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Comment by bedbot | Hacker News Reader

I never comment, and I appreciate your view, but suffice it to say that I hate the Touch Bar enough that your comment has spurred me to post.

My company-issued laptop has a Touch Bar, and I can only imagine that it was invented and distributed by some kind of malicious clique of saboteurs within Apple who hate both (1) users and (2) Apple and want both to fail.

Brushing the Touch Bar accidentally with a finger leads Siri to interrupt me, silencing whatever video call I'm on or music I'm listening to. Instead of being able to adjust the volume manually or pause what I'm listening to with a key that I can press without looking, I have to flatten and retract my hands, peer down at the touchbar, and then poke through several options just in order to do a simple operation, all the while terrified that Siri will interrupt me.

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You can remove Siri from the touchbar, which I've done on my own Macbook. But I otherwise still trip over the touchbar enough that I always have to have it in the back of my mind, just a bit.

I've been using the touchbar for over a year now, and I still find that I get nothing out of it that physical keys couldn't have done better. I like that I can figure out which keys are for volume or brightness without having to look down. I need that at night when I'm playing something on my laptop but I want to gradually lower the volume and brightness without my contacts in or my eyes shut. If my personal Macbook had a touchbar, I could never do that reliably.

It sort of baffles me why they went with a touch bar and not with keys that have OLED in them that are easily tweakable. Or how about add some bumps to it so that my finger can know where it is without me looking?

No. It's got to be a flat bar.

I recently learned that if you tap the volume + or - and just start dragging left/right the volume will adjust. I used to think you had to tap then grab/slide but that is not the case. Made a difference to me anyway.

You can also (at least in Big Sur) tap and swipe right/left quickly and let go right after and it'll bump up/down the vol/brightness 1 bar, depending what icon you tap and swipe on. If the brightness/vol expands then you've held it down too long.

I do wish Apple would improve media controls on the Mac in general (and touchbar). So often the media icon just doesn't show (e.g. Spotify), or I've had several media apps running and macOS gets confused and the media icons no longer do anything for what's currently playing. It's soo buggy.

I think it has worked that way since day 1. At least I was using it on Mojave

That's a nice trick, thank you! Although even knowing _what_ I had to do, I only managed to learn this after couple tries.

I don't mean to pick on you in particular, but I continue to be flabbergasted by the number of people who claim to suffer from the presence of the default touchbar interface.

MTMR (My Touchbar My Rules) took me all of 15 minutes to install and configure to my liking. Then another few minutes to tweak it (adding brightness and volume buttons on either side of their respective sliders) when I realized I wanted both control mechanisms available.

In the time it takes to complain about the default config you could have fixed 100% of the things about it that bother you.

Unfortunately, my touchbar removed my escape key. Yes, I took a few minutes and remapped the caps-lock key to escape - but, I now have a single mb that has a different key configuration than every other mb and mac keyboard that I use.

This is a perfect example of why Apple is cool at reimagining and reengineering, but it is not an enterprise company. That may not matter to some, but it does to many.

Not to belabor the point, but you could easily configure the touchbar to put an esc key in the top-left corner.

Thank you.

The tb came that way, but it wasn't correct in placement or how many it had to be touched when the tb was dark. The tb isn't good for programmers when quickly typing text. It's also a complete change for changing volume quickly. This comes into play when switching multiple times every day between full volume meetings on headphones and full or medium volume on speakers. The tb doesn't act the same as original keys just by adding virtual keys.

Yes, these are first-world problems, but this was completly needless and makes the keyboard less useful than all of the other mac keyboard I use daily. It's like Apple thinks that people have one and only one computer they ever use.

I hear you, but - again - using a tool like MTMR allows you to create a huge, persistent esc key in the top left corner, and volume and brightness sliders and buttons, etc.

I'd recommend removing Siri (or just disabling it entirely if you don't use it) if you're activating by mistake.

Also with volume/brightness you can press and slide instead of tapping and then adjusting. Hope that helps!

How do you remove it? I have it always disabled but still run into the parent's problem that I'll randomly touch the stupid Siri button...

When Finder is active click on the View menu, press the option key and select "Customize Control Strip", then you can just mouse down to the touchbar and remove the Siri button.

In Preferences under the keyboard settings you can customize the placement and presence of every single button on the TouchBar. Preferences also lets you disable Siri

Also you can make shortcut for "Customize Control Bar...", it helps to quickly adjust Touch Bar in new program or for experimenting

If you often listen to music/watch videos and need to adjust the volume, have you thought about adding a physical volume knob? Something like this: https://www.droking.com/USB-Controller-USB-Volume-Audio-Adju...

Jesus christ

I want to get something like that, but designed well with media keys and separate vol/mic sliders for specific apps. Like Discord.

Just remove Siri from the TouchBar then?

I’ve removed every control besides volume and mute... and I still accidentally brush them every now and then. The Touch Bar is way too sensitive.

If the Touch Bar was adjustable sensitive to force, it would be almost perfect in my book. My biggest objection to it is that it establishes a different UX between laptop and desktop.

Yeah the only time I notice it is when I brush the mute which is a key I rarely want to hit. Also when I want to hit escape I often miss because it is oddly indented.

The escape button is actually quite large. At least on my 2018 MBP, the whole empty left also acts as the escape button so no need to try and hit the escape in the middle of the label.

I used to have this, that I could tap anywhere on and to the left of the esc touch button and it would trigger esc. But after one of the OS updates (i forget which) it stopped working, now I have to hit the etc touch button, if I hit the blank aria to the left, nothing happens anymore. It bugs me so much!

Just curious, what OS version are you using? I'm on Big Sur (but same issue in Catalina). I've got the 2017 MBP 15"

EDIT: I should add, I mean that I could hit the far left blank aria of the touch bar any time in any touchbar mode and it would trigger the esc action. They "fixed" that in an update. I can still press to the left of the esc and trigger esc when the esc button is visible. But often I'll have spotify touch bar "app" open and the esc key won't show, so I have to close the app just to access the esc key, super annoying.

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