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Jacoblee23

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Nov 10, 2011
1,482
736
I enjoyed customizing it on my m1. It is pretty handy if you get the customization on it in a way that suits your needs.
 

cycling_pete

macrumors member
Dec 8, 2020
60
89
For the brief time I was using an M1 MBP, I absolutely hated the touch bar compared to the physical keys on my 15 inch 2015 MBP. Everything from turning up and down the volume to simply pausing music took 5x as long with the touch bar. And then there was the constant accidental touches that dimmed the screen, turned up the volume, etc.... The touch bar will not be missed.
 
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James_C

macrumors 68030
Sep 13, 2002
2,847
1,897
Bristol, UK
Pretty much agree with @cycling_pete , I bought the widely hated 2016 MBP with the 1st Gen Butterfly keyboard and 1st Gen Touch Bar. Worst MBP I ever bought. Keyboard was horrible to use, and it was far to easy to accidentally hit the virtual Esc key. Touch Bar was doomed to failure when they did not release it on any other Mac, so if you use a desktop and a portable like me you have to change your workflow depending on which machine you are using. If you are a touch typist the Touch Bar is largely a waste of time as well.

When the M1 laptops were released last year, I bought a MBA for the first time, just to avoid the Touch Bar on the M1 13 MBP. Which has been a fantastic laptop, now going to my daughter as i will be getting the 16” MBP M1 Pro as they finally have dropped the Touch Bar (not that is the main reason I am upgrading).
 

Czo

macrumors 6502
Dec 30, 2008
437
274
Debrecen, Hungary
I loved it, because it's the easiest way to make that row of keys to dynamic. Ie when using Terminal/VNC/RDP and some not perfectly ported Linux/Windows applications i can configure it to show the plain F1-F12 keys and on any other apps i can configure it to use the default/app specific functionality (App Controls with Control Strip). Previusly (and when using external keyboard), i had to change the keyboard configuration when i hat to use the previusly mentioned apps mostly on that day, and i had to remember the current setting (what will happen when i press the F2? I will change the brigthness or opening the drive selector on the remote Windows machine?).
 

Wakey87433

macrumors regular
Jun 1, 2016
116
57
England
While Apple's implementation of it has been pretty shoddy I actually like the touch bar. As someone who uses both macs and PC's where many advanced shortcuts are different between the two and even the same piece of software on both can at times have subtle differences. And that's before you get to the fact to do the same job you might have to use 2 different pieces of software each with different shortcuts to do the same thing.

The only problem is Apple Decided to do the usually Apple thing and lock it down too much without using something like BTT. They should have looked at Elgato, the stream deck on my PC is perhaps the thing that saves me the most time because in its core software I can hook that into various third-party services to interact with them directly or can simply program in macros and shortcuts. If the preferences area had a touch bar section that was like the stream deck software allowing us to get creative and customise it as we saw fit it could be an amazing tool. As it was we were stuck with what Apple decided to stick us with or what the app devs wanted which most just did a half baked implementation (if they did at all) as the userbase just wasn't big enough to justify diverting resources
 
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