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Touch Bar Fully Discontinued on New MacBooks After Seven Years
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I'll miss it... Besides being a novel way to interact with a computer, it had some good intentions and tried to bring the dynamic touch interface from smartphones to the static old keyboard concept... perhaps had no right to replace the Escape key (was fixed after some generations) plus the Function keys and should've been instead another new row on top of the usual keyboard layout... Maybe for future models...
Absolutely. Just like I waited pretty long with my MacBook Pro 2012 to have Apple come back to their senses and get rid of the silly Touch Bar and re-introduce proper ports on a laptop, indeed I do see cars now doing the exact mistakes: removing physical buttons and knobs.
That might make sense on a phone, hence the iPhone and all its followers en copy cats, but not when you are driving 260 km/h on the highway.
I hate the Touch Bar so much. This MBP is not a Mac with an added display/controller, it's just a Mac without function keys. It sucks 3 years running and I'm gonna trade the heck out of it. Good riddance Touch Bar,.
DING DONG THE WITCH IS DEAD
Good riddance to that worthless gimmick. Now sure, the touch bar had SOME cases of usefulness, like fast timeline scrolling in video editors or quick access to effects and transitions, or on Photoshop having the color palette accessible at all times was neat. But outside of those two fringe cases, the entire thing made the computer objectively worse. No tactile feedback, increasing thoughtput in simple tasks like adjusting the volume and brightness, absolutely useless in other operating systems, and just the idea of your function key row being software bound by a touch bar was a horrible idea.
The new M3 14 inch Macbook Pro ushers in a new age for the Mac, as the last remnant of the Cursed Jony Ive Era is finally gone (well except for the awful Magic Mouse with it's charging port being on the bottom. That stain remains)
Good riddance to that worthless gimmick. Now sure, the touch bar had SOME cases of usefulness, like fast timeline scrolling in video editors or quick access to effects and transitions, or on Photoshop having the color palette accessible at all times was neat. But outside of those two fringe cases, the entire thing made the computer objectively worse. No tactile feedback, increasing thoughtput in simple tasks like adjusting the volume and brightness, absolutely useless in other operating systems, and just the idea of your function key row being software bound by a touch bar was a horrible idea.
The new M3 14 inch Macbook Pro ushers in a new age for the Mac, as the last remnant of the Cursed Jony Ive Era is finally gone (well except for the awful Magic Mouse with it's charging port being on the bottom. That stain remains)
I have the OG M1 MacBook Pro from a few years ago and it has the TouchBar and I generally like it - at worst, I am ambivalent towards it. It is there, I use it sometimes, other times it just exists.
Can someone please explain to me where there is such a pure, visceral hatred towards the TouchBar? If you don’t like it - just don’t use it?
Can someone please explain to me where there is such a pure, visceral hatred towards the TouchBar? If you don’t like it - just don’t use it?
To each their own but I for one was glad Ives was there to design the Powerbook G4 12, still one of my most favorite machines I ever owned.
I never got to use a mac with a touchbar, other than just a few mins at the Apple store. It seemed like a decent idea, and with the escape key moved to a real key, after some time, and infinitely customizable.
What was so bad about it?
What was so bad about it?
They could've kept it on the 14 inch by just putting the Touch Bar above the function keys.
I find whenever I'm using my work machine with the TouchBar, half the time I touch a key (like volume or brightness), they don't register. Call me old fashioned but I prefer the tactility of a physical button.
That whole generation was a hot mess. glad apple stepped it up and fixed it with the new m series
I always thought they should have put it on everything, or nothing. I thought it was a cool idea but I knew it would be underutilized and wouldn’t last if it was a special case for developers to worry about.
Removed tactile function keys. Not really all that useful for most people. Would cause hardware failures.
Dynamic Island is not a permanent feature. It is a way of trying to make the notch more functional. It’s fundamentally different than 3D Touch (which is the biggest flop that Apple had in my view because it would’ve vastly improved the experience of the iPhone X line but created a new problem: force people to learn a completely new system that would’ve been a barrier to adoption, or scale it back. Apple went towards scaling it back and then decided to eat the loss, but if they made its use robust on the X line, I feel it would’ve vastly improved the experience and pulling it was “schizophrenic”).
And part of this is style. To get 3D Touch to make sense would’ve probably required skeuomorphism. And that’s where the change after Steve died mattered: considering roadmaps, it’s quite likely that it was already in development by the time the iPhone 4s was released. It certainly would’ve been in development by the time Scott Forstall was fired. And Apple fundamentally moved away from that direction at that time in software development leaving the tech essentially an orphan. Importantly, it’s not obsolete, and probably will never be obsolete, even if it isn’t ever used. Same with the Touch Bar. Dynamic Island will assuredly be obsolete and sooner than later. A phone without a cutout as we think of it won’t need dynamic island. Though it could probably be built with a 3D Touch array if Apple wanted to spend the money and do that. But that would require the admission of a lot of mistakes for something the consumer isn’t asking for, which would cost millions of dollars to put into newer phones. It’s dead in all likelihood but would very much compliment the current phone (although it might be incompatible with under the screen cameras and sensors, so possible there is a future roadblock, who knows).
I love physical buttons and hate my touch screen. But, at the same time, Musk had a point about it being rigidly designed, and in my opinion, they too weren’t great. I’d have a ton of dead switches in my car and I have ADHD. So I can appreciate the lack thereof. But…physical buttons are likely better most of the time. The lack of physical buttons in the car saves money. I’m not sure it did in the laptop (cheap connectors and slave labor sounds cheaper than a light bar) so that’s probably not the motivator (differentiation), but it was also a ridiculous way of not giving us touch screen laptops (which do not differentiate Apple from Lenovo if it adopted).
I would’ve probably integrated the LEDs into the trackpad and left the function keys, but that’s why those guys at Apple got paid the stock options. They know best. And I probably would flop if they hired me.
A lot of things surprisingly:
- No function key row. This rubbed so many people the wrong way especially touch typists. The touchbar had NO haptic feedback whatsoever and a lot of functions were buried in submenus so simple tasks like adjusting volume and brightness had more steps than needed and increased thoughtput
- No one used it. Outside of a couple programs like Final Cut and Adobe Photoshop, the touch bar wasn't used at all by third party software developers, which made the sting of not having a function key row even harder
- The thing was useless when using any operating system other than macOS. If you had Windows installed through Boot Camp or were using Linux, congrats you gotta press more buttons just to use function keys
- And just the idea of having the function key row buttons bound to software via the touch bar was a horrible idea, because if the OS froze congrats you can't use your function key row anymore as it's just software in the touch bar. Or if the touch bar broke now you're without your function key row, versus a keyboard where if one key broke you could just fix that individual key and still have the rest of the function key row still there.
Even though I wasn’t a fan of it and I am not sad in the slightest to see it go, at least they tried something new. You can’t innovate without trying
Well yeah, because I’ll expect everything to go under display. But that doesn’t mean the UI has to go. It’s pretty sleek and it will be even better if it didn’t have the notch taking space.
I belong to this exotic minority that actually liked the concept, and by and all also its implementation.
Though its application was limited, it could save quite a few mouse clicks. Should Apple ever come up with an external keyboard with built-in TouchBar I‘d probably buy one. (Yes, I know, not going to happen.)
Though its application was limited, it could save quite a few mouse clicks. Should Apple ever come up with an external keyboard with built-in TouchBar I‘d probably buy one. (Yes, I know, not going to happen.)