Hacker News News Feed for the Mac Touch Bar

It should be still rewritten in rust.

That's basically what Objective-C code looks like when desugared to C.

I have a feeling the touch-bar is part of Apple's strategy to slowly convert keyboards into touch-screens for their desktops and notebooks. They're doing it a lot more carefully than on the phone where they could jump all-in.

If they can improve the haptic feel of it by iterating on a less-critical portion of the keyboard and show people what a more adaptable layout can do, maybe they'll be able to produce a touch-screen keyboard most people want.

I have the 2017 touchbar rMBP as well. I've found BetterTouchTool useful for customizing it with various scripts (displaying Spotify currently playing, for instance). I guess it's not so much the touch bar itself but the lack of function keys which still throws me off. Thankfully I use an external keyboard for when I need that row...

> But the touch bar is pretty pointless, I would rather have just paid less money or gotten better hardware.

The audience for the touch bar is people who look at their keyboard and/or take their hand off the keyboard frequently (e.g. to use a mouse). Come to think of it, the touchbar is probably best considered a mouse+menu accelerator.

As for you, the touchbar is pointless for me, but that's simply because its physical affordances are completely and inherently outside my model of use. I don't want my gaze off the screen and I don't want my hands off the core keyboard. We are likely in the minority.

Apparently there's touch bar support in the Mac emacs branch

It would be nice if it were like the Optimus keyboard [1], but I understand why they didn't do it. I would remove a lot of flexibility for sliders and variable size keys.

[1] http://www.artlebedev.com/optimus/

You can have sliders in the touchbar that you can't have with e-ink keys.

The bar would be perfect for adjusting volume and brightness if Apple decided to remove the awful indicator pop-up in the monitor.

For what it's worth, Apple was rumored to be buying this [1] company, who purports to have built an e-ink keyboard with relatively normal chicklet style keys.

[1] https://sonderdesign.com/

Is there any touchbar app that just shows configurable buttons that you can use for performing certain functions?

I got a MBP this last refresh. I'm a programmer.

Touch Bar is a nice incremental advance. Not having a physical ESC key is not as bothersome as I expected. In fact, I don't notice it at all. Disclaimer: I don't use vi.

I like the media control modes, and am looking forward to content creation apps (ex: Ableton) making use of it.

I'd be sad if it were taken away, but it wouldn't prevent me from getting work done. It's a nice-to-have extra.

Also, the new keyboard is fantastic. I love the keys, and my external keyboard is now a buzzkill and I can't wait for Apple to refresh the Magic Keyboard with the new switches.

I have never accidentally hit the touch bar.

I run architecture software on Windows and Mac on my MBP.

On software that supports it I use it and vastly prefer it to F-keys. For instance, I never remember the F-key shortcuts for AutoCAD. In the macOS version, with icons on the Touch Bar, I use them all the time and it's fantastic. For system shortcuts, I find it about the same as using the F-keys on the previous model.

On Windows, I frequently brush by the Touch Bar when entering numbers (for dimensions) and pressing escape to cancel commands. Even the side of a finger is enough to trigger a shortcut, unlike a physical key that requires some amount of force directed downward. This is quite frustrating and likely a real productivity loss with no real gain for software that just shows standard F-keys. I should re-map my caps lock key but I need to switch between camel case for naming objects and all-caps for notes frequently.

I hope that I can eventually customize the bar in BootCamp and then it will be a mild improvement over the old way but neutral-to-negative unless you're in macOS on supported software only and then if you don't already have muscle memory for the shortcuts.

I'm a developer and one of my work laptops is a MBP 13 inch w/ touchbar. I wasn't a huge Apple fan to begin with, but I used one of the last gen 17 inch MBP's for work, for about 2 years and liked it mostly because of the excellent hardware, specifically the keyboard and trackpad.

The new keyboard is absolutely terrible though. Genuinely the second worst keyboard I've ever used. The new switches have caused dramatically more typing errors for me. I thought it might decrease over time, but after 60 days with it as my daily driver I've seen no improvement. It's an odd feeling when I'd rather use a generic HP desktop keyboard over the Apple keyboard.

I tried to keep an open mind with respect to the touchbar, but so far I haven't found a reason to like it. I will say that trying to use Vi is an exercise in futility if you don't remap the ESC key. It probably wouldn't bother me so much if I didn't feel like it's just sitting there using battery power unnecessarily.

Hopefully others have had a better experience.

I have one for work and absolutely hate it. No tactile feedback at all, so it's easy to mis-hit a key. I also echo the guy who said he accidentally hits Siri now because of it. It happened to me A LOT until I realized you can change what shows on it by default. Now I keep mine with expanded controls at all time. It's still annoying because I have to look down to be able to press the right key. I prefer having physical buttons.

EDIT: ALSO the keyboard itself is AWFUL. The absolute WORST keyboard I've ever used. It's terrible to get stuck typing on.

I was issued a new gen MBP at work and have been supremely disappointed. The touch bar is (to me) a useless anti-feature, and am also completely dissatisfied with the new keyboard (reduced tactility across the board, varying tactility from key to key, a loud static noise emitted from the keys when the machine heats up, etc).

I went so far as to try to return this thing, but my employer wasn't willing to indulge me. The GPU upgrade and smaller form factor, to me, aren't worth the sub-par keyboard. If they allowed for more than 16GB of RAM the new models might be worthwhile, but as it stands I definitely do not recommend it as a work machine.

I've had a MacBook Pro w/Touch Bar since Dec 2016, and the touch bar has mostly gone unused by me other than the core functions (changing brightness, volume, and ESC and function keys).

The only thing I've used on the TouchBar that I did find very useful was scrubbing in QuickTime when the video is fullscreen.

Still, I would have much rather had a the best spec'd 2016 MacBook Pro wo/TouchBar and physical function and ESC keys.

Edit - And for the record, I love the keyboard over my Mid-2012 MacBook Pro keyboard. No complaints there.

I had it on for a day and the constant context switching was annoying. I flipped the setting back so that the default toolbar (volume, esc, brightness etc) is always displayed.

I still don't like it at all. I'll sometimes look up while thinking and one of my fingers will accidentally be resting on the brightness dimmer. I'll look back down and my screen is black and I'm like WTF??! Only to realize where my finger was with no feedback I had done so.

I wish the touch bar would go away.

My work laptop has it, and I'm resoundingly neutral. I think it was a mistake not to give it a genuine hardware escape key, especially since there's dead space to the left of the actual display where you could actually put something like, I don't know, A HARDWARE ESCAPE KEY. But beyond that, I think the hate directed at it is way blown out of proportion. Maybe other writers/developers need actual physical function keys all the time and will go bananas without them, but I've found that in practice, I just don't. I'm a touch typist on the actual alphanumeric keyboard, but have never been able to hit media keys and function keys without looking down anyway, so I don't feel any substantial rage that I have to look down to use the volume or brightness slider. I kinda like the emoji bar, on the rare occasion I use emoji. It's kind of neat to get a terminal that has both option and meta available instead of either/or, and I admit I use the man page button when I remember it's a thing. And, of course, if I hold down FN, I get all my function keys back anyway -- which is how I've had things set with the hardware function key row for the last few years (other keys by default, FN to access F1-F12), so in practice, there's no significant change for me. (And you can set it so it displays F1-F12 by default and does the touch bar woo woo stuff when you hold down FN.)

Having said all that, I'm neutral because it hasn't sold me as being a "must have" feature that's worth the ~$200 premium. I bought a MacBook Pro earlier this year, post-Touch Bar, and bought one of the lower-end 13" ones with the actual function keys.

Worse than useless. Adds no value and sometimes it crashes.

The Touch Bar is the reason I didn't buy a new MacBook and went with an XPS instead. As a hardcore vi/vim person, there's no way I'm going to use it, period. Why didn't Apple offer a plain keyboard as an option on the higher-end MBPs at least?

I've been using a 15" tMBP for around 8 months now and although I don't miss the function keys one bit, I'm yet to have an experience with the Touch Bar that makes me go "oh, now I get it."

Changing the volume and brightness by pressing and holding the relevant icon and sliding is nice, but that's literally all I've ever really had to use the Touch Bar for.

I'm not looking at the keyboard while I type and therefore am never going to see or use the auto-suggest dictionary thing it does when you're filling in text fields, nor am I ever inclined to use emoji, so that Touch Bar feature is essentially invisible to me.

Apps which integrate the Touch Bar in some way are only ever replicating functionality that already exists in the app itself, and so there's no real impetus to use the Touch Bar if you're already familiar with that app.

I feel like there's something missing here, that the Touch Bar's killer feature just hasn't been presented to me yet. I don't have a suggestion for what that killer feature might be, but I expect that as time goes by and the Touch Bar becomes more prevalent, developers will start thinking about unique and innovative ways to incorporate it.

I use an external keyboard most of the time, so the TB goes unused.

I've customised it with BetterTouchTool so at least I have some useful shortcuts the few times I'm on the road, but I wouldn't cry if it went away. It's one of those things I would have loved when I was 16, but grown-up me doesn't see much value in it. The fact that I cannot reliably reach a button without looking at it, basically disqualifies it for any keyboard poweruser, I think.

Touch-ID addition is wonderful, no complaints there (beyond a bit of extra paranoia).

The rest of the keyboard is a love-hate thing. I find myself banging on it, the travel is really short, especially for people using mechanical or simil-mechanical keyboards; and it's pretty noisy compared to the previous one. I also hate the collapsed arrow keys.

To be honest I bought this MBP only because I found it uber-discounted in Japan. The power upgrade is nice, but everything else (the TB, the dongles, even the outsized trackpad) is change for change's sake, and it makes the experience overall worse compared to the previous model, IMHO.

I use it all the time, the volume / brightness sliders work really well

The problem is that most apps displays things in the Touch Bar that are already visible / accessible on the screen via mouse.

It also gets rid of F-keys which makes it really hard to use a lot of shortcuts in my IDE (because I have to look down to see where the F-key is)

The Touch Bar would be more useful if it was used to make features discoverable that aren't already on the screen.

I find it quite usefull at times. One thing I really like are the settings you get while taking a screenshot, when you press the shortcut for the area screenshot tool you have the option to change the destination or copy it to clipboard, you can also change it to another tool. I’m not sure if that was possible before.

Not really the touch bar, but Touch ID + 1Password is really nice!

Dev here: I've had the MBP w/ Touch Bar for about 3 months now.

* For 2 of those months, I did not know I could customize the touchbar and kept hitting siri. Kinda annoying.

* I thought I would hate not having a ESC key, turns out it's not so bad. I'm able to hit it precisely the only problem is that it doesn't have any feedback. If the on screen interaction is too subtle then you have no idea if you've hit it or not. Just a little vibrate would be great, like android capacitive buttons.

Overall I neither hate it nor like it. It's cool, I guess. I like being able to customize it and more finely control my music. TouchID great too not sure that counts as the touchbar. I don't /need it/ in my next machine nor will I seek it out.

I bet you'll get dramatically different opinions based upon people who bought it themselves or had work buy it for them. Former have to self justify cost, latter don't.

I am one of latter. The touch bar is garbage. It is less accurate and takes longer than the old media. I rarely use it. I use emaca - try hitting meta-f a few times in a row and tell me that getting rid of the ESC key is not annoying

The new keyboard is garbage. I occasionally open my previous mac and I really miss the keyboard. I have a maxed-out MacBook Pro 15" touch bar. Apple has really screwed up its human interfaces.

I've had one for a couple months now, and it largely goes unused on a daily basis. I remapped caps lock to escape for vim usage, so my most common theoretical use of it isn't necessary anymore.

I will say, however, there are moments when it shows promise. The 3rd party app BetterTouchTool lets you put custom shortcuts on it, so I created some utility shortcuts for things I never remember how to do, like taking screenshots. In those moments it's very nice, but I don't think I'd think less of the computer without the touchbar.

I use it daily because it's the only place to change volume and do a bunch of essential OS tasks. They replaced the top row of keys with it. However I don't use it for much beyond that.

There are times that its shortcuts make it convenient for you to work and actually save your time. e.g. pdf editing shortcuts and also facetime shortcuts as well as email writing cpabailities.

When I go to hit delete, my fingers curl up and end up hitting something on the touch bar. Before I took the lock button off the touch bar, this lead to some absolutely maddening interruptions in my work flow. Removing that made it better, but I honestly prefer typing on my xps 13 than on my work computer.

I replaced the Siri button with a "lock screen" button. I do love that about it. :)

I don't like the touchbar at all. I didn't initially like the keyboard either, but have grown quite quickly to prefer it - seems more solid, and the keys are a bit larger.

It would only be nice if they had not removed a physical escape key. It's a downgrade in my opinion. Sometimes it just turns off for no reason.

Not very useful at all. Few apps take advantage of it. The lack of a physical Escape key is also very annoying.

I use it daily. I'm indifferent to it. What I love though is that I now have TouchID on the power button. That's what makes it great. The customization is nice, and I find I hit the play/pause buttons on the touch bar if I'm watching something on Youtube more frequently than locating my cursor and clicking on play/pause.

I don't think my family member with the Touch Bar has ever used it.

I remapped my Caps to Esc, and recommend doing the same; as a vim user it's great.

Map your Caps Lock button to ESC

I have the same fear. I'm leaning towards the xps but I'm not gonna buy one unless I can try one out first physically.

I'm using a machine with a touch bar right now and I have an escape key in the upper-left corner of the touch bar where it always was. I don't understand this complaint.

I assume the Touch Bar and the corresponding decision to remove the ESC key is part of the strategy to make the transition between iOS and MacOS as seamless as possible, even if the 2 systems are never completely unified. I can't remember the last time I've ever used the ESC key in day-to-day computing but I notice its absence all the time when using the iPad Pro's smart cover keyboard.

I don't own a Touch Bar laptop myself but as someone who has to teach people how to use computers and applications, the Touch Bar bothers me as much as Microsoft Office's Ribbon toolbar, in which functionality somehow becomes even more difficult to memorize because of the seemingly arbitrary decision in how the context buttons are arranged (nevermind how they might change with each software update).

I'd like to have the keys back but keep TouchID

I ended up buying a second hand late 2013 MBP instead of a new one because of it. Happy with my choice. Disappointed that I don't have the option to buy a top end machine without the touchbar.

I love it. Prepping a Youtube video on how I use it this weekend.

You can remove Siri from the touch bar in the touchbar settings. While in the settings you can tap the bar to open the different configurations and remove her anywhere

3d touchpads have revolutionized the way I curse audibly a few times over the same period

Haha, I had the same issue, so swapped it with “do not disturb” that also use quiet frequent.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2X_UATE9-c

I replaced Siri with the lock button. Guess what happens from time to time.

Cool story.

Non-touchbar are the first models offered on the MacBook pro page.

Oh, the Touch Bar that I'm really looking forward to having when I upgrade my laptop, because I am a professional.

I've been searching for alternatives too. Problem is I don't know of any laptop that has a similar quality touchpad compared to MBP. Apparently Apple has invested much more in touchpad responsivity, especially to small movements.