The end of the MacBook Touch Bar

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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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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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.

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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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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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.

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.

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.