As someone who actually really liked my Touch Bar, the only problem I had with it was that it replaced a row of keyboard keys. If they had simply put it above my F keys instead of trying to replace them I think the world would have learned to love it like I did.
It replaced a well-known decades-old paradigm of engage-only-on-user-input buttons with a glowing slider that would always engage out of turn. I can't count the number of times I reached for numbers, only to be greeted with the whatever random function the application and context decided it was relevant there. And of course, whenever I reached for the ESC key, it would never register it properly, because if you're trying to quickly back out or interrupt software that's misbehaving, the touchbar software also had to run on the same CPU and could become totally unresponsive to input. All of this doesn't even begin to describe the rage of being in the middle of words and sentences and realizing your screen has been doing random shit for the last 10 seconds because your fingers accidentally swiped or hovered a 1px portion and activated the $USELESS_FUNCTION slot machine (I do have big hands and long fingers).
I hated it from the first ghost touch back in 2019 until my work Mac was replaced with an M3 in 2024, and after they added some customization settings, I basically disabled all the "glossy and touchy" functionality and set it to display the FN keys regardless of application or context. Then I mapped pressing FN to show brightness control + audio mute/down/up. And even then the occasional F10 or F11 accidental swipe was always a possibility, although way less rage-inducing.
The immediate problems were software, but the hardware was what doomed it and I don’t see how they didn’t see that from the start. It could never be in all their products (e.g. iMac, well, without requiring a wired keyboard but that was never going to happen) so it could never be more than an accessory.
I think they realized that too late. It’s a shame though. In a MacBook-only world, I wonder what would have become of it.
It could absolutely have been in an iMac's wireless keyboard; witness the "Sidecar" macOS feature that allows use of an iPad as an external display for a Mac.
Both? The missing Escape was a hardware disaster, but unrealized potential and UI issues was a software one. Though not having multitouch is also hardware.
> and the volume would also appear in the old HUD on the screen, altogether feeling like different parts of the system weren’t aware of each other.
As it should: first, you can cover the slider with your finger, so the level reading becomes hidden. Second, why would you look at the slider instead of the screen where all the other useful information is?
They actually have ESC key with a later update. Although I thought it was too late. They should have done it the next year after first Touch Bar was introduced. I believe that is not because product designer don't want to change but some part of the supply chain / operation don't want to waste money on new design so quickly.
That era started with Window 8 when Microsoft wanted the same UI and UX on laptops and tablets. Amalgamation of physical keys with touch screens. Apple's Touch Bar was somehow a symptom or even culmination of it. It's over and let's forget it ever existed.
Automotive seems to have its Windows 8 moment right now.
If they had had individual keys with screens instead of the Touch Bar I think everyone would have been happy. Have it default to a normal function row but give people the option to customize, let apps customize it behind a modifier key, etc.
The only real function would have been to have customizable icons in that case because you can already assign shortcuts to different functions keys and per app contexts with apps like Hammerspoon
It removed the physical function keys, which is a huge no-no overall. The initial version also lacked a physical Esc key.
But the bigger issue was the notion that it was created in spite of having a conventional touchscreen on the laptop instead. Apple has been rather weird, petty, and immature about putting touch on Macs, stemming from Jobs' ill-conceived "your arm gets tired if you have touch on a laptop, boo hoo" speech which has never been correct and continues to be misconstrued as scientific when it isn't.
Luckily, the market soundly rejected the Touch Bar and Apple is now due to release Macs with proper touch on them. It took a while, but this era of pretentiousness is over.
The main objection to touch on MacBooks so far is the software, by far. Apple may now, just about, be in a place where they could support it due to Catalyst, Apple Silicon and some of the latest UI changes in Tahoe. Back then, when they released the touch bar, they weren’t even close. Neither was Windows, though they shipped it anyway.
> Apple is now due to release Macs with proper touch on them.
I'll believe this one when I see it. "The Year of the Touchscreen Mac" has been confidently predicted for almost as long as "The Year of the Linux Desktop."
We're starting to see software-level touch support, things like screen mirroring being able to accept touch from iPads rather than only pen. So we are at least closer than we've ever been.
Wasn't the Touch Bar just a sneaky way for Apple to mess around with ARM coprocessing and other ARM-based macguffins in production?
We went from Touch Bar + T2 to Apple Silicon pretty quick. The Touch Bar was the user-facing toy to drive adoption, then they just dropped the bar and kept T2 as they built out more functions in it being taken over from Intel hardware.
It's like how the iPhone Air is just a test device for the iPhone Ultra's hardware capabilities and the 16e was a device to test the C1 modem. Apple's short lived "experimental production" products.
The TouchBar's problem was both hardware and software. Because of its poor affordance for text labels it typically only allowed Mystery Meat UI[0]. If you labeled a button it ate up surface area and prevented a dense interface. Because it was constantly in flux you couldn't develop any muscle memory for it. It didn't help that the icons most apps used were inscrutable flat bullshit sigils.
It was made worse since desktop keyboards lacked the feature so you couldn't practice/learn the UI on anything but MacBooks. Keyboard shortcuts were far more useful since they worked on any Mac and whether or not you were using an external keyboard.
That lack of external keyboard support also meant developers couldn't write decent interfaces for the TouchBar unless they had the right MacBook. The simulator was not sufficient to actually test real world usage for positioning/ergonomics.
I found it to be a top to bottom failure of a feature. Small OLED screens on physical buttons would have been far superior ergonomically. Using the space for better cooling on the i7 and i9s would have been a much much better use of that space.
BetterTouchTool cleverly let one trigger the trackpad haptics when using custom Touchbar configs. With the haptics set to high, you could really feel it. It made a huge difference.
I don't think native haptic support would have been enough to save the Touchbar, but like the author I'm a little surprised that Apple didn't even try it.
I'm pretty much convinced they knew it was doomed before it was even released.
I would say no.
As someone who actually really liked my Touch Bar, the only problem I had with it was that it replaced a row of keyboard keys. If they had simply put it above my F keys instead of trying to replace them I think the world would have learned to love it like I did.
No, the biggest problem was the hardware.
It replaced a well-known decades-old paradigm of engage-only-on-user-input buttons with a glowing slider that would always engage out of turn. I can't count the number of times I reached for numbers, only to be greeted with the whatever random function the application and context decided it was relevant there. And of course, whenever I reached for the ESC key, it would never register it properly, because if you're trying to quickly back out or interrupt software that's misbehaving, the touchbar software also had to run on the same CPU and could become totally unresponsive to input. All of this doesn't even begin to describe the rage of being in the middle of words and sentences and realizing your screen has been doing random shit for the last 10 seconds because your fingers accidentally swiped or hovered a 1px portion and activated the $USELESS_FUNCTION slot machine (I do have big hands and long fingers).
I hated it from the first ghost touch back in 2019 until my work Mac was replaced with an M3 in 2024, and after they added some customization settings, I basically disabled all the "glossy and touchy" functionality and set it to display the FN keys regardless of application or context. Then I mapped pressing FN to show brightness control + audio mute/down/up. And even then the occasional F10 or F11 accidental swipe was always a possibility, although way less rage-inducing.
> the touchbar software also had to run on the same CPU
It actually ran on the separate T1 CPU.
I ended up putting insulating tape across mine.
The immediate problems were software, but the hardware was what doomed it and I don’t see how they didn’t see that from the start. It could never be in all their products (e.g. iMac, well, without requiring a wired keyboard but that was never going to happen) so it could never be more than an accessory.
I think they realized that too late. It’s a shame though. In a MacBook-only world, I wonder what would have become of it.
It could absolutely have been in an iMac's wireless keyboard; witness the "Sidecar" macOS feature that allows use of an iPad as an external display for a Mac.
Battery life was more what I was getting at. You’d basically have to have it plugged in and I couldn’t see Apple going for that.
Both? The missing Escape was a hardware disaster, but unrealized potential and UI issues was a software one. Though not having multitouch is also hardware.
> and the volume would also appear in the old HUD on the screen, altogether feeling like different parts of the system weren’t aware of each other.
As it should: first, you can cover the slider with your finger, so the level reading becomes hidden. Second, why would you look at the slider instead of the screen where all the other useful information is?
>The missing Escape was a hardware disaster,
They actually have ESC key with a later update. Although I thought it was too late. They should have done it the next year after first Touch Bar was introduced. I believe that is not because product designer don't want to change but some part of the supply chain / operation don't want to waste money on new design so quickly.
That era started with Window 8 when Microsoft wanted the same UI and UX on laptops and tablets. Amalgamation of physical keys with touch screens. Apple's Touch Bar was somehow a symptom or even culmination of it. It's over and let's forget it ever existed.
Automotive seems to have its Windows 8 moment right now.
I had completely forgotten this existed. Despite adding bettertouchtool I never found a single useful thing to do with it.
If they had had individual keys with screens instead of the Touch Bar I think everyone would have been happy. Have it default to a normal function row but give people the option to customize, let apps customize it behind a modifier key, etc.
Yes, there was a lot of buzz about a keyboard like that from Art Lebedev* for several years prior to Apple's touch bar.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimus_Maximus_keyboard
The only real function would have been to have customizable icons in that case because you can already assign shortcuts to different functions keys and per app contexts with apps like Hammerspoon
No, you lose the best part - sliding!
But their only usecase that I remember was a touch sliding bar.
I don't know if that would have worked as individual buttons.
They had room to put the touchbar above a physical set of function keys with a real escape key and power button.
Many of times I slipped off the delete key and hit F11 to zoom the window.
I loved Touch Bar. I hated missing functional keys. They attempted to fix it by reintroducing physical escape key, but it was not enough.
No, it was just plainly a bad idea.
It removed the physical function keys, which is a huge no-no overall. The initial version also lacked a physical Esc key.
But the bigger issue was the notion that it was created in spite of having a conventional touchscreen on the laptop instead. Apple has been rather weird, petty, and immature about putting touch on Macs, stemming from Jobs' ill-conceived "your arm gets tired if you have touch on a laptop, boo hoo" speech which has never been correct and continues to be misconstrued as scientific when it isn't.
Luckily, the market soundly rejected the Touch Bar and Apple is now due to release Macs with proper touch on them. It took a while, but this era of pretentiousness is over.
The main objection to touch on MacBooks so far is the software, by far. Apple may now, just about, be in a place where they could support it due to Catalyst, Apple Silicon and some of the latest UI changes in Tahoe. Back then, when they released the touch bar, they weren’t even close. Neither was Windows, though they shipped it anyway.
What does Apple Silicon have to do with this, or are you saying that touch screens are impossible without that level of "innovation"?
It allows iPad apps to run natively on macOS. Before Catalyst and later Apple Silicon, there were no touch-native apps for macOS.
> Apple is now due to release Macs with proper touch on them.
I'll believe this one when I see it. "The Year of the Touchscreen Mac" has been confidently predicted for almost as long as "The Year of the Linux Desktop."
We're starting to see software-level touch support, things like screen mirroring being able to accept touch from iPads rather than only pen. So we are at least closer than we've ever been.
...and that just triggered a memory of the ModBook, a pre-iPad aftermarket conversion service that turned white MacBooks into large tablets:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modbook
I love the touch bar on my M2 and I'm sad that more software isn't aware of it.
In my own applications I often put common functions on the touch bar and I like the convenience of it in that way.
I think most people simply don't use the F-keys much so it's not usually that big of a problem.
> It removed the physical function keys, which is a huge no-no overall.
Is it? Really? I'd wager most touch bar users never used the F keys and use the volume, media playback, and screen brightness mapping instead.
Inb4 it says "pro" on the lid
Wasn't the Touch Bar just a sneaky way for Apple to mess around with ARM coprocessing and other ARM-based macguffins in production?
We went from Touch Bar + T2 to Apple Silicon pretty quick. The Touch Bar was the user-facing toy to drive adoption, then they just dropped the bar and kept T2 as they built out more functions in it being taken over from Intel hardware.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_T2
It's like how the iPhone Air is just a test device for the iPhone Ultra's hardware capabilities and the 16e was a device to test the C1 modem. Apple's short lived "experimental production" products.
this sounds likely, but they definitely did have real plans with Touch Bar. They thought it was an answer to laptops having a touch screen.
The TouchBar's problem was both hardware and software. Because of its poor affordance for text labels it typically only allowed Mystery Meat UI[0]. If you labeled a button it ate up surface area and prevented a dense interface. Because it was constantly in flux you couldn't develop any muscle memory for it. It didn't help that the icons most apps used were inscrutable flat bullshit sigils.
It was made worse since desktop keyboards lacked the feature so you couldn't practice/learn the UI on anything but MacBooks. Keyboard shortcuts were far more useful since they worked on any Mac and whether or not you were using an external keyboard.
That lack of external keyboard support also meant developers couldn't write decent interfaces for the TouchBar unless they had the right MacBook. The simulator was not sufficient to actually test real world usage for positioning/ergonomics.
I found it to be a top to bottom failure of a feature. Small OLED screens on physical buttons would have been far superior ergonomically. Using the space for better cooling on the i7 and i9s would have been a much much better use of that space.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mystery_meat_navigation
Great article, thank you
BetterTouchTool cleverly let one trigger the trackpad haptics when using custom Touchbar configs. With the haptics set to high, you could really feel it. It made a huge difference.
I don't think native haptic support would have been enough to save the Touchbar, but like the author I'm a little surprised that Apple didn't even try it.
I'm pretty much convinced they knew it was doomed before it was even released.
No