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Comment by largehotcoffee | Hacker News Reader

I honestly hope the Touch Bar doesn't survive longer than one generation of MacBooks. I believe the whole thing is a gimmick (a well intentioned gimmick) meant to drive forward one thing, Apple Pay on the MacBook. Most likely it's internally perceived as a situation where the end justifies the means, if Apple Pay is widely adopted on the MacBook this will look like a genius decision down the line and make a ridiculous amount of money in the long-term. If not, blame the Touch Bar.

Apple should have done a full touch input screen on the MacBook. It might not have been perfect, but it would have been lauded as revolutionary by the mainstream media. By not doing it they have now given their competitors the chance to grab that market.

When Apple does eventually make a full touch input screen MacBook, Apple Pay will be a part of it. The Touch Bar is just a stepping stone to get to that point, but it's a step they should have skipped.

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Maybe it's just me, but I dislike any sort of touch input on a laptop besides the regular trackpad.

The Touch Bar seems distracting since I don't really understand why one should look down and search for what to press instead of simply using a keyboard shortcut via muscle memory. But I have yet to try one and I understand that for stuff like a video editing timeline overview it may be suited - it's an additional display showing information afterall.

On the other hand, a full screen touch input like the dell XPS feels like the least ergonomic thing. How are you supposed to interact with it? Holding your arms up extended to the screen? [0]

[0] http://i.dell.com/sites/imagecontent/products/PublishingImag...

> I don't really understand why one should look down and search for what to press instead of simply using a keyboard shortcut via muscle memory.

From a personal perspective, I agree. I think we generally forget though, we are vastly in the minority and this technology is designed for the layman

Basically my litmus test for this stuff is "would my technologically illiterate mum use and understand this. Will it enrich her computing experience". If yes, it's not a dumb idea. We'll see how the market reacts though

If you've never used a Windows touch screen PC, I can imagine that you can't imagine why you'd want a touch screen. If you have, then you know that after a day or so, you just start reaching for the screen intuitively, and it's a rude reminder of the bad old days when it's not a touch screen. This is what Apple missed: none of them use a touch screen, none of them bother to check out Windows, so they can't imagine how important it can be. The Touch Bar is a poor substitute for it, and calling any laptop "premium" in 2016 without full touch is marketing, not reality.

>This is what Apple missed: none of them use a touch screen

Some Apple employees might use iPads or iPhones.

I've had Windows touchscreen laptops for ~2 years and the only time I even remember it's there is when trying to point at something in conversation and accidentally clicking on it. Are there really use cases that matter for a touchscreen on a standard laptop? I understand it on a convertible, but not your standard clamshell.

I don't know how common these use cases are, but I find touch support useful while doing some web dev stuff. For instance, in Chrome, pinch to zoom is more precise than ctrl-scroll / ctrl-+. It preserves the existing screen dimensions (ctrl-scroll / ctrl-+ makes the actual font size larger and alters dimensions).

I'm not so vision impaired that I need to do this on a day-to-day basis, but it's great for zooming in to see if I need to adjust a CSS border by 1px or something.

I haven't tested this thoroughly but I believe Chrome also supports the same set of touch events it does on Android. So if you want to make sure the mobile version of your site is touch-friendly, having a touch screen is less clunky than trying to emulate it with a mouse.

I have little experience with vertical touchscreens. Some friends cheap PCs and my tablet attached to a Bluetooth keyboard.

I discovered that I was naturally touching the buttons in dialogs and web pages and the checkboxes and radio buttons in forms. It's faster than reaching for the mouse or the trackpad. With the trablet it was the only way and it was good. No gorilla arm.

Touching links in browser can be fast too, but the target must be big enough. HN is particularly bad at that.

Basically everything that is easy to do with the touchscreen of a phone and a tablet is easy also with the screen of a laptop. But the screen must not move when you touch it.

The use case that matters for me is: when I'm using them as laptops. Most of the time, my Windows laptops are connected like desktop machines: external monitors, mouse, keyboard. When I take my devices off the desk and go to a cafe or my living room, I use the touchscreen all the time. I don't reach for my mouse to click a button when I have a finger to do it. I probably don't go more than two minutes without touching the screen in that scenario, even while writing code. Scroll up/down is much easier with a finger. Pinch-to-zoom is obviously easier.

"This is what Apple missed: none of them use a touch screen, none of them bother to check out Windows, so they can't imagine how important it can be."

I surprised you don't envision that there must be a huge product development testbed at Apple, where they go over all these options in detail. They sold 4-6 million macs per quarter for years. They've been a product-development company ever since their inception. Sometimes it seems as if people think Phil Schiller and a summer intern are making these decisions on the basis of gut feeling.

This is like when Apple pulled back the curtain after the "Antennagate" brouhaha a few years ago, and it revealed things like a huge EM test facility, a CT scanner, etc., etc. (http://www.macworld.com/article/1152771/wireless_lab.html)

The power of Windows 8/10's UI has been severely compromised by the need to support both touch and mouse at the same time. The requirements/strengths of these two input modes are in conflict and trying to combine the two results in an interface that's not great for either:

* while the mouse is precise and allows for high information density, touch requires big targets since a finger is not so precise - so Windows 10 has big targets that waste lots of space relative to a UI that is designed solely for mouse/trackpad use

* touch allows interactions like swiping, pinching, and multi-finger gestures, but because Windows 10 has to support a traditional mouse as well these are rarely used or aren't used effectively

A touchscreen does not work well with an interface that's designed primarily for use with a keyboard mouse, likewise a keyboard/mouse can't replicate all touch interactions effectively. Trying to design for both in the same UI creates a lot of compromises that will delight neither group.

To me, it's about moving in this direction. Apple shows no interest in doing the work in MacOS to go here, and it's puzzling. Microsoft has iterated and iterated on it until it's pretty good. Not perfect, but they've already moved through a lot of the pain of making touch work well, and they're not stopping. When Apple figures out in 2018 that they need to ship touch screen laptops, they'll be years behind in UX on them... it's not as if they'll get it right on their first try, either.

Yup, but why would a video editor buy a laptop that's limited to 16GB of RAM these days?

Because when your disk IO subsystem can do 2+ Gigabytes/second, RAM is much less of a factor.

Not really, unless you want to use it for a swap file. I'm currently sitting at 12 GB of RAM in use, with about 21 GB committed. I'm on half dev mode (watching netflix while hacking a bit)

Right now I only have 1 VM with one IDE open (thank god for vagrant), but I can have as many as 3 VMs and two IDEs (mixed .net and java shop here). Pushing 24GB of RAM in use is not uncommon for me (including the 50 or so chrome tabs and what not).

Could I make do with 16GB? Probably, but I'd have to change my development habits, and I don't really want to.

I was mainly referring to the video editing use case, where video could be streamed off disk quickly enough. For your use case, 16 gigs may indeed may not be enough.

What do you do with 50 tabs? I usually keep 10 open at most.

I think the Touch Bar has potential, to be honest. The main selling point is that it offers apps a way to make previously hidden functionality much more discoverable. The traditional row of function keys is flexible and simple, but it also places a lot of demands on the user -- it's up to you to research what each key does in all possible contexts and to commit that to memory. The odds are very high that there exists at least one context in which some function key performs a function that would be useful to you but you weren't aware of it. The Touch Bar could be a remedy to this situation.

That said, I haven't used it and don't want to sing its praises too early. But I also don't want to wish it dead on arrival.

Macbooks don't have a row of "function keys" though. They have a row of keys that do very specific things in the OS:

* Adjust screen brightness (x2)

* Adjust volume and mute (x3)

* Adjust keyboard brightness (x2)

* Power button (x1)

* Play/pause and next/previous (x3)

* Rearrange the desktop windows (x2)

So, if you launch an app that uses the touch bar, will you lose the ability to adjust the brightness and volume?

No, a portion of the bar (the "Control Strip") is always reserved for system stuff and can be expanded to full width with a tap.

The only one of those I use regularly is volume. As long as they have an easy way to change volume I think the touchbar is a good thing

> Macbooks don't have a row of "function keys" though. They have a row of keys that do very specific things in the OS

If you look closely, those keys have things like "F1", "F2", etc. written on them. They're function keys.

They are actually 2 modes (you switch between the OS keys and the Fx keys by pressing the fn key). There is also an OS setting to switch which mode is enabled by-default (without pressing the fn key).

Right, so TouchBar increases the number of possible modes to basically infinity. Isn't there already a way to make the TouchBar just render the function keys?

Yes. Now the Touch Bar will (by default) display the function keys when the `fn` key is pressed, and display the current set of functionality per the application otherwise. There is, per the presentation and reports, an OS setting that allows you to switch which is the default.

One of the first things I do on a new Mac is to toggle the preference that lets you use the function keys and function keys and the "fn" modifier to coerce them to do things like volume control. Macs (until now) absolutely do have function keys for anyone who wants them.

> Apple should have done a full touch input screen on the MacBook. It might not have been perfect, but it would have been lauded as revolutionary by the mainstream media. By not doing it they have now given their competitors the chance to grab that market.

What makes you think they would do this? The arguments they've made about MacOS fundamentally not working well with touch input make complete sense to me. iOS was designed for touch input, MacOS was designed for pointer input.

I think they could have added the fingerprint sensor without adding touch bar if they had wanted to - they're not the same hardware.

> I honestly hope the Touch Bar doesn't survive longer than one generation of MacBooks.

Have you used it?

> Have you used it?

This. This x 1000.

Everyone is complaining without any hands on experience. The "magic mouse" is one of my least favorite pieces of tech to come from Apple (I use a trusty Logitech) and I do 95% or more of my work with an external mechanical keyboard. I wouldn't even notice the change and I think a lot of people wouldn't, either.

The track pad is lightyears beyond anything I've had from Lenovo (can't speak for HP) and has to be the One Killer Feature™ that would make me ^happily pick a brand new MBP.

They really should support more ram though...

> can't speak for HP

HP, Acer, Dell... Nothing comes close.

> The track pad is lightyears beyond anything I've had from Lenovo

This. If I want to pick one feature on Macbook (Base/Air/Pro) hardware side (Obviously I can not live without macOS because of its Unix-like nature plus all the major supported 3rd party softwares) then that would be Macbook's touchpad. It's absolutely irreplaceable and lightyears ahead in scrolling experience than any other damn laptop.

I'm growing tired of people saying that they want a full touch screen. Good luck holding your arms up 8 hours a day while sitting.

Every new thing that Apple does gets a lot of negative attention, remember the launch of the iPad? It was being mocked and laughed at but now everyone seems to have a tablet. Remember this?

https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/400/1*9tNGJOMAcFprbQrUFp...

Another argument I saw is "they force users to look down at their keyboard". I still have to meet the first user who uses the function rows blindly, besides the esc key it wasn't that useful and everyone was looking down at the keyboard to find the right keys already.

It intrigues me and I would like to try it out.

Why would you use the touchscreen for a full 8 hours expecially on a large desktop monitor? It's ok to use it sometimes on a laptop, where the screen is close to the hands and much lower than the shoulders. I tried and sometimes I was using the trackpad, sometimes the screen.

I have a Lenovo Yoga with touch screen and it's frequently easier to just touch the screen than guide the mouse over. It is convenient enough that I probably will never go back (willingly). It doesn't mean that I'm pointing 8 hours a day. Most of the time I'm just typing.

The Apple Pay fingerprint scanner is attached to the (still physical) power button, so it really doesn't have anything to do with the Touch Bar.

Both Apple Pay scanner and Touch Bar display run on a separate ARM processor.

Sure, but even if they ditch the bar I don't see them ditching Apple Pay.

They would need at least a portion of the bar to display the Apple Pay recipient. I guess they could make the bar screen smaller and restore function keys.

They could just display the recipient on the screen, like they do currently without the Touch Bar.

Which must explain why they're only available as a pair. I would have been tempted to buy the non-Touch Bar 13", but it lacks Touch ID which seems really nice. Though I'm not sure I'd want to trust FileVault (i.e. full disk encryption) to a fingerprint, since a fingerprint it can be coerced.

Does it do that? I would have hoped password on boot, fingerprint when bringing back from sleep or locked screen.

And a password can't?

Not as easily. Police can simply grab your hand and stick it on the sensor in 10 sec, and there's nothing you could do about it. A password on the other hand, would require either serious torture to be effective.

I think is somewhat of a gimmick, too, but withhold my judgment until I've tried it or at least have heard from many people that it indeed is

  No escape key. Less touch space than a Surface Studio. Lame.

I suspect that the missing physical escape key will not be much of a problem because, from what I have read, the left and right edges of the TouchBar have a fairly fixed layout, so muscle memory will work there. Also, those who really need haptic cues to find the key will learn to slide in their finger from the left end or use the number keys to find where the TouchBar starts without having to specifically look at it.

Also, I don't think Apple would add such an expensive piece of kit (I doubt the price difference is mostly margin. Can you buy LCD panels of that size or were they specially made for them? How hard is it to make such a thing robust? A thin stroke of glass breaks easier than a full screen) if they thought it to be a UI nightmare.

But since I know so little details of this, that's mostly guessing.

The only thing I have to say, to play devils advocate, is that I wish they would've made it so that the escape key was in the very very left when it is there, so that I wouldn't have to learn a new offset location The only thing I have to say, to play devils advocate, is that I wish they would've made it so that the escape key was in the very very left when it is there, so that I wouldn't have to learn a new offset location. I'm assuming the location is offset by about the width of one key, based on the pictures I've seen.

You can remap Caps Lock to Esc from the keyboard preferences pane in the latest Sierra update.

>Apple should have done a full touch input screen on the MacBook

why repeat somebody's else mistakes?

Exactly.

I don't want fingerprints all over my screen, there isn't much real value in a touchscreen laptop for 80% of users, and their tablets already cover those bases (especially with the advent of the iPad Pro).

Have you actually used the touch bar?

If we're going to do gimmicks, let's see some useful gimmicks. As Don Draper said on Mad Men, if you don't like what's being said, change the conversation.

- Built in LTE modems on all devices

- 1 TB RAM optional

- 4k Touch Screen

- Two Day Battery

All for a price tag of $6k for an 8lb machine that no one would buy.

I have not used the Touch Bar, yet I agree that's a gimmick.

The problem is that it needs software support. Which means adoption. And that's a problem, since it is only rolling out in the newest MBPs. Had the entire line been refreshed, developers would at least count on it being there and could justify allocating resources supporting it.

Also, what's the external keyboard for, now?

I disagree that Macbooks need touch screens. Touchscreen ergonomics are terrible, unless you change the form factor.

It's easy in Xcode to pop up a simulation of the Touch Bar for Macs that don't have them. Obviously not as good as the real thing, but I expect we'll see at least basic Touch Bar use become a standard feature very rapidly.

> I believe the whole thing is a gimmick (a well intentioned gimmick) meant to drive forward one thing, Apple Pay on the MacBook

If that's the case, wouldn't it have been a lot easier to replace only the power button in the top-right corner rather than creating a whole interface device to replace the function keys?

i would agree except why bundle touchbar at all with the touch id/apple pay? and why remove it from the base macbook pro.

i figure if touch id was a priority they would make a huge effort to update the mac line with a touch id sensor at a bare minimum. as it stands now the decision making seems fragmented and unfocused.

Pretty much nobody has been able to turn touch into a "must have" on the PC. Microsoft has tried valiantly, but it's shipping a million Surface devices per quarter versus five million Macs and 10 million iPads.

> Apple should have done a full touch input screen on the MacBook.

And make you move your hands off the keyboard area? No, thanks.

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