RIP Touch Bar MacBooks

[maflynn]

A nice retrospective of Apple's failed touchbar MBP.

I remember being active in this sub-forum, and the hubub with the defective keyboard, people loving or hating the touchbar, the lack of ports.

My opinion with this class of machines - apple truly missed the mark, not sure why but by and large, folks just didn't fall in love with the changes. I know with Intel resting on their laurels didn't help matters and Luke mentions in the video but overall Apple tried to push changes through that were not well received.

 

[Corefile]

I worked at a Mac shop back then with a 2015 MBP. Some of the infra guys got the latest and shiniest gadgets but it was immediately apparent the keyboard keys would get stuck or stop if you dropped stuff on them. Other issues were lack of real ESC key which was the deal breaker. I also think these were USB-C only which meant dongles galore. Then the actual touchscreen just seemed like a solution in search of a problem. I held onto my 2015 MBP until the bitter end in 2019 then quit.

 

[maflynn]

hen the actual touchscreen just seemed like a solution in search of a problem.

I remember saying that ad nauseam here

 

[salamanderjuice]

I worked at a Mac shop back then with a 2015 MBP. Some of the infra guys got the latest and shiniest gadgets but it was immediately apparent the keyboard keys would get stuck or stop if you dropped stuff on them. Other issues were lack of real ESC key which was the deal breaker. I also think these were USB-C only which meant dongles galore. Then the actual touchscreen just seemed like a solution in search of a problem. I held onto my 2015 MBP until the bitter end in 2019 then quit.

I didn't mind the USB C only nature. The Touch Bar sucked though, at least for my use case. Added nothing and at one point I literally had to add a blank spacer to the Touch Bar to ensure I didn't tap anything by accident when hovering over delete.

A regular touch screen is far more useful and far more versatile.

 

[FreakinEurekan]

Since it never made its way to Desktop Macs, it was doomed from the start IMO. Too many of us move back & forth between portables and desktop Macs.

 

[maflynn]

Since it never made its way to Desktop Macs, it was doomed from the start IMO

While the lack of a desktop keyboard was a large omission, I don't think that was the cause of its demise.

• Increased complexity, whether we're talking about taking our eyes off to make sure we're hitting F3, or needing to change the display to get to the function keys. There was no real added benefit
• Many of the items in the touchbar could be handled more effecicently with shortcuts or even the mouse
• Lack of adoption, apple hoped more companies would jump on board, but other then adobe, (and microsoft?), it really wasn't adopted.
• dedicated function keys, I recall you could set it so the function keys are displayed 100% but then what benefit is having that touchbar.
• Lack of an esc key

There were people who liked it, and for them that was a nice addition, but I think for the majority of Mac fans, they didn't and for the general consumer it seemed the general consensus was its just a gimmick

 

[theluggage]

There were people who liked it, and for them that was a nice addition

If it had been an addition, rather than a replacement for the function & escape keys it might have fared a bit better.

My opinion with this class of machines - apple truly missed the mark, not sure why but by and large, folks just didn't fall in love with the changes.

Seems like it was designed in an echo chamber, with nobody listening to critical voices.
It was also peak "the future is phones and tablets" time, and peak "thinner is better" time.

Really is a trifecta of misses.

Strike one: touchbar instead of function keys, because everybody needed a touch of iPad on their laptop.

Strike two: the butterfly keyboard, because thinner is better... even if it had worked reliably, the feel was too love it/hate it to have as the only keyboard option on Mac laptops. Really, really silly because the previous "chiclet" keyboard was a near-perfect (and much copied) compromise between thickness and feel (once you accept that you're not going to get a full-travel keyboard in an ultrabook). Even the later scissor mechanism in the Tragic Keyboard and later MacBooks is a shadow of the old Unibody/Aluminium keyboard. Probably costs 50c less to make, though :-(

Strike three: too much USB-C too soon. Replacing the two TB2/MiniDP ports on the old MBP with USB-C/TB3 ports would have been a good upgrade, worth buying new VGA/DisplayPort dongles for - if the MagSafe, HDMI,SD and USB-A ports had stayed. Removing them all overnight was just an expensive headache. I guess it created a demand for USB-C products, problem is 90% of those turned out to be adapters/docks that just brought back the so-called "legacy" ports...

 

[Fishrrman]

From the beginning, the touchbar seemed like a solution to a non-existent problem.
You just knew that it was destined to go the way of the butterfly keyboard...

 

[FreakinEurekan]

While the lack of a desktop keyboard was a large omission, I don't think that was the cause of its demise.
...

• Lack of adoption, apple hoped more companies would jump on board, but other then adobe, (and microsoft?), it really wasn't adopted.

Adoption is the final nail, but IMO the REASON it wasn't adopted is that it simply wasn't on desktop Macs, which is where a huge percentage of content creators work. I know it got some features for DJ use, which is commonly done from a portable. Beyond that I never heard much about it at all... I did have a 2019 model with the Touch Bar, but I mostly used it with an external keyboard anyway so barely ever looked at it.

 

[aries81]

I thought it was rather cool, but hardly ever used it.

 

[theluggage]

Adoption is the final nail, but IMO the REASON it wasn't adopted is that it simply wasn't on desktop Macs, which is where a huge percentage of content creators work.

Nor was there any way to use it with older Macs.

Which is where Sidecar could have come to the rescue by letting you use an iPad or iPhone as a custom button pad, but ISTR that didn’t appear for a few years.

Seems like Apple put the cart before the horse - start as an iDevice app to generate demand and support, *then* building the functionality into a laptop might have encouraged people to upgrade.

 

[maflynn]

I thought it was rather cool, but hardly ever used it.

Oh don't get me wrong it looked cool, and the presentation was slick, but as I mentioned it was a solution in search of a problem. It replaced functional keys and as its replacement made things more cumbersome.

 

[aries81]

Think the main gripe with it was that you'd have to actually look down on it, whereas most people keep looking at the screen and typing blindly.

 

[theluggage]

Think the main gripe with it was that you'd have to actually look down on it, whereas most people keep looking at the screen and typing blindly.

Yet there seems to be a market for this sort of thing:

LOGICKEYBOARD KEYBOARD Apple Final Cut Pro X, European English, MacBook Keyboard Cover

73-9781 | LOGICKEYBOARD COMPUTER EDITING KEYBOARDS | The majority of video, audio and graphic editing computer software have numerous keyboard commands to carry out the application functions. Logickeyboard customised keyboards are program specific…

www.canford.co.uk

That's going to be a great help for someone learning a complex app - until muscle memory cuts in. A 'dynamic' label for real function keys might have been a better call than the touch bar.

I think the problem was what they took away, not what they added.

 

[edubfromktown]

I remember saying that ad nauseam here

I have a 2-in-1 touch screen Chromebook and do not intentionally use that feature. Occurs accidentally sometimes when my hand bumps into the display.

By the same token: owned one touchbar 13" MBP (got a great deal on it). It was gimmicky cool and otherwise lacked any tangible benefits.

 

[Timpetus]

I still have my 2016 15" MBP, and it still works great. Keyboard was a little sticky for a while, but that's my fault - spilled a bit of a sugary drink on it by mistake. Fixed that when I got a new battery under AC+, thank you Apple for swapping the whole top case!

I had a love/hate relationship with the touch bar. It was mostly annoying when I was playing windows games, because some of the games I play make heavy use of the function keys or at least the escape key, and not being able to hit it quickly by feel gets frustrating. On the other hand, the ease of fine volume control came in handy when playing keyboards using MainStage. The touch bar really shone when using Apple's apps for playing media or editing photos/video.

The design was always nice, I didn't mind that it was slim and USB-C only. Only had to use dongles occasionally, because I just kept a cheap hub at work that added everything I needed to connect to my mouse and keyboard setup there.

 

[chrono1081]

I found the Touch Bar incredibly useful. If they ever brought it back I'd buy it in a heartbeat. I think the big issue is most people don't use their computers as heavy as they claim they do so to them it was a gimmick with emojis. For me it was a bunch of shortcut keys I'd never remember otherwise that I could just tap away at in Xcode, or Final Cut, Affinity, or <insert app here that supports it>.

I think if it was easier to customize for the end users (like saving a document in it for instant one touch access, or programming shortcut keys, etc) it would be much more useful.

 

[CyberDavis]

I had a 2017 MacBook Pro with Touch Bar until I recently upgraded.

To be fair the USB-C only element didn’t bother me. I thought it made more sense to have USB-C than an older port which would have fallen out of use.
It never became an issue, yes I a few dongles but it was not a problem.

The Touch Bar was ok, I used it a bit.
It would not have bothered me if it was not there, but having it was occasionally useful.

And my keyboard worked ok, so no problem there.
Yes, the keyboard on my new/refurbished M2 MacBook Pro is better, but the old one worked ok.

I guess they took a misstep, and fixed it subsequently.

 

[Allen_Wentz]

A nice retrospective of Apple's failed touchbar MBP.

I remember being active in this sub-forum, and the hubub with the defective keyboard, people loving or hating the touchbar, the lack of ports.

My opinion with this class of machines - apple truly missed the mark, not sure why but by and large, folks just didn't fall in love with the changes. I know with Intel resting on their laurels didn't help matters and Luke mentions in the video but overall Apple tried to push changes through that were not well received.

Sorry but I do not watch clickbait videos.

I have a 2016 MBP and found the touchbar to be very useful. The keyboard was problematic but Apple fixed it a couple of times. That MBP was used every day until I replaced it with an M2 MBP and it still works fine despite the limiting 16 GB of RAM.

 

[throAU]

My opinion with this class of machines - apple truly missed the mark, not sure why but by and large, folks just didn't fall in love with the changes. I know with Intel resting on their laurels didn't help matters and Luke mentions in the video but overall Apple tried to push changes through that were not well received.

I avoided the Touch Bar models because:

• keyboard reliability problems
• extra expense for something I didn't want:
  • the Touch Bar added a few hundred dollars to the price, for something that I felt was objectively worse: touch based controls offer no haptive feedback, and you can't "feel" for something without activating it like with a physical key
  • I'm a unix guy and edit with VI, they took away my physical escape key
  • did I mention being asked to pay an extra 200-300 dollars for this?
• I'm already looking at the SCREEN not at the keyboard, so putting changing controls on a display that's not on the screen that I need to look at to see what they do.... just needs me to take eyes off the screen... not good

The Touch Bar was a side project "solution" to a problem that didn't exist, adding additional expense on top of already compromised value due to the keyboard issues at the time.

For people who don't know the keyboard intimately and perhaps do a job that isn't so focused on using the keyboard.... maybe? But they should have added it instead of stealing the function row and the escape key.


If the butterfly keyboard wasn't such a disaster, I could maybe have tolerated it at half of the additional cost, but the combination is what made me hold off upgrading from my 2015 machine until 2020.

 

[maflynn]

Sorry but I do not watch clickbait videos.

Its not click bait and coincidentally, the title lf this thread is the same as the YT, so you technically if this is click bait you already succumbed. Either way, you may not have enjoyed the YT if the 2016 (and beyond) MBP is something you feel is an excellent machine, but it does highlight the short comings of the laptop and its informative but if you're not interested that's fine, no skin off my nose

I have a 2016 MBP and found the touchbar to be very useful.

That's fine, I've said all along that there are people who liked it, yet its clear they were in the minority. Its clear to most people it did not increase one's efficiency, but decreased. It may have worked for some but overall it was a failure.

 

[memento mori]

Even though these TB MBPs were very flawed, they just look so much better than the current M chip offerings. I don’t know if it’s the thickness, or the weird proportions, or the ugly notch but the new ones are just not that nice looking. Hopefully the redesign will be better.

 

[Madonepro]

I was one of those that liked the TouchBar, and downloaded BetterTouch Tool to enhance it. I also enjoyed the presentation of emojis, as my eyes struggle with he tiny icons normally. Sadly Apple did nothing with it, and it just lay dormant, being ridiculed not improved. Things like scrolling and pausing YT shorts was useful, and when editing, watching movies, it was good to 'rub' the timeline.

 

[haralds]

I am replacing my MacBook Pro M1 13" with a nicely configured M4. If it were available, I would have chosen the TouchBar. I will miss it.

 

[Kevin Palser]

My take: I get Touch Bar hatters but I don't agree with them.

I had a 2016 MacBook Pro and rarely used the Touch Bar feeling it was a bit of gimmick. But then something happened between buying a 2021 16" MacBook Pro M1 Max and last month. This year I saw a colleague, who was a newbie to Macs, embracing her 13" Mac Book Pro in a way that I never had.

First up she had a Mac with a physical escape key and a Touch Bar - Apple had listened and learned for later models.

Secondly, I saw the details that that are normally skipped over when arguments were asserted against the Touch Bar:

• auto completion suggestions like an iOS/iPadOS virtual keyboard
• more granular stepping on slide controls for things like brightness and volume than the physical key steps
• hints that would come up like the arrow to the adjacent Touch ID button during its setup
• etc for all the raw flexibility

So, I sat back and tried to take an objective look at something that I hadn't missed before and realised that Apple's implementation was undervalued. Forward a month, I asked my company to acquire an 13" MacBook Pro M2 because I found myself missing something I thought I never would and have used its Touch Bar features a couple of times whilst typing this message.

I hope Apple will resurrect it in the future the way that they did with MagSafe (irony that this M2 model does not have it unlike my M1 Max). But if they do so I hope it is an option because I still get the hatters.