The Problem With the Touch Bar

While it would no longer have been a bar, I wonder if it had been physical keys with LCD displays that could be customized if it would have been more successful. For me as a touch typist, the bar was never appealing.

Consumer non-touch-typist feature on machine designed for Pro touch typists used to hitting real buttons. Total mismatch.

> Hardware-wise, I think it needed some sort of haptics.

I'm not sure if you mean haptic feedback, haptic pressure sensing, or both. IMO the former would be helpful but the latter (Force Touch for the Touch Bar) would have absolutely transformed the Touch Bar from a hated element which I kept triggering accidentally into an incredibly useful and flexible tool. I personally already can't use any of the keys on that row without looking (aside from the Escape key and the Touch ID key) and I'm sure I'm far from the only one, but turns out I all-too-often lightly brush against them.

For me at least, there is nothing they could have done to it that would have made it useful other than making them real buttons with screens. Anything touch sensitive at all would be a deal breaker.

". . . painted a target on it"

Being a mediocre idea poorly executed painted a target on it.

I was in disbelief that the Touch Bar didn't have haptic feedback and any sort of analogue touch. And the trackpad was right there on the other side of the device to rub it in every single time I accidentally brushed against the touchbar and "pressed a button" I didn't want to press. I liked the TouchBar at first, but after two instances where I accidentally sent an email I was still writing in Postbox, I gave up on it and mostly disabled it.

Lacking an escape key made the Touch Bar completely unworkable for many, myself included.

Aside from that, the Touch Bar is counter to touch typing. I do not want to look at my fingers or keys when using a keyboard. This was engrained into me in school, where they'd put a box over your hands to prevent you from seeing the keys and your fingers while typing, and accuracy and speed under those conditions were the measure of which you were graded.

We should commend Apple for giving up on a failed experiment.

@Andrew Both. To find the keys and feel when they’re pressed, but also to prevent accidental activations.

I always thought maybe the Touch Bar should be at a slight angle for readability. Maybe something fancy that would lie flat when the laptop was closed and tilt when open. Might be tricky to do that and also offer enough resistance to finger pressure.

That said I’ve used a Touch Bar Mac approximately 0 minutes.

Replacing ESC was the worst part.

I believe that the fact that it was available only for a small subset of users was also a big problem. How much effort would developers spend on something niche? It had to be an _additional_ way of accomplishing something since most people didn’t have one.

It was only for MacBook Pro users who aren’t connected to a real keyboard on their desks.

Touch Bar was a great piece of tech, and even though I agree that they just dropped the ball and did not develop it, the main issue is that they used it to replace the function keys row. They should have just added it on top.

Buttons with screens are a bad idea, because it limits the shapes and sizes, and not all things are buttons, so the screen as a single piece is better. Haptics would help, but also, that is not critical, as we use touch screens all the time and most of the interactions have no haptics. Again, the main reason people did not like it is because their function keys, which for all intents and purposes are hardware control keys, were taken away, and they were forced to invent substitute functionality with a wrong “device”, i.e. embedded narrow touch screen.

So, here’s what should have been done:

1. Regular function keys left in place, just at half height
2. Add the Touch Bar above it, with a small gap in-between, probably 4 mm, to avoid incidental touches.

I just rewatched the [Touchbar Intro from 2016](https://youtu.be/EA8vDBY6bCs?si=K_61whQeR1S4VxKc&t=2158). In retrospect, it seems like really weak motivation for a new, considerably more expensive, hardware addition. The main pitch seems to be that no one really uses those F keys and wouldn't it be great if the most common controls were contextually available at your fingertips. It ignores the fact that apps already make the most frequent controls accessible through toolbars and keyboard shortcuts. In many of the demos, the touch bar is literally showing the same controls that are already on the screen.

For me, losing escape, volume, and screen brightness controls was starting out in the red and there was little they could put there that could make up for that. Also, I frequently use my MacBook in clamshell mode or use a desktop Mac, so it is harder to invest in new input modes that aren't there half the time (I use a Magic Trackpad on my desktop precisely so I can have the same input affordances all the time).

@Nick M That was the big issue I had. Anything in the Touch Bar should already exist in your app's Toolbar. The loss of physical Esc made it a non-starter. I went out of my way to not buy Touch Bar Macs (nor butterfly keyboard Macs).

The APIs introduced by AppKit seemed decent, but I never used them. I wish they'd just improved NSToolbar and NSControls, instead.

@Hammer

> Anything in the Touch Bar should already exist in your app's Toolbar.

It's almost like the enshittification of Mac Hardware was preceded by the enshittification of Mac software UI design; the pivot to welcome iOS and iPad developers by making the Mac easier, and more like their previous platform experience, doing the same to Windows and Electron developers, gave us this endpoint where App UIs lack good control systems, so we come up with hardware kludges to make developers surface them, but like all kludges, they don't work and add complexity.

How stupid do you have to be to add a peripheral to a computer, whose own separate internal operating system can crash, and take the entire computer with it. *glares at his Mac Pro's T2*

Why didn't they just make the touch bar a version of Sidecar, that could apply to iPhones (oh yeah, cause it would eat the phone's battery).

I wish the bar had been a row of keys with small screens on them so they could change image based on context. Wish cars would at least do this too instead of going all screen. Buttons with small screens that can change purpose and state.

Additionally would have loved some sort of sensor that knew when your fingers were approaching the bar area and would light up based on that motion similar to when my Nest thermostat lights up when I approach it.

For me, the issues were:

* The lack of the escape key on the initial iteration. It's the only key that I use frequently of the top row and I want it to be a key.

* No clear story how the touch bar should be used in docked mode. I use a MacBook, but most of the day I use it at a desk, on a stand. Using the Touch Bar in that configuration becomes very unergonomic. For Touch ID they solved this by making the Magic Keyboard with Touch ID, but there was never a desk version of the Touch Bar.

* I don't really want to look down all the time and since the Touch Bar changes between applications and has no distinctive feel, nor haptic feedback, it's nearly impossible to commit it to muscle memory.

In the end to me Touch Bar is a lot like the removal of buttons from cars. A misguided attempt to touch'ify everything during the touch screen hype. The iPhone set off the touch screen/button hype, but on a smart phone it made a lot of sense. For some years after the huge success of the iPhone, everyone wanted to apply touch screens everywhere. Luckily, those days seem to be over. I even switched from an Apple Watch Ultra to a Garmin Watch recently and one of the huge benefits is that you can do almost everything using buttons, rather than trying to hit small touch surfaces on a teensy display.

Regarding Touch ID, I had increasing problems with it on my MBA M1 and I saw a tip somewhere that you should "ground" your hand by touching the case at the same time. So now I touch the case with my thumb for example, while putting another finger at the sensor and amazingly it works very well!

The touch bar was bad design from the beginning and nothing could save it. You don't want to stop looking at your screen constantly to do anything which the touch bar forced you to do.

100% in on team "The Touch Bar was and is an abomination" just as touch screens in cars are a genuinely bad idea.

I have a keyboard with a physical volume knob and it's fantastic. Eyes off instant volume and mute control never misses or fails.

By all means, add a touch screen control surface to the left or right of a keyboard and make it USER CUSTOMISABLE. But anyone that thinks replacing physical buttons with an ever changing strip of screen is a good idea ... is an idiot.

"By all means, add a touch screen control surface to the left or right of a keyboard"

This reminds me of Asus's touchscreen trackpads, which seems like a slightly better idea, but is probably also poorly executed, given that it's Asus.

Most everyone has covered my complaints, but I think this attempt to revisit the Touch Bar and cast it in a more positive light is an indicator of an annoying trend among the Apple punditry. They are incapable of believing, really believing, that Apple can make large mistakes, so they constantly try to reinterpret everything so as to cast apple in a better light.

The Touchbar is a deeply flawed feature that should never have seen the light of the day. It took too long to die.

@Someone wrote:

>Why didn't they just make the touch bar a version of Sidecar, that could apply to iPhones?

This works already with iPad, using Sidecar. An iPhone screen would be a little too small for this kind of feature, I think.

“there wasn’t really any way to empower the user to do stuff with it. You could only rearrange predetermined toolbar buttons.”

There was, if one knew where to look!

There’s this amazing app called BetterTouchTool, it allowed users to do _anything_ with the Touch Bar. I built shortcuts for all my commonly-used apps, made me love the Touch Bar. Now I'm back to trying to remember if I bound F1 or F2 to "toggle developer mode" in Safari, or which F-key does what in Finder, the Terminal… sigh.

It still blows my mind that the Mac tech luminaries were always going on about tools like Keyboard Maestro, but completely silent about BTT. It's still around and still amazing, btw, the author expanded its abilities to keyboards, multi-finger trackpad swipes (swipe between browser tabs! why doesn't Apple have that in Settings??), so much more.

One additional problem with the Touch Bar: it *replaced* the f-keys. There was, and still is, space above them. I'm convinced that if Apple hadn't alienated developers by eliminated a thing they actually depended on, they would have given the Touch Bar a better chance.

@Eric I linked to BetterTouchTool at the time. It’s great, but what it was doing required private APIs and went completely against Apple’s design guidelines, so I don’t think it makes sense to count that as part of what the Touch Bar could do any more than one would count iPhones as initially supporting third-party apps because there was jailbreaking.

Concur with those saying it wouldn't have been quite so awful if they'd only left the F-keys alone. This definitely-not-able-bodied person (and other blind people I know) really only had a problem with the F-keys going away, especially in Windows where screen reader support for discovering and using the keys on the strip wasn't there. Keeping a full complement of keys, but disabling the touch bar, would have been fine.

Never liked it on my MBP. Helped a friend to set up his freshly-bought M4-powered MBP a year or so ago. Didn't miss the touch bar at all.