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.