The Touch Bar arrived in 2016 seemingly already pre-doomed, on a generation of machines that had a “we’ve run out of ideas” smell all around them. The arrow keys were reshaped, the keyboard got a slimming down, and even the beloved MagSafe wasn’t, in fact, safe. All of these changes would prove unpopular and get reverted in time, and the axe would eventually come for the Touch Bar, too.
With an enormous benefit of hindsight, a decade after its arrival, and on the (rumored) eve of fully multitouch MacBooks, I wanted to look critically at the Touch Bar in more detail. I put a spicy title above this post, and while I’m not sure I can answer it in the affirmative, I feel I got surprisingly close to that.
↫ Marcin Wichary
I have never spent this much reading about and pondering a technology seemingly nobody liked and that I never really used. I still think there’s merit to the idea of screen on a keyboard, but only if the screens are integrated into the individual keys (as some products have tried over the years). Of course, this would also be astronomically expensive, delicate, and virtually impossible to repair, so I’m not sure something like that can be reasonably made at an affordable price.
I had a work laptop with a touch bar (thermal castration 13 inch macbook pro) and I liked the idea but it would have way better if they also had kept the function keys. Professionals who work a lot with the same applications tend to get very proficient with their function keys and the touch bar would have made a nice addition to that, instead of removing it.
Loved it. Absolutely loved it. As a “hardcore” developer I’ve never bothered much with fn keys cos’ everything is “meta+shift+ctrl+alt+command+$key” anyway. Natch opinions will differ!!
The only thing that REALLY bugged me was the missing escape key but, IIRC, they put that back on the 2019 MBP I still have here somewhere.
I had one of these, but I barely ever used it. Kind of like the butterfly keyboard, everybody at my company only used the Mac keyboard when it was absolutely necessary. There’s something funny about that.
Anyway, I was always under the impression that they made the touch bar primarily to have a chip start going in the Mac so they could have that figured out in their supply chain. So they could eventually switch to doing M1, etc later. That plan makes a lot of sense. The fact that they had to make it do something useful was almost an afterthought.
I had a laptop with the touchbar, and it was annoying trying to use it to change brightness or volume only to discover an application had hidden those buttons for its own, or an application that doesn’t use the touchbar now has extra steps to use the F-keys.
I’m glad the F-Keys are back.
Worth noting that Apple was not the first company to try this idea. The second generation X1 Carbon had an LCD/E-ink touch bar that was meant to allow software to create a special row of custom capacitive “keys.”
My guess is that both touchpads were products of the same line of thinking. Thinkpads and Macs both put a lot of work into their keyboard. Apart from excellent typing experiences in terms of e.g. actuation and consistency of key travel, both lines are built around the idea that a user should stay as close to the Home row as possible (which is one reason that Thinkpads have the TrackPoint and why Macs and Thinkpads were early adopters of multimedia keyboards — the Mac Extended keyboard had multimedia keys back in 1990, and the Thinkpad 760 CD had one in 1996, and I think was the first laptop to feature them).
From that “the more you can do from the keyboard, the better” perspective, a touchbar makes a lot of sense because it reduces the number of keyboard-to-trackpad transitions a user needs in order to e.g. type an emoji or a special character, and can also reduce the frequency of complex keystrokes. The admin assistants who were throwing WordPerfect overlays on their keyboards back in 1993 would have lined up for that kind of feature.
I had a MacBook with touchbar via work. I couldn’t stand it because the esc key was missing !
I entertained high hopes for the sonder keyboard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonder_Design. It would have been cheaper than the Optimus Maximus …
Unfortunately the company was acquired and the product went nowhere.
Typing class 101: Don’t look at the keyboard while typing. This will always be an example of how Apple is actually terrible at design outside of making the final product look good.