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Comment by tonyedgecombe | Hacker News Reader

My guess is the touch bar along with haptic feedback is going to replace the whole keyboard.

The multitouch technology in their phones was developed by a company that made a completely flat keyboard with no haptic feedback of any kind. (The Fingerworks Touchstream).

http://www.ergocanada.com/products/keyboards/fingerworks_lp....

It had some pretty powerful macro/gesture functionality. A friend of mine had one and loved it, but wound up having to buy a humidifier to keep it working in the winter.

I can't tell if you're joking, but I've long wondered about keyboards transmuting into touch pads of some kind. Haptic feedback is only part of it, though. I really depend on affordances like the nubs on the F and J keys or the valleys between keys to orient my hands above the keyboard properly without constantly having to look at them. The lack of such affordances on your average on-screen keyboard make high-speed touch typing very difficult for me. Does anyone know if there's been any research in this area?

I don't know about formal research, but there's definitely a track history of membrane keyboards and other such "advances" that kill the physical feedback becoming miserable market failures. Given Apple's usual attention to detail about the importance of such tactile feedback, I can't imagine them going to a system that rejects it. Moreover, we're not seeing non-Apple PC vendors moving in that direction too, even though it's hardly expensive or technically difficult these days.

To the extend that tactile feedback is important for efficient typing, I imagine keyboard design for laptops is a tradeoff between good feel, durability, and making the mechanism as lightweight and shallow as possible. I'm typing this on a recent-model Thinkpad, and the key throw is about 2mm, substantially less than a high-feedback clicky-key type keyboard.

I have a MacBook 12". It took me either months or more than a year to notice that the haptic touchpad does not depress at all when you click. It happened suddenly when I pushed it while the laptop was powered off, and I panicked, thinking the pad was broken / stuck.

I still grin like an idiot pushing into the pad and telling myself that no, my finger did not go down. It is really magical.

If this can be done behind an eink screen or something similar, with a distinct feel for resting a finger and pushing a button, I believe it can be day and night for laptop keyboards. Alternatively, these eink screens could for sure have ridges for key delimitation.

My guess is that your joking, if not then you must be one of the few touchbar fans ("there are dozen's of us...dozens!").

I hate the touchbar, but love touchid on my laptop

I'm in the same boat, I really like touchid. I have CAPS LOCK mapped to ESC and have rarely if ever use anything but the function keys on the touchbar. I wanted to like it and use it, but it just doesn't work well for me.

It is useful in some apps although I wouldn't have gone out of my way to pay extra for it. Having Touch ID on a corporate laptop with strict requirements to change passwords often is amazing though.

I would absolutely love the touchbar ... as long as it were in addition to the regular keyboard, instead of a replacement for that top row of keys. Put it above the keyboard and keep the ESC and function keys, and I think it would be great.

No on both counts, I'd rather they just bought their keyboards from Lenovo.

You mean like the Atari 400? http://oldcomputers.net/atari400.html

On the plus side, very easy to clean.

Thanks for the memories! I hated that keyboard, but the one on the 600XL even though it was full-travel was arguably worse.

They'll probably call it "ipad"

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