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Comment by makecheck | Hacker News Reader

I suspect that as early as the next version, they’ll add tactile feedback to the bar; they already know how to do it, they probably just made a judgment call to release on time. With that addition the bar would feel essentially like a keyboard and solve the biggest issues I think.

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It's not tactile feedback, for me. It's that I can't touch-type on it because there are no keys. I really do want function keys, not widgets, for how I use a computer. I don't look down at the keyboard when I'm typing, I'm not going to want to do it to change brightness or volume or whatever, to say nothing of trying to send F-keys to parallels or whatever. And I also use vim. Blindly mashing at the top corner of my keyboard and having to wait until I can register "OK, I'm in command mode now" from the status bar was gross.

I think that the Touch Bar exists only and one-hundred-percent because Apple doesn't want to hurt the iPad. It doesn't even theoretically offer improvements over an on-screen toolbar with touch capability.

> I think that the Touch Bar exists only and one-hundred-percent because Apple doesn't want to hurt the iPad.

That would be a radical departure for Apple. They're always cannibalizing their own product lines.

Apple is very open about why they don't think a touch screen makes sense for Mac. They absolutely could change direction but as many others have pointed out, the PC form factor is slowly dying, so why would they?

Apple cannibalizes their product lines in favor of what they want to push, and it feels, given the steady disregard of the Mac over the last ~3 years, that they want to push iPads. A touchscreen doesn't make sense for a Mac because they make it not make sense for a Mac, yeah?

(I'm not even saying they should have one. I don't care either way. Just that the Touch Bar is not a good replacement.)

> I think that the Touch Bar exists only and one-hundred-percent because Apple doesn't want to hurt the iPad.

No because touchscreen makes zero sense for Apple.

OSX is simply unusable with a touchscreen. And we know this because you can remote desktop from an iPad and try it yourself. At some point when Apple has (a) built a unified iOS/OSX UIKit so developers are forced to auto scale their apps and (b) rewritten OSX to use it and (c) convinced enough developers to use it then it is a possibility. But that is years away.

I can very much see Apple bringing the iPad Pro's pencil to OSX however.

As I said in a side comment: OS X is unusable with a touchscreen because Apple makes it unusable with a touchscreen. That could change, if they wanted it to. They don't. And that's fine--I don't care either way, I'm touch-agnostic. I just think the Touch Bar is crap and that it exists because they don't want OS X to horn in on iOS.

The Pencil would be the only thing they could do to a standard, no-Touch-Bar-thank-you-very-much MBP that would make me stay with Apple, because I digitally draw and paint a lot. I currently have a DisplayLink-driven USB3 display tablet with a stylus for exactly that reason (and, as with everything else on an iPad, an iPad doesn't begin to replace it because it can't run Photoshop). I'd love it if they went that route. I doubt they will, though, because--well, I think they care about the iPad way more than they do about the Mac.

Touch screens can't (reasonably) be optically coated, because fingerprints on an optically coated screen get very obvious very quickly.

Personally, I'm upset enough that they no longer have a matte-screen option. To take away the optical coating so it could be a touch screen might be sufficient to drive me to another laptop. I hate glare, and the trackpad works fine for me; I have no interest in a touch screen.

I think they made a weird decision here, not letting you hold fn the row of 1 through equals as fn keys. It's not too dodgy a solution, and I wish it was an option because I use both a Poker 3 and an ergodox with chording to do this and it feels entirely natural.

I use vim on an older Macbook Pro. Even with a physical escape key, mapping caps lock to escape is a huge improvement. Now one of your most highly used keys is right on the home row instead of far off in the corner.

That is an option. It is one I don't want to deal with. Escape is escape on every machine, in every terminal. I prefer it to not suck.

try jj instead, i've been using it for years.

> And I also use vim.

As another vim user, it's probably better to get in the habit of using Ctrl-[ or Ctrl-C (though Ctrl-C has caveats in certain situations).

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