Have you actually used the Touch Bar? Did the person you responded to use the Touch Bar? My guess is no. I used it and it works great for me. Are we really that closed minded?
I „used“ the touchbar over the course of 2 years. What I didn’t mention is that I actually was a huge fan of the idea from the very beginning. I really tried to make it work for a couple of months, but ultimately I gave up and saw no utility in it other than occasionally making a CTA easier to reach.
The problems with the touchbar are manyfolded: It lacks both feedforward and feedback within the action cycle. Latter can be solved with haptic feedback, but I don’t know whether the former is solvable at all. So far the only solution I see is to make the TouchBar out of physical keys, which loops back to the whole idea of making a keyboard out of OLED screencaps. Other than that we‘re talking about future technology way out of reach for now.
The next problem is the inconsistencies in contextual behavior. Sometimes the touchbar sticks with the same actions over a ridiculously huge scope, making it basically useless since it only exposes actions that people already know well through shortcuts. Other times it would jump on seemingly irrelevant occasions into a new state, making it even harder to memorize the patterns than learn the shortcuts in the first place.
The problems that the touchbar tries to solve are 1) accessibility of features hidden behind shortcuts and 2) bringing touch intuitiveness into controls with value ranges. The touchbar tackles the latter problem acceptably, would profit from a bigger screen area though for stuff like color pickers.
It doesn’t solve the first problem at all though, which is, as I assume, the main value of it. And that’s because of the lack of muscle memory. See, all the issues I mentioned before — feedforward, feedback, predictability — make it basically impossible to memorize the patterns and execute them reliably. For productivity, all what matters is what’s in your brain. Your subconsciousness then communicates your intents through your body to the device. But since that’s impossible, you end up wasting cognitive resources on repetitive ********. Therefore, you’re better of learning the keyboard shortcuts in the first place.
That leaves the touchbar with only two usable areas: 1) Sliders and 2) Actions that you very rarely use and don’t know of. And since the touchbars uselessness makes you ignore it in the first place, you might not even notice the second use case.
On top of all of that, beyond being of not much use, the touchbar triggers at least 10 times a day accidentally, because the force threshold of triggering it is basically 0, contrary to a traditional key. I don’t know how often I pressed escape or Siri on accident, making me swear because it took me out of my flow. It takes like a good 10 seconds to get back into the zone again. Over time, that sums up..
I didn’t even go into the fact, that during my second year I spent 80% of my time working at the office with a big screen, where there was no possibility of having a Touch Bar. Even if Apple would’ve solved all the other issues, the lack of the Touchbar on the Magic Keyboard alone will already keep a lot of people from building a solid muscle memory.
Apple needs to get its **** together if they want to make the Touchbar — which is a great idea all in all — succeed. And the 16“ would be great starting point to make a statement...
