oddskar 5y ago
The touch bar was fingers on glass. It's not appropriate for a professional device since it requires you to look down and doesn't lend itself to the "mechanical" use of devices that high-paced work requires. Also, you can actually add the analog inputs yourself. The DIY keyboard community -- which is flourishing with options and new vendors -- has lots of options available. I myself have two analog knobs and one trackpoint on my keyboard. It's absolutely amazing.
- wyre 5y ago
  What keyboard do you have with a trackball?
  - Oddskar 5y ago
    Oops. Should have been "trackpoint" and not trackball. It's a pimoroni trackpoint breakout board.
  - formerly_proven 5y ago
    G80-11800 of course
  - evan_ 5y ago
    The Ultimate Hacking Keyboard has trackball options: https://ultimatehackingkeyboard.com/ https://ultimatehackingkeyboard.com/
  - twalla 5y ago
    https://tex.com.tw/collections/keyboard https://tex.com.tw/collections/keyboard
- setr 5y ago
  > It's not appropriate for a professional device since it requires you to look down and doesn't lend itself to the "mechanical" use of devices that high-paced work requires. Sure it could; it just has to beat the cost of the lookup. If you could have done some complex operation trivially with it, that couldn’t really be done with some keyboard shortcut, being a dynamic visual field would be fine. Of course, volume sliders don’t fit that bill, and I don’t think anyone really found something that did… but it’s not some fundamental guarantee that it would be useless.
jjoonathan 5y ago
> Headphone jack? Gone. Ethernet port? Gone. VGA port? Gone. Floppy disk drive? Gone. Also the parallel port. I remember the drama! It goes the other way, too. When Apple put cameras in all of their laptops, the press relentlessly bashed them for wasting BOM on something so useless and expensive. Then the industry realized it was a good idea and followed suit. Similar for retina displays -- the term "High Definition" had become synonymous with "good enough" and ground PC monitor advancements to a halt for a decade. Phones were coming out with higher resolutions (not pixel densities, resolutions) than full-size monitors. Then Apple figured out how to market higher resolutions, the press mocked them for wasting money, but word got around that HD might not be the end-all of display technology and consumer panel resolutions started to climb again. Here's a counterexample, a niche that could really use the Apple Bump but hasn't gotten it and probably won't get it: 10 gigabit ethernet. 1GbE became synonymous with "good enough" and got so thoroughly stuck in a rut that now it's very typical to see 1GbE deployed alongside a handful of 10 gigabit USB ports and a NVMe drive that could saturate the sad, old 1GbE port many times over. Sometimes taking risks results in a Touch Bar or Butterfly Keys. That's just the nature of risks. The only way to have a 100% feature win rate is to limit yourself to copying features that someone else has proven out, but if everyone does that then the industry gets stuck in a rut. I'm glad Apple exists, even if I don't personally feel the need to fund their experiments.
- birdman3131 5y ago
  The scary part? 1GbE is older than I thought. A couple weeks ago I replaced a 1GbE switch (gs524t) at my work and got curious. Said model came out in 2001 or 2002.
  - jagger27 5y ago
    Copper gigabit Ethernet is about as old as USB 1.1.
- bluedino 5y ago
  >> Also the parallel port. I remember the drama! Printers I can see. An entry-level HP LaserJet was $600 back in 2000, something not as easily replaced as a serial mouse or gamepad. >> a niche that could really use the Apple Bump but hasn't gotten it and probably won't get it: 10 gigabit ethernet. They stuck it on the Mac Mini
deeblering4 5y ago
> Analog knobs, jog wheels, sliders, trackballs, etc. are tragically missing. Fwiw they are readily available by way of USB (e.g. MIDI) controllers. There are loads of dedicated knobs, faders, pads, etc. with a large amount of software to customize and translate those inputs (in addition to the array of software supporting them natively) Obviously that would be external to the computer, but I think given the highly specific nature of analog controls it makes sense for these to be external. I'm having difficulty imaging a set of analog controls that would be at the same time universally useful and efficient in terms of weight and space utilization.
tarsinge 5y ago
> The touch bar is a very flexible (effectively) analog input + rich display device. It just can't work with people like me that never look down at their keyboard. I'm not trying to be elitist, it's the honest truth. I wanted to love the Touch Bar, tried plugins like Pock, but in the end no matter how hard I tried I can't help and force myself and interrupt what I'm doing to look down, it just doesn't make sense.
- hardlianotion 5y ago
  It might have worked with some kind of haptic feedback device?
  - diskzero 5y ago
    It was tried. Many, many people spent many, many hours inside of Apple trying to make the Touchbar more useful. The simple fact was that looking down at it was a context shift and, in general, no one wanted to do it. It exposed functionality that you would eventually learn to drive from the keyboard.
- RobertDeNiro 5y ago
  You're not meant to look at your keyboard. It's simply not efficient.
ksec 5y ago
>and no evidence that including it had anything to with making laptops expensive as a goal. It is product differentiation. The MacBook Pro 2016 redesign was delayed by a year due to Intel's CPU problems. The touchbar Macbook also had higher ASP from the start. It was the Post PC era. Everyone was suppose to leave the PC ( including Mac ) platform to Tablet. It doesn't get any clearer than that. Even making an iPad ads "What's a Computer". Making an ASP increase is a typical move of a market where you want to milk it. Did I mention they completely neglect Mac Pro for years? >Jony Ive was its patron Despite media wants to claim otherwise at the time and had shills cover it up. He spend most of his time on Apple Retail redesign and Apple Park. But iPhone X and Macbook / MacBook Pro was his vision of how the ultimate MacBook Pro and iPhone would be as he said so himself. He was named CDO in 2015, along with some design team restructuring. The “Designed by Apple in California” chronicles 20 years of Apple design photo book came out in 2016. When he finally left in 2019, the media and shills were suggesting he hasn't actually been on product design for quite a few years. His earlier work on Apple in 2011+ was iOS 7 re-design. ( After Scott Forstall was out ) And we all know how that went as they spend the next 3 years to iterate out of it. To the point their old UX design head had to retire. And if you look at the changes to Apple Retail Store redesign, they were the same. Form over function. Partly Jony's fault, partly Angela. >Nobody ever set out to make a “worse experience” or higher cost. Apple filled many patents where they were looking at keyboard on a flat piece of glass with Force Touch and 3D Touch. These patents were specific to computer. Higher BOM cost are often used as moat in any luxury items. >to design the best extremely thin keyboard they could... If it wasn't for the butterfly keyboard. The internet would not have a group of people and product reviewer now talking about key travel distance. The thin keyboard has a similar typing experience as typing on glass...... >There are many suboptimal features... No one fault them for trying. But the first report of keyboard problem came out in 2016 from MacBook users. Less than one year after its launch even before the MacBook Pro TouchBar. Apple constantly delete report of the problem on its support forum. The whole thing only gotten attention when an online press themselves decide to blog about it and went viral. That was 2018. They stopped reporting Mac user satisfactory in 2018, both in keynote and in investor meeting. It took nearly 3 years of ranting before Tim Cook even made a Keyboard Service Program. Basically without Steve Jobs, no one had the gut to say, fuck this. This isn't working. Close it down. Work on a alternative or go back to where it was and we make a Service Programme. Instead they drag on it for years. Without product sensibility and direction.
saghm 5y ago
> No, this was some Apple-internal mechanical engineering group trying to design the best extremely thin keyboard they could, but getting bitten hard by a mismatch between reliability in a prototype vs. full-scale factory production + poor estimation of reliability in a wide variety of contexts over a longer period of time Okay, but...what caused them to try to make a keyboard that thin in the first place? GP is suggesting that it was driven by Ive, which you dispute, but you only give an alternative explanation for the "what", not the "why".
skohan 5y ago
The touch bar was just awful. Not only did it lack software support, but occasionally it would just become non-responsive. And that's really bad when you are trying to mute or turn the volume down quickly, and you have to wait a couple seconds for it to recognize touch input again, or fall back to the mouse. Also it's on the keyboard where you're not looking. If you want analog controls, either make them tactile - like a physical dial or slider - or just make the display a touch screen.
raverbashing 5y ago
> mechanical engineering group trying to design the best extremely thin keyboard they could, but getting bitten hard by a mismatch between reliability in a prototype And this is why I believe more in the Ivy story than this one. If you're a mechanical engineering group mismatch between prototype and production is MechEng 201 pretty much. You wanna put out a new keyboard fine, but test the heck out of it. Let people have a go at it, put force onto it, spread some food on it, etc Unless that mechanical group really think keyboards are a toy and don't need reliability, in this case they don't belong there
nothis 5y ago
What I don't get about the touch bar is: Why didn't they put it above the F-keys as an additional input? There's room there. Why remove the F-keys (and, even more insanely, the ESC key)? People were more upset about that than any limitation in the touch bar's usability. It obviously adds some possibilities. It's just that some programs actually use the F-keys and have for decades. They provided a no-look keypress feedback for many tasks. What ever was the genius idea of taking that away?

stack_framer 5y ago

> This is pure speculation, ungrounded from any evidence. It's not ungrounded from the anecdotal evidence that these changes are coming after Ive's departure. > I have seen no evidence that Jony Ive was its patron, and no evidence that including it had anything to with making laptops expensive as a goal. Holy, evidence Batman! Leadership 101: When your title is "Chief Design Officer", the design buck stops with you. When your company releases an updated design to an existing product, you had some kind of say in that design. Period. Even if your "say" was just that you were aware of it, and didn't veto it.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
BoorishBears 5y ago
> Holy, evidence Batman! Leadership 101: When your title is "Chief Design Officer", the design buck stops with you. When your company releases an updated design to an existing product, you had some kind of say in that design. Period. Even if your "say" was just that you were aware of it, and didn't veto it. This is just shifting goalposts because you got called out. You didn't word your comment as "these things happened on Ive's watch" you consistently word your comment like Ives was personally pushing for something. It's a common refrain on HN and it's never backed with proof. And speaking of your first comment: > Ive is gone and every one of those decisions has been reversed or at least significantly amended. This is no accident. ... you realize that this is a new generation of MBP landing on the exact same cadence they've come out on in the last few decades? So it makes perfect sense to have drastic changes land now regardless of who's in charge? Not mention the fact it hasn't even been two full years since Ives left. And the fact the HDMI port was coming back leaked at the start of the year. So unless you seriously think Apple designs a laptop in the course of a single year, it's highly unlikely he had no input on the current machine.
- Dylan16807 5y ago
  > You didn't word your comment as "these things happened on Ive's watch" you consistently word your comment like Ives was personally pushing for something. This is not a meaningful difference when he's in charge and it's a flagship product.
  - BoorishBears 5y ago
    I knew this would be the response, and it's utter nonsense. But definitely extra points for trying to act like it being a flagship is why maybe this is an exception. - Flagship product or not, people do not say "Sundar Pichai recently made an unliked change to YouTube" despite his Director role People do not say "Kevin Scott's new Windows version is being disliked" despite him being MS's CTO > these things happened on Ive's watch Is a factual statement > Ives was personally pushing for X. Is gossip that HNs tell themselves to feel better. Or is Johnny Ives magically a special case because people don't like him? I mean seriously, if you think being a leader means you are personally pushing for every single solution as opposed to personally accepting every solution... and that you always have the exact same level of personal love for everything that you allow, you've never lead anything with any sort of scale. Being a leader is about compromise, not turning every project into a 1:1 reflection of what your preferred choices would have been.

sedatk 5y ago

All Apple had to was to have the touch bar over function keys, and nobody would complain at all.

edgriebel 5y ago
THIS! Touch bar is cool but when they went and removed _the ESC key_ they failed. Both would be ideal
- ceejayoz 5y ago
  Touch Bars have had a separate, physical ESC key since 2019. I'm looking at one right now.
  - minimaxir 5y ago
    Due to years of vocal complaints from developers since 2016.
    - ceejayoz 5y ago
      Sure, but "both would be ideal" exists. You can have an Escape key and Touch Bar, if you want.
      - dmitriid 5y ago
        It's not "ideal". Function keys are exactly that: physical keys. Something you can use without looking down at your keyboard.
      - trevyn 5y ago
        I think two rows of function keys would be ideal! Each with a little OLED display, please. (Why hasn't this happened yet??)
  - sedatk 5y ago
    ESC itself doesn't cut it for me. With my resting hand position on the keyboard, my fingers touch the touch bar, and it always causes something either catastrophic or very frustrating. On a similar note, I'd gotten used to pressing Fn keys without looking at the keyboard. With touch bar, I have to carefully analyze the touch bar before doing anything with Fn keys. It's a very problematic experience overall. If it was a separate bar, I wouldn't have any of these issues.

IggleSniggle 5y ago

I actually really like the TouchBar except for the dramatic input lag. The input lag is so damn high that I never ever use it. If you could swipe left/right on it without holding down first, as on an iPhone, and if touch events generally had the same responsiveness as on an iPhone, I think everyone would have loved it much more. RIP TouchBar.

Zelizz 5y ago
I used BetterTouchTool to add a second volume slider with no delay and no on-screen UI, for changing the volume while I watch something :) I highly recommend using BetterTouchTool to get the most out of it if you still have a device with the touch bar.
- IggleSniggle 5y ago
  I love BetterTouchTool, and it does help, but the input lag is still too high. And as far as I know, even with BTT, there’s no way to get a proper swipe interface that removes the “touch and hold” delay.

GloriousKoji 5y ago

I thought the touchbar was great idea but I hated that the function keys (and especially esc for a while) were sacrificed for it. They could have taken that 1cm of vertical space from the ridiculously huge touchpad instead and given us a ridiculously huge touchpad along with function keys and a touchbar.

Oddskar 5y ago

The touch bar was fingers on glass. It's not appropriate for a professional device since it requires you to look down and doesn't lend itself to the "mechanical" use of devices that high-paced work requires. Also, you can actually add the analog inputs yourself. The DIY keyboard community -- which is flourishing with options and new vendors -- has lots of options available. I myself have two analog knobs and one trackpoint on my keyboard. It's absolutely amazing.

wyre 5y ago
What keyboard do you have with a trackball?
- Oddskar 5y ago
  Oops. Should have been "trackpoint" and not trackball. It's a pimoroni trackpoint breakout board.
- formerly_proven 5y ago
  G80-11800 of course
- evan_ 5y ago
  The Ultimate Hacking Keyboard has trackball options: https://ultimatehackingkeyboard.com/ https://ultimatehackingkeyboard.com/
- twalla 5y ago
  https://tex.com.tw/collections/keyboard https://tex.com.tw/collections/keyboard
setr 5y ago
> It's not appropriate for a professional device since it requires you to look down and doesn't lend itself to the "mechanical" use of devices that high-paced work requires. Sure it could; it just has to beat the cost of the lookup. If you could have done some complex operation trivially with it, that couldn’t really be done with some keyboard shortcut, being a dynamic visual field would be fine. Of course, volume sliders don’t fit that bill, and I don’t think anyone really found something that did… but it’s not some fundamental guarantee that it would be useless.

jjoonathan 5y ago

> Headphone jack? Gone. Ethernet port? Gone. VGA port? Gone. Floppy disk drive? Gone. Also the parallel port. I remember the drama! It goes the other way, too. When Apple put cameras in all of their laptops, the press relentlessly bashed them for wasting BOM on something so useless and expensive. Then the industry realized it was a good idea and followed suit. Similar for retina displays -- the term "High Definition" had become synonymous with "good enough" and ground PC monitor advancements to a halt for a decade. Phones were coming out with higher resolutions (not pixel densities, resolutions) than full-size monitors. Then Apple figured out how to market higher resolutions, the press mocked them for wasting money, but word got around that HD might not be the end-all of display technology and consumer panel resolutions started to climb again. Here's a counterexample, a niche that could really use the Apple Bump but hasn't gotten it and probably won't get it: 10 gigabit ethernet. 1GbE became synonymous with "good enough" and got so thoroughly stuck in a rut that now it's very typical to see 1GbE deployed alongside a handful of 10 gigabit USB ports and a NVMe drive that could saturate the sad, old 1GbE port many times over. Sometimes taking risks results in a Touch Bar or Butterfly Keys. That's just the nature of risks. The only way to have a 100% feature win rate is to limit yourself to copying features that someone else has proven out, but if everyone does that then the industry gets stuck in a rut. I'm glad Apple exists, even if I don't personally feel the need to fund their experiments.

birdman3131 5y ago
The scary part? 1GbE is older than I thought. A couple weeks ago I replaced a 1GbE switch (gs524t) at my work and got curious. Said model came out in 2001 or 2002.
- jagger27 5y ago
  Copper gigabit Ethernet is about as old as USB 1.1.
bluedino 5y ago
>> Also the parallel port. I remember the drama! Printers I can see. An entry-level HP LaserJet was $600 back in 2000, something not as easily replaced as a serial mouse or gamepad. >> a niche that could really use the Apple Bump but hasn't gotten it and probably won't get it: 10 gigabit ethernet. They stuck it on the Mac Mini

deeblering4 5y ago

> Analog knobs, jog wheels, sliders, trackballs, etc. are tragically missing. Fwiw they are readily available by way of USB (e.g. MIDI) controllers. There are loads of dedicated knobs, faders, pads, etc. with a large amount of software to customize and translate those inputs (in addition to the array of software supporting them natively) Obviously that would be external to the computer, but I think given the highly specific nature of analog controls it makes sense for these to be external. I'm having difficulty imaging a set of analog controls that would be at the same time universally useful and efficient in terms of weight and space utilization.

tarsinge 5y ago

> The touch bar is a very flexible (effectively) analog input + rich display device. It just can't work with people like me that never look down at their keyboard. I'm not trying to be elitist, it's the honest truth. I wanted to love the Touch Bar, tried plugins like Pock, but in the end no matter how hard I tried I can't help and force myself and interrupt what I'm doing to look down, it just doesn't make sense.

hardlianotion 5y ago
It might have worked with some kind of haptic feedback device?
- diskzero 5y ago
  It was tried. Many, many people spent many, many hours inside of Apple trying to make the Touchbar more useful. The simple fact was that looking down at it was a context shift and, in general, no one wanted to do it. It exposed functionality that you would eventually learn to drive from the keyboard.
RobertDeNiro 5y ago
You're not meant to look at your keyboard. It's simply not efficient.

ksec 5y ago

>and no evidence that including it had anything to with making laptops expensive as a goal. It is product differentiation. The MacBook Pro 2016 redesign was delayed by a year due to Intel's CPU problems. The touchbar Macbook also had higher ASP from the start. It was the Post PC era. Everyone was suppose to leave the PC ( including Mac ) platform to Tablet. It doesn't get any clearer than that. Even making an iPad ads "What's a Computer". Making an ASP increase is a typical move of a market where you want to milk it. Did I mention they completely neglect Mac Pro for years? >Jony Ive was its patron Despite media wants to claim otherwise at the time and had shills cover it up. He spend most of his time on Apple Retail redesign and Apple Park. But iPhone X and Macbook / MacBook Pro was his vision of how the ultimate MacBook Pro and iPhone would be as he said so himself. He was named CDO in 2015, along with some design team restructuring. The “Designed by Apple in California” chronicles 20 years of Apple design photo book came out in 2016. When he finally left in 2019, the media and shills were suggesting he hasn't actually been on product design for quite a few years. His earlier work on Apple in 2011+ was iOS 7 re-design. ( After Scott Forstall was out ) And we all know how that went as they spend the next 3 years to iterate out of it. To the point their old UX design head had to retire. And if you look at the changes to Apple Retail Store redesign, they were the same. Form over function. Partly Jony's fault, partly Angela. >Nobody ever set out to make a “worse experience” or higher cost. Apple filled many patents where they were looking at keyboard on a flat piece of glass with Force Touch and 3D Touch. These patents were specific to computer. Higher BOM cost are often used as moat in any luxury items. >to design the best extremely thin keyboard they could... If it wasn't for the butterfly keyboard. The internet would not have a group of people and product reviewer now talking about key travel distance. The thin keyboard has a similar typing experience as typing on glass...... >There are many suboptimal features... No one fault them for trying. But the first report of keyboard problem came out in 2016 from MacBook users. Less than one year after its launch even before the MacBook Pro TouchBar. Apple constantly delete report of the problem on its support forum. The whole thing only gotten attention when an online press themselves decide to blog about it and went viral. That was 2018. They stopped reporting Mac user satisfactory in 2018, both in keynote and in investor meeting. It took nearly 3 years of ranting before Tim Cook even made a Keyboard Service Program. Basically without Steve Jobs, no one had the gut to say, fuck this. This isn't working. Close it down. Work on a alternative or go back to where it was and we make a Service Programme. Instead they drag on it for years. Without product sensibility and direction.

saghm 5y ago

> No, this was some Apple-internal mechanical engineering group trying to design the best extremely thin keyboard they could, but getting bitten hard by a mismatch between reliability in a prototype vs. full-scale factory production + poor estimation of reliability in a wide variety of contexts over a longer period of time Okay, but...what caused them to try to make a keyboard that thin in the first place? GP is suggesting that it was driven by Ive, which you dispute, but you only give an alternative explanation for the "what", not the "why".

skohan 5y ago

The touch bar was just awful. Not only did it lack software support, but occasionally it would just become non-responsive. And that's really bad when you are trying to mute or turn the volume down quickly, and you have to wait a couple seconds for it to recognize touch input again, or fall back to the mouse. Also it's on the keyboard where you're not looking. If you want analog controls, either make them tactile - like a physical dial or slider - or just make the display a touch screen.

raverbashing 5y ago

> mechanical engineering group trying to design the best extremely thin keyboard they could, but getting bitten hard by a mismatch between reliability in a prototype And this is why I believe more in the Ivy story than this one. If you're a mechanical engineering group mismatch between prototype and production is MechEng 201 pretty much. You wanna put out a new keyboard fine, but test the heck out of it. Let people have a go at it, put force onto it, spread some food on it, etc Unless that mechanical group really think keyboards are a toy and don't need reliability, in this case they don't belong there

nothis 5y ago

What I don't get about the touch bar is: Why didn't they put it above the F-keys as an additional input? There's room there. Why remove the F-keys (and, even more insanely, the ESC key)? People were more upset about that than any limitation in the touch bar's usability. It obviously adds some possibilities. It's just that some programs actually use the F-keys and have for decades. They provided a no-look keypress feedback for many tasks. What ever was the genius idea of taking that away?