It’s unfortunate that so many design decisions are made with little regard for the true utility of what’s being designed, of which the touch bar has essentially zero.
Volume changing? Screen brightness? Those are better with the touchbar.
Escape key for vim or whatever? Switch your caps lock with escape! You should have been doing that the whole time!
The actual function keys? I don't use them enough to need them showing up all the time. And an extra key to get them up again is no big deal.
I agree that the touch bar doesn't add a whole lot of utility, but I can't see the argument of it removing any utility.
Again, I don't see how its worth all the hassle and surely extra cost for Apple to push it, but really don't see how it's any worse than the previous bar.
- consistent button locations across any apps. An F1 is an F1 whether you are in Finder, in Safari, or in a programming IDE.
By default Touchbar displays whatever the developers of the currently focused app put there. So switching to any app will change the touchbar rather unpredictably.
- consistent physical button locations. For any shortcut that involves physical buttons you don't have to look at your keyboard. You could change the volume easily because it was mapped to Fn + F<X> (or just to F<X>) that just was there.
On Touch Bar for any button that's not on the far left or on the far right edge of the touchbar, you have to look down. It becomes significantly worse as you move towards the middle of the touchbar.
- Physical buttons have affordances built-in. If you can't long-press, you can just tap on a button repeatedly. If you accidentally brush against a button or even rest your fingers on a button, it won't trigger. A physical button has tactile shape, so you can feel your way around a button to see feel you hit it correctly, or if your finger is between buttons.
Touch Bar has none of that.
Default volume and brightness controls all but require long press and slide (a huge problem for a huge number of users).
Accidental brush against Touch Bar will trigger it.
Resting a finger on the Touch Bar will trigger it.
There's no tactile feedback on the buttons.
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In general, Touch Bar is significantly worse in usability while providing very little in terms of usefulness. So bad that in just a second minor update Apple brought back the F1 layout that you can set for it in System Preferences.
Touchbar affordances are better than the iPhone in that the persistent touch buttons are immediately above hardware buttons. My mute button is directly above the + key. My volume control is directly above the - key. My brightness control is directly above the 0 key. I can get a finger there without looking and immediately adjust by sliding left or right.
> Touchbar affordances are better than the iPhone
Nowhere in my text did I once mention the iPhone. I did mention, insistently, and several times, the actual physical keyboard on the laptop.
And yes, a laptop keyboard is very different from a phone.
Here's my test. Take a Touchbar-equipped Mac, and a non-touchbar equipped Mac. Sit them side by side. Play a video or song on both of them.
Then, one hand on one mac and your other hand on the other mac, turn the volume up and down using the keyboard and touchbar.
One hand gets confused on where to go on about your third or fourth time turning it back up or down. There's nothing for your fingers to call home.
It's the exact same problem when you try to use a touch screen phone as a game controller, vs an actual gamepad.
If you'd read the guidelines and follow them, we'd be grateful. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Not really. My wife has low vision. Changing the volume used to be a muscle memory sort of thing. Now it's an awkward fumbling mess, especially if she's in the middle of a meeting and trying to mute her laptop.
We've locked the buttons to a static position so she knows where to press but there's still no tactile feedback.
Not tactile, haptic only but there is https://github.com/niw/HapticKey
Function keys are used heavily in IDEs, and forcing a large reach of fn + f# key isn't adding any utility either.
I have yet to see a situation where the touchbar adds some utility that merits the loss in other areas for users.
So many times I would want to adjust volume, keyboard brightness, display brightness by muscle memory and feedback alone, which isn't possible with the horrible touch bar.
I literally am still using my beloved Macbook Pro 2015 because I can't stand the damn thing. At my old job I had to use one of the new MBP machines at work and the keyboard + touch bar killed me every time.
I won't be buying a new MBP unless Apple fixes the keyboard and makes the touch bar optional. In fact, with the new improvements to Linux in Windows I may just got for a new AMD based Windows laptop instead, which is huge for me because I've been Macbook Pro since Apple first went to Intel...
Physical keys were a huge improvement. I'd have loved it if it was programmable keys with little LED displays, but being a flat, easily triggered surface makes it a big loss for me.
Control is already mapped there because apple put fn at the bottom left corner! Esc is the only key i think i really need that is missing. It needs to be a physical key. Why design something where the right way to use it is immediately remap keys?
There are many touch typists who've been trained to use caps lock all the time.
The moment I need to type more than 2 upper-case characters in a row, caps lock it is. In combination with Vim.
The touch bar (or better: the removal of Esc) is a huge regression.