What is your current stance on the MacBook Pro's Touch Bar now that it has been refreshed?

[Yebubbleman]

Effectively there are two generations of the MacBook Pro Touch Bar. One with a digital touch Esc key and one with a physical Esc key. I'm curious as to whether or not your opinion of the Touch Bar changed from one generation to the next and in which direction.

Personally, I was always ambivalent on the first iteration of it; though I leaned much more on not liking it as soon as I needed to force-quit and app and found that I couldn't because the Touch Bar had also crashed. Plus Alt-CMD-Esc is so much more awkward from a tactile standpoint with the non-physical Esc key than it is with a physical one. I'm very cool with the current iteration of the Touch Bar for solving that problem while not otherwise being a hinderance. But I'd imagine that, at least on a subconscious level, a lot of my happiness stems from not having the butterfly keyboard.

What say you?

(Also, please vote in the poll!)

 

[BacioiuC]

I love the touchbar! Using it constantly in the normal mode and with pock to have my dock hidden. Touch and drag on it is amazing for controlling audio and brightness and I even wrote some custom controls for my tools to use it (doing game dev, and using the touchbar to control replays of my ai states and see why they took that decision).
Going to be sad to see it go.

 

[Stephen.R]

You've left out the option for "I've never used it, hardly ever used the function keys it replaced, but I heard someone else doesn't like it, so I'm gonna whine about it forever".

 

[impulse462]

It was a god awful idea in 2016 and still is a god awful idea now. It ruined how I used my computer. I use vim (this was fixed with addition of the revolutionary physical esc key, but its still weird) and used the function keys as well as routinely increased and decreased my volume and brightness of my display without having to look down at my keyboard.

The touchbar took all of that away from me, and on top of that it routinely crashes. Just an absolute disgusting addition, I hate it with every fiber of my being, especially since they put it on their flagship "pro" laptop. If they want to put this crap on the consumer notebooks fine, but not dont **** with how i get work done.

It's a shame because I actually like everything else about the 16", but once the new M1X (or whatever the new chip is) 16" comes out, i'm jumping ship to that, provided it doesn't have a touchbar. software compatibility be damned.

 

[cheddar-caveman]

About the only thing I use it for is inserting Emogies 😁 Is there another use?

 

[richinaus]

I am just of the opinion that it is better than fixed function keys.

neither love or hate it as they are extreme terms.

 

[Lihp8270]

Great idea that wasn’t well used by developers.

I like it when a software package uses it well.

 

[Yebubbleman]

I love the touchbar! Using it constantly in the normal mode and with pock to have my dock hidden. Touch and drag on it is amazing for controlling audio and brightness and I even wrote some custom controls for my tools to use it (doing game dev, and using the touchbar to control replays of my ai states and see why they took that decision).
Going to be sad to see it go.

It seems like it HAS utility, but requires customization to realize that utility, which is an up-front cost that most people are too busy to have to deal with. I personally didn't mind it when I was using the earlier iteration...except for the escape key not being physical. That DID inconvenience me on numerous occasions.

You've left out the option for "I've never used it, hardly ever used the function keys it replaced, but I heard someone else doesn't like it, so I'm gonna whine about it forever".

Fair point!

 

[Madonepro]

Great idea that wasn’t well used by developers.

I like it when a software package uses it well.

I totally agree with you here. Developers seemed to immediately dislike it, lost their function pokeys and couldn't be bothered to write code to support their apps.
I find it laughable when they say they have to look at the keyboard now to use the Touch Bar, but I have fairly long fingers, in surgeons terms, I wear a size 8 glove, and when typing, I cannot easily reach the function row without having to look, numbers are traditionally the hardest to learn when touch typing.
I too like the emoji feature on the Touch Bar, they are quite small to see normally, and some of the variances can be subtle. Better Touch Tool is good, but has a steep learning curve.

 

[applesed]

i don't want to look down when i'm typing. but i will when i'm adjusted volume. the slider is nice, but could live without it.

 

[BacioiuC]

It seems like it HAS utility, but requires customization to realize that utility, which is an up-front cost that most people are too busy to have to deal with. I personally didn't mind it when I was using the earlier iteration...except for the escape key not being physical. That DID inconvenience me on numerous occasions.

Fair point!

Yep, that’s where Apple dropped the ball. They should have made it easy to customise it. Something like shortcuts + easy to setup rules for what to be displayed in various app. Instead they left app devs do that and well… let me say that I didn’t do that for my own games and apps that I released. Touchbar could have been great for a lot of people - right now, the majority just see it as feedback-less keys.

And a ton of people don’t even know you can press and drag to slide controls, not tap and tap one more time to drag.

 

[mrt.plt]

The Touch Bar is certainly a nice addition for me, although I wouldn't pay for it had it been an add-on.
It's just nice to have shortcuts near the keyboard when you have an application open. And with the help of an app like BetterTouchTool, you can even get more out of it.
This is truly a first-world problem but it sure is nice to be able to turn up the keyboard brightness with the help of the touch bar as opposed to blindly searching for the brightness up key. The same applies to screen brightness and volume.
The physical Esc key is a nice upgrade over the OG Touch Bar and I like the updated Touch ID sensor as well.

 

[Fear12]

The only thing I like about it is the volume slider. Everything else I do not use or have no need to use.

 

[Squillace]

The Touch Bar is a good thing but highly neglected by Apple.

They should offer more customisation, introduction of widgets and things like that. Most of all, what bothers me the most is the limitation of 4 buttons in the Control Strip and the fact that it's tied to the right side of the keyboard. I would prefer having it in the left, because I often touch it's buttons when I'm typing and it's annoying.

So, yeah, giving the Touch Bar 'some' (!) BetterTouchTool possibilities would be nice.

But honestly what I'm super thrilled the most about is the idea of a keyboard with full OLED keys for 100% customisation and contextual keys. As long as the typing feeling remains comfortable.

 

[deeddawg]

I think at least some who still dislike the TB haven’t realized they can set it to display the classic hot keys via Sysprefs>Keyboard

I was one of them.

 

[Yebubbleman]

I totally agree with you here. Developers seemed to immediately dislike it, lost their function pokeys and couldn't be bothered to write code to support their apps.
I find it laughable when they say they have to look at the keyboard now to use the Touch Bar, but I have fairly long fingers, in surgeons terms, I wear a size 8 glove, and when typing, I cannot easily reach the function row without having to look, numbers are traditionally the hardest to learn when touch typing.
I too like the emoji feature on the Touch Bar, they are quite small to see normally, and some of the variances can be subtle. Better Touch Tool is good, but has a steep learning curve.

I can definitely see this. Apple tends to change the layout of the function keys on Macs that have them so that I can never keep track of which keys are where. Certainly I'm feeling that on the non-MacBook Pro M1 Mac keyboards when compared to the pre-Apple Silicon non-MacBook Pro function key layout. So, I always have to look anyway. I thought it was cool, but third party app (and/or Windows) support was always something that worried me about it.

I think at least some who still dislike the TB haven’t realized they can set it to display the classic hot keys via Sysprefs>Keyboard

I was one of them.

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This makes sense. I don't know that Apple really communicated much about it to users who were, at that point, already upset at the diminished quality control of the keyboards that first came with it. It's unfortunate.

 

[James Godfrey]

You know what will be hilarious if they remove the Touch Bar but don’t bring back function keys, obviously apple seem to hate the function keys for some random reason…

they didn’t even put them on the iPad Magic Keyboard…

In all honesty I don’t think Apple are going to get rid of it just yet…

 

[Squillace]

You know what will be hilarious if they remove the Touch Bar but don’t bring back function keys, obviously apple seem to hate the function keys for some random reason…

they didn’t even put them on the iPad Magic Keyboard…

In all honesty I don’t think Apple are going to get rid of it just yet…

Apart for power users, nobody uses function keys.

 

[ahostmadsen]

Apart for power users, nobody uses function keys.

To, me the function row key has always been mostly useless (only use it to rarely adjust volume). The touchbar is just a slightly more useful, so I prefer that.

 

[posguy99]

Apart for power users, nobody uses function keys.

I think that's obviously untrue, considering all the whinging you still hear about Apple changing the behavior of the media keys.

 

[Squillace]

I think that's obviously untrue, considering all the whinging you still hear about Apple changing the behavior of the media keys.

Uh... we should separate things when we talk about this. Functions keys are F1, F2, F3, F4, etc.
The alternative controls on the same keys are not, for me, "function keys".

Of course I'm not talking about media, brightness, Mission Control, volume, etc. Those are extremely useful and used by many. And I'm sure Apple will bring them back if the Touch Bar is gone.

 

[Madhatter32]

Touch bar was, and still is, a gimmick -- a solution to a problem that never existed. It is an example of what a company does when they are not actually innovating. As soon as they began to release some real innovative laptops in the form of the M1 laptops, they abandoned it for good reason.

 

[impulse462]

Uh... we should separate things when we talk about this. Functions keys are F1, F2, F3, F4, etc.
The alternative controls on the same keys are not, for me, "function keys".

Of course I'm not talking about media, brightness, Mission Control, volume, etc. Those are extremely useful and used by many. And I'm sure Apple will bring them back if the Touch Bar is gone.

When i was talking about them i referred to both the function keys and the media/brightness/volume etc. the latter were also especially ruined by the touchbar

Touch bar was, and still is, a gimmick -- a solution to a problem that never existed. It is an example of what a company does when they are not actually innovating. As soon as they began to release some real innovative laptops in the form of the M1 laptops, they abandoned it for good reason.

Great point

 

[poorcody]

Not only do I like it, I use it extensively: I have dozens of custom Touch Bars for various apps with many many macros. I am dreading its apparent demise.

That and running Windows under Parallels is probably going to keep me on this 16" for quite a while, despite being impressed by the M1.