The end of the MacBook Touch Bar

TidBITS Talk
9

IMO the TouchBar is a far superior interface for adjusting volume and brightness, compared to the keyboard. I use an external keyboard much of the time, and that was the only reason I used TouchBar. When using the internal keyboard, I didn’t use or try to use other features. Even emoji selection was a little improvement.

Additionally: I had a recognised screen bleeding problem on my MacBook Pro. I got Apple to fix it. After that, I needed to bring it back to Apple again to refix, because the TouchBar wouldn’t turn on. All in all, I was without computer for a month. At the time, I thought maybe all this was too difficult for Apple to support, and I was sour on the whole thing.

If Apple provided a way to repurpose old iOS devices as an external Stream Deck-type device (or, off topic now, as a webcam) that could be pretty sweet.

10

If I had purchased another laptop prior to today, it definitely would NOT have had a Touch Bar. It seemed like a solution without a problem. I’m pleased to see it gone.

11

The Touch Bar was a nice idea but 2 problems. Lack of tactile feel, you had to look at it. More important, Apple just never did anything with it. If Apple spent the past 5 years improving it perhaps it would be a must have feature.

12

@MMTalker… I love it. And I know others who do!

The butterfly keyboard, on the other hand, is a disaster. I’ve had keycaps replaced four times and the entire keyboard replaced once (upside: a new battery comes along for the ride).

13

My 2019 16" MacBook Pro has one, and I loved it for movie playback (adjust the brightness of the screen, the volume, sroll forward or back in time effortlessly, wake up th laptop with the adjacent TouchID key. But I never learned to use it to enter emojis or to do anything application-specific, and when my own carelessness with crumbs and coffee made me aware of how RIDIICULOUSLY expensive it would be to do any keyboard repairs because of that tiny horizontal strip screen, I realized it was not going to endure. The other evidence, from the beginning, was the lack of any real evidence that Apple promised to bring it to external keyboards.

14

The TouchBar was an interesting idea that I don’t think works very well. Based on it’s location and appearance (and the way it replaced the function key row), it seems like it wants to be part of the keyboard, but it is completely jarring whenever I push the buttons on the TouchBar with my fingers. They expect it to feel like pressing a keyboard key, and instead it has zero physical feedback. It just feels wrong.

Furthermore, it mostly duplicates controls also available elsewhere (by design and by necessity, since not all Macs had a TouchBar), so it’s an additional place to look for a way to do something—I don’t want more places to search for actionable interface elements!

The one thing I do like about it is that its controls for adjusting volume & brightness are better than single press buttons and probably better than mouse- or touchpad-controlled sliders.

It might have done better if it were at the bottom of the screen rather than the top of the keyboard. But then you run into weird interface issues where only part of the screen is touch-sensitive, so that’s no good, either.

I can see the potential value of putting stuff that otherwise sits as icons in the menubar into the TouchBar instead. That seems like a better use to me than having a bunch of functions that constantly change as you switch between windows. If it didn’t replace the physical function keys, held all those always-present menu bar icons, and had a better “feel” for interacting (give it texture & haptic feedback like a touchpad), then maybe it would have been more successful?

15

I think you’ve got a key point here. Had Apple provided the Touch Bar (or something similar) in addition to the function keys instead of as a replacement for them, it might have been more useful.

One interesting variation on this theme is being sold by Asus. Several of their laptops offer a “ScreenPad”, where the trackpad doubles up as a secondary screen. It extends the desktop and can be used to dock things like full-screen apps and tool bars/palettes.

They also sell ZenBook Duo laptops, where there is an entire second (touch) display, between the keyboard and main display. Like the ScreenPad, it extends the desktop and can be used to dock application windows. In order to make room for the second screen, they moved the trackpad to the right of they keyboard where it can also double-up as a numeric keypad.

Both of these demonstrate variations on the touch-bar theme. I’d love to read about how well they work in practice, because they look really awesome in promotional photos.

16

I always wondered why they never integrated the touch bar into their Bluetooth keyboards, figured it had circuitry or other issues that required more than Bluetooth could reasonably offer.

17

If you had Better Touch Tool and Aqua Touch loaded, your function keys were one keystroke away.

The Touchbar is an amazing addition to the Mac and could be programmed using BTT and Aqua Touch to intuitively do whatever you wanted.

Apple’s software for the Touchbar was worse than awful. It did pretty much nothing.

I will now hold on to my 2018 MBP, keeping my Touchbar until I have no choice but to go to M1. And I will write to Tim Cook to ask that he bring back by u

Dumping the Touchbar because Apple was too dumb to fully exploit its capabilities will go down in Apple history as one of Apple’s worst decisions.

Before you disagree, download the free Better Touch Tool and Aqua Touch and check it out and see for yourself what Apole just took away.

18

When I was purchasing a replacement MBPro in 2018, I went out of my way to seek out a non-Touch Bar version, which as I recall was actually a few dollars more expensive. The ESC key is a muscle-memory staple for me, and while I don’t use all of the Function keys every day, I use them enough that I would miss them.

I’ve sometimes thought what Apple really wanted to do was individual keycaps whose legends would change based on language, context, or other criteria defined by software developers…like what you get on iOS.

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19

I’d love that as well. Unfortunately, every attempt at a physical keyboard with in-key displays has either been bad, expensive or both. And a purely virtual keyboard (e.g. giant touch screen) is also bad, because it becomes really difficult to touch-type when there are no physical keys.

I have seen this concept as a specialized keypad (e.g. Elgato Stream Deck), but it’s pretty pricey with only 15 buttons. It would probably become prohibitively expensive if they tried to make a 105-key version. (And buttons suitable for a control-deck are not likely to be comfortable for touch-typing.)

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20

I initially had great hopes for TouchBar. However, when Apple did not provide any way to extend it to the desktop, I lost hope that it would ever amount to much. Although an integrated Apple-branded keyboard would have been one way to do it, I think that a better solution would have been as a separate piece of hardware that could have been placed behind whatever keyboard you used.

As one who primarily uses an iMac, but also daily uses a MacBookPro, the fact that it never crossed over kept me from learning how to efficiently use it for most tasks. The one gesture that I really appreciated was the ability to reduce changing screen brightness and speaker volume each to one key, which, when held down, turned the rest of the TouchBar into a slider controlled by moving that finger.

21

That does sound better in many ways. However, it also means that something like this cannot happen:

Unless it was really one physical key but could somehow distinguish where you were touching when you engaged the key?

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22

The Steam Deck brings back a memory of a full sized oled keyboard about ten years ago. IIRC it was $1000 and reviews were not great. But the prices of small oleds are gradually coming down and there are a bunch of open source projects out there to build your own, so hopefully in the next few years interesting products that don’t break the bank will show up.

There’s an iPhone app version of Steam Deck, $25/year subscription. It talks to the Steam Deck desktop software, which is a free download, but they don’t explicitly say that you don’t need to have a desktop license to make it work. Probably worth a try.

Or you can roll your own solution via keyboard maestro and a midi controller, either hardware or an ios app (there are a bunch; I haven’t actually tried any yet). The apps give you control surfaces for mac apps. Some are set up specifically for a particular app such as final cut, and some are more open by letting you set up any sort of MIDI control surface. Most seem to connect over your choice of usb, bluetooth or wifi midi. Bluetooth midi is easy, I don’t know if wifi is.

Using midi is of course trivial if you’re talking to an audio program like garage band, but keyboard maestro knows how to do it too. Recognizing a straight keypress/note value is easy, but continuous activation of a button or using a slider look kind of hairy though should be possible in principle.

A hardware controller would have the advantage of tactile feedback. Most connect via usb, but for more money you can find some with bluetooth. A few examples:

iRig pad, $150, 16 pressure sensitive buttons that can have any of three colors, a slider, and two knobs

https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1056440-REG/ik_multimedia_ip_irig_pads_in_irig_pads_pad_style_midi.html

korg nanokey, $70 (if you just want a lot of buttons)

https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/767243-REG/Korg_NANOKEY2BK_nanoKEY2_Slim_Line_USB.html?sts=pi&pim=Y

korg nanopad, $80, 16 pressure sensitive buttons and one small trackpad

https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/767248-REG/Korg_NANOPAD2WH_nanoPAD2_Slim_Line_USB.html

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23

Or we can all en mass send an e-mail to Tim Cook asking him to not kill the Touch Bar. Too late for the new MacBook Pros, but nothing in the rules says they can’t bring it back just as they did with Mag Safe.

The new M1 Macs without TouchBar are not appealing. I don’t do video and don’t write code where faster speed helps compile or encode.

So I’m not buying, sticking with my 2018 MacBook Pro with 1 TB and 16 GB.

24

Yes. The Optimus Maximus. It was hyped, blogged and discussed for a very long time before it finally shipped and when it did, it (sadly) turned out to not be a very good keyboard. They never shipped any after the initial production run.

The Steam Deck does look similar, but since you’re using it to trigger actions in apps, not for typing, it will probably be more usable.

Art Lebedev’s web site also shows a concept (the Optimus Tactus) which is a giant touch screen that can double-up as a virtual keyboard. Sort of like a full-body Touch Bar. They never shipped this (don’t know if any were ever built). I suspect most people wouldn’t enjoy typing on one, and today such a device would have to compete against an app running on a connected tablet computer.

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25

That’s the issue – a feature that requires substantial after purchase programming to be useful is going to lose a lot of people right away.

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26

I’ve never seen a keyboard that needed its own Kensington lock socket, but that one would have fit the bill. And yes, that looks exactly like the kind of device that Steve Jobs would have thrown at the designers and engineers with a challenge to make something that he himself would use. The idea that the little screens were stationary and down deep in the keycaps so that they wouldn’t be damaged seems like just the thing he would have screamed about.

27

Though there is definitely a learning curve with the Touch Bar, I have grown to really like it:

  • Volume and brightness controls are more granular than the F-keys
  • When the system figures out which folder to use, it is a quick way to move an e-mail to a folder (it doesn’t learn very quickly or very well)
  • In the Apple Calendar, the Touch Bar allows me to jump to a specific month instead of scrolling. And, when the calendar refuses to scroll, then I have a way to get to a specific month (why does it sometimes not let me scroll up or down beyond the current month?).

I don’t use it as often as I could, but I use it more than I ever used the physical keys. I didn’t use them for much more than volume and brightness.

28

You are so right. The Touchbar was never properly supported by Apple’s
useless software.

BRT and AquaTouch are great products. Apple should have bought these
companies. The interface for set-up is not easy to use or master, but the
fact that out of the box it provides Touchbar support for so many apps
provides a preview of what it could do. And once set up, it works really
well. But I still struggle with the set-up.

For example, I want volume control via two-finger swipe to always be active
and I cannot figure out how to do that.

I use Luminar 4 to edit photos, and use a brush tool to set the diameter of
the brush I use to paint in masks. Super fast and easy with Touchbar, not
easy at all with the app and mouse.

If you like the Touchbar, you must bury Tim Cook in e-mails. Tcook@apple.com

Keep it short but make it clear that killing the Touchbar is a strategic
mistake.