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Comment by jlarocco | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, but you're ignoring the functionality loss from not having the function keys. You may not use them, but many people do.

For example, in Emacs (and I'm assuming most IDEs) I can map a function key to run my tests and have a status bar entry saying how many passed or failed. It's the exact functionality in your screenshot, no touch bar required.

At best the touch bar is a nice gimmick, and it's not adding anything you can't already do, and the trade off is the function keys. They could have just as easily left the function keys alone and added the touch bar above.

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Remind me again how function keys can produce full colour multitouch interfaces, such as video/image scrubbers, colour pickers, etc.

The standard "function keys can do anything" response is getting old.

Who cares? It's a gimmick. Video scrubbers and color pickers already exist. I don't need a silly keyboard screen to do them.

The "I need to pick colors and scrub video" response is getting old. Nobody does that stuff often enough for it to be a good trade off.

But they didn't add a dedicated hardware video scrubber. They added a dedicated hardware input device that can present basically any type of input. Those are just examples of what's possible that wasn't possible before.

> The standard "function keys can do anything" response is getting old.

That "function keys can do anything" is, in my opinion, the exact reason they had to go. They're scary for the typical user. What is F7? You may know, but it's not obvious in any way. That some of them cause destructive actions (e.g. Alt+F4 on Windows) makes it worse - they're scary to many users. And even when after figuring out what some of them do, one is stuck wondering "was that F8? Or F9? Oh! It was F10" (which, includes the worry that a wrong guess could cause problems).

Though, I cannot believe they shipped it without the haptic feedback to make it clear that a button was actually clicked.

^ Also, none of that, to me, includes Esc. Esc seems clear enough in its intent, and I hold no ill-will toward the Esc key.

Exactly. Particularly once you jump between a few apps, and as I said elsewhere, I can't use media/volume/display controls and f-keys without the function key, so I don't use the f-keys on my existing MBP.

Haptic feedback would be interesting..

The way that for the last couple generations the touchpad hasn't actually "clicked", and been simulated by haptic feedback. That same feeling on the Esc/Cancel/etc. virtual button would alleviate most of my personal concerns.

I'm surprised they didn't include it given how much they've been pushing it on iOS, as well as on the touchpad of Macs.

Oh wow, I guess that's why Mac touchpads feel so impressively sluggish to click.

> That "function keys can do anything" is, in my opinion, the exact reason they had to go. They're scary for the typical user.

Then make the whole screen touch enabled and bypass the silly, tiny screen gimmick.

That seems entirely unrelated to what you quoted. Regardless of whether the whole screen becomes a touchscreen, or a bar is used, the F-keys in their form are bad UX.

Adding 'touch' to a UI designed for mouse/trackpad + keyboard interaction is inherently a terrible idea. Even my pinky finger is much bigger than the cursor. I would have zero chance of being accurate with it.

Also, that still requires the actual controls to be on-screen somewhere. With the touch bar, you can opt to not have those controls (e.g. a toolbar in an IDE, or a palette in a visual tool like photoshop) shown on the main display if they're available when contextually relevant, on the touch bar.

But "full colour multitouch interfaces" are awful compared to keyboard keys! Getting to switch back to my mouse + kb after using my phone is so fantastic.

This bar is all the bad stuff about a touchscreen (limited/no tactile feedback, reduced ability to rely on muscle memory) plus the bad stuff about keyboards (primarily that they are not where your eyes are naturally). There are a few tiny niche uses cases that will be nice, like video scrubbing, but 90% of the time it's just going to be functionality that is more difficult to use than it was previously.

> awful compared to keyboard keys

Don't mistake your opinion for a fact.

I'm pretty sure I hate the current situation with F-Keys at least as much as you claim to hate multi-touch interfaces.

If you truly use F-Keys by touch (i.e. without looking) forcing the touch bar into F-Key mode should get you pretty close to what you had anyway.

The F-Keys don't have the little identifying lumps (on mine these are on F & J), so you simply have to know where they are by muscle memory. The only difference is you're tapping like a track-pad tap (as opposed to trackpad click).

On a proper IBM-M style keyboard layout, the F keys are in groups of four, with spaces between each group. This makes it trivial to touch-type them without looking.

It's really a very well laid out keyboard design. The worst thing about laptop keyboards is that they are all so non-standard, and every manufacturer does their own special-snowflake thing, so that it is almost impossible to touch-type on an unfamiliar machine.

You're not losing function keys, they're just becoming more powerful. You can still set the touch area to be a row of function keys, if you like that! Or they might become more dynamic, by updating which binds are available based on what's on screen.

It is a nice gimmick. Is there anything wrong with an improvement, even if it's a little one?

First, your F keys already change binds based on what's on screen. Second, you are ignoring all the things that are worse. You can't really touch type any more, you have to take your eyes away from the screen, and you get greatly reduced tactile feedback.

It is a gimmick, but in my opinion it's not an improvement, it's counterproductive.

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