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Comment by ProfessorLayton | Hacker News Reader

The Touchbar has been mostly a dud for me, and I don't miss it when using my older MBP. I have customized by touch bar to include my favorite actions such as locking the screen, but it is otherwise static.

My 2 biggest issues are:

- It turns off after 1 min of inactivity, and find it infuriating that I have to wake it up by before using it. Effectively making everything 2 interactions away.

- No haptic feedback. Even having the trackpad click would be useful, since it can be felt throughout the Macbook.

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"It turns off after 1 min of inactivity" Oh wow I didn't know that, I've been kinda leaning on the "it might actually be pretty cool/useful" side of this touchbar thing, but now I'm squarely in the "it's totally useless" camp. What were they thinking?

Well it's essentially running it's own processor and display.

It'd have to time out because otherwise it would eat even more of your battery than it already does.

You'd think it doesn't use that much, given it's a mostly black oled and the co-processor is from the apple watch. But, that one turns off after a little while too so nothing new there.

The key here is that it's oled: given that it's mostly static as the user above says, it would get pretty bad burn in if it was always on

Whats great is when seemingly intelligent apps adopt the Touchbar koolaid, such as .. iTerm. So yeah, now I'm greated with the very nice side-effect of having a massive row of blinking crud all over my vision, just because iTerm wants to show me what command is running, what keys I could use to kill the process, blink back to the shell, oh .. another app is running in the shell, better update the touchbar ..

Man, its just .. like .. such an 80's feeling.

At least, you can disable it.

That's the first thing I disabled in iTerm. Also for all IDEs I just go to settings and make them display traditional function keys on the Touch Bar.

None of it can fix the horrible keyboard though.

Does remind one of those keyboard overlays for Wordstar/ Wordperfect/ Lotus 1-2-3/ etc.

If those overlays would jump off the keyboard if you didn't stroke them every 59 seconds.

> No haptic feedback

HapticKey fixed this for me: https://github.com/niw/HapticKey

It turns off? I had no idea.

I'd been waiting for them to release this laptop, but ended up going with a lightly used Mid 2015 after Apple announced the specs and price. It was just a misfit for my needs especially after trying the keyboard. The powering-down of the TouchBar sounds like a horrible user experience.

Primary reason it turns off is because its oled, and leaving it on would cause burn-in.

Whatever the reason is, it leads to a poor user experience.

Sounds like a great application for an e-ink display. No burn-in, low power, and can always emit as much light as the keys on the keyboard do (by front-illuminating the bar when the keyboard backlight is on).

Do eink displays have decent pixel density yet? The last time I used an eink was in 2012 and looked terrible by modern standards

They do, the newest e-ink Kindles have 300ppi screens which puts them close to iPhone/iPad Retina display density.

Most e-readers were only 167ppi in 2012, with 212ppi just starting to hit the market in premium models.

The 2014 ThinkPad X1 Carbon had an e-ink touch strip instead of an F-row (exactly like the MBP does). It didn’t work very well: poor display contrast, hard to see in bright daylight, can’t feel for keys, slow response time, etc. They switched back to real keys for the 2015 model release.

...that’s why Apple’s adoption of it surprised me the most: I saw how it on the ThinkPad added no value, and while Apple has greater integration and will undoubtedly encourage third-party devs to use it - it will still be too fiddly and complicated.

I think Apple’s too proud to kill it off in just one project cycle - but I can’t see Apple’s management justifying continued investment of time into maintaining it. The fact they didn’t include it in their latest desktop keyboard (for a Pro users no-less!) says something.

> hard to see in bright daylight

Huh? One of the defining features of e-ink is that it's easier to read in bright light, compared to a regular screen...

It had a smooth plastic window over it without any matte-finish or anti-reflective coating. Couple that with how the keyboard area is often in the shade made it hard to see.

I owned one of those X1 Carbons and that was absolutely not e-ink. It was merely some LED lights over a touch surface. All the possible configurations were physically cut out; you couldn't display arbitrary stuff on it. Even for what it did do, it sucked, and made the entire layout more awkward.

E-inks respond too slow for good touch feedback though so you'd want to have it be clicky or vibrate or something, which adds a moving part.

Vibration could be added via a speaker, not exactly a moving part. This is how Apple's current vibration scheme works, at any rate.

Not entirely accurate, the Force Touch device uses a linear motor to accelerate a small mass to 'thump' into its housing. In principle it's similar to a speaker, but in implementation it's very different (a speaker voice cone never intentionally impacts its housing, for example).

*Taptic Engine, I think I meant

I thought so too but the Pebble Time had snappy, colorful animations[1] that looked really good, and changed my perception completely on what is possible with e-ink.

With regards to touch feedback, MacBooks come with a pretty hefty “haptic engine” already so it should be possible.

[1] https://youtu.be/v-vP9D062aM

>I thought so too but the Pebble Time had snappy, colorful animations[1] that looked really good, and changed my perception completely on what is possible with e-ink.

Except they didn't use e-ink. Pebble used transreflective LCD's. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transflective_liquid-crystal_d...

I see. The confusion on my part is that they used the term "e-paper" which I've now learned is an umbrella term including e-ink and any other technology that works to electronically replace paper.

Based on cursory research I believe the most important aspect of the LCD used on the Pebble time is that it's a "Memory in Pixel" or "Memory LCD"[1] – a technology specifically built for screens that may show the same thing for a sustained period of time.

Memory in Pixel seems to be a feasible alternative to e-ink if you want a low-power display that tends to show the same thing for extended periods of time. And it would probably work well for the use case of Apple's Touch Bar (assuming you can get a good pixel density with this technology).

[1] https://www.sharpsma.com/sharp-memory-lcd-technology and https://www.sharpsma.com/products?sharpCategory=Memory%20LCD

Pretty neat. Thanks for this comment, I didn't know about the memory in pixel.

It's almost as if they shouldn't have made with with OLED

It is as if they shouldn’t have released it in the first place.

It is as if the only thing you should run on it is Electric Sheep.

https://electricsheep.org/

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