Is the Touch Bar a gimmick? Two years in, I can answer that

There are many things in the tech world that have gotten fantastically better in my lifetime (I am 40). GPUs have been amazing, machine learning has made great leaps. virtual reality is now semi-awesome and improving.

But a few things have been getting worse. One of the things I most lament is the move to touch interfaces instead of tactile buttons. See phones, cars, remote controls (apple tv) and now keyboards on laptops. It is a worse interface most of the time. I absolutely abhor it. The trend shows no signs of ever reversing though.

Inspired by a blog post, which I think made rounds on HN as well, I customised my Touch Bar using a Mac app called BetterTouchTool.

Now I have shortcuts to my most used apps on the left, a Now Playing display connected to Spotify in the middle and audio controls (including a volume slider that you don't have to expand first to use) on the right.

This setup is always displayed, regardless of the app currently on the foreground. This means the controls are once again in a predictable place for my fingers and has made using the touch bar a much more pleasant experience.

I love it. I programmed it to show my current TODO task, when I am on break as well as my battery and time. So I basically replaced my menu bar with it.

https://github.com/nikitavoloboev/my-mac-os/tree/master/btt

I miss a real ESC key. I can’t tell if I’ve pressed it or not, which is problematic when using vi and touch typing. Haptic feedback would be a nice add-on to make it a little more tolerable.

Also, Apple’s default configuration with Siri in the upper right was a horrible design decision. It only took me a few hours of use to decide to reconfigure the Touch Bar’s layout.

I found it interesting that even an Apple Genius Bar employee was recommending a third-party app to me: BetterTouchTool.

To avoid the clickbait:

> "So is the Touch Bar a gimmick? I say yes."

I am not a fan of the Touch Bar. I’m one of those who thinks the 2015 MacBook Pro is the epitome of human achievement.But that being said, one thing that is cool about the Touch Bar is when you are viewing a video and it puts a “smeared” thumbnail onto the Touch Bar making it easy to visually seek. That’s really useful sometimes.

I find the touchbar kind of clunky to use (like the author), but I believe it's partly because it's suffers from a sort of "gorilla arm" problem ergonomically.

It's a touchscreen, so you can't lay your fingers on the buttons before pressing something (unless they add pressure-sensitive controls), and you have to reach across the keyboard, so you can't brace your hand on the computer chassis while hitting buttons. Instead you have to awkwardly hover your hand over the touchstrip to use it correctly, which is really awkward

My wife has one, and she only uses the touchID capabilities of the touchbar. Other than that, she doesn't like it.

I'm still not in love with it, but there are two things that make the touchbar much more tolerable.

BetterTouchTool and HapticKey.

The advantages of BTT are obvious but HapticKey has been a really pleasant surprise. It gives every interaction with the touchbar haptic feedback. I now use the touchbar much more frequently.

I’m I the only one who is neutral or even slightly positive about the Touch Bar? I definitely can’t understand why so many people hate it. Take the two points of the article: 1) he uses an external keyboard 80-90% of the time, so he doesn’t care. Well, it’s called Laptop for a reason. 2) errors: I’ve been using the bar for quite a while and wouldn’t say the error rate is any higher than for any other key on my keyboard. I delete a lot of text because I hit the wrong key on the physical keyboard

I wonder if I’m the only one who doesn’t understand where all the hate is coming from

Not every iteration of a beloved product series ends up a classic. This is a down period for the MBP. I hope the clout of some decision-maker within Apple has taken a hit.

I would be surprised if they don't start phasing it out. This along with the keyboard issues are major reasons I won't just buy a new MBP today.

I use a new basic 13” MBP because the Touch Bar is such garbage. God willing Apple releases a 15” model with no Touch Bar later this month.

I like having touch id and the brightness / volume sliders and do miss those on my non-touchbar laptop, but thats all i use it for.

Having used a touchbar MacBook Pro for the last year daily (both for developing and casual use) I also agree with the article. For the most part I ignore it as I usually have a tethered monitor and keyboard setup. However for those times when I do work directly off the keyboard I more often than not accidentally hit a button (the worst being accidentally triggering a build and being tied up for 10 seconds trying to frantically cancel).

I think it would transcend gimmick into useful feature if they added haptic feedback of some kind when it is used. I have plenty of memorized keyboard shortcuts so that I do not need to avert my eyes from the screen when typing, something that the touchbar requires to actually properly use. With some kind of physical feedback I would be more easily able to integrate it's use into my workflows, especially so if you could customize haptic feedback based on virtual buttons.

I fully agree. Even though I don't own a touchbar MBP. I even choose to go with the older model because the touchbar could not be incorporated into my current workflow, even if it was great, as there is no separate keyboard with integrated touch bar (and frankly it would be to expensive if it was).

I wish I had an option to buy a 15 inch mbp without a touchbar.

The author used the touch bar for two years and didn't think of removing the Siri button he accidentally clicked so much, or of adding volume controls to the expanded touch strip.

This review is worthless.

the biggest issue i’ve had with the touch bar was touching it by mistake.

i solved it by having a static set of buttons and an app that vibrates the touchpad when i touch the bar.

the touch bar is the force touch of macbooks.

It is a gimmick to satisfy novelty seekers. But it creates problems for old time users, it messes with muscle memory and having to look down is downright unproductive, it steals microseconds and takes you out of the context for a fraction of time. While kids love this, I know that it's less deficient than tactile buttons that are always there!

However, I think this could be great for new users, it is intuitive if you're new to computers: kids and old people who were never power users.

I agree with the article. When I bought my MacBook Pro I was actually rather enthusiastic about the Touch Bar, and very cautious about the butterfly keyboard. Two and a half years later I love the Butterfly keyboard and dislike the Touch Bar. I don't hate it, but I'd rather have the physical function keys back.

My new work laptop has an idiot bar. It's constantly offering me unwanted autocomplete items and the like. I have sensitive peripheral vision and am easily distracted by "squirrels" that lie outside my field of focus, and that fucking bar is like a constant squirrel generator. Thanks, Apple.

Short answer: yes, especially when the author has the laptop on the desk with a wireless keyboard/trackpad.

I love it for brightness and volume control.

Besides that, it would be really cool if i could program it with microapps. Temperature would be cool and/or clock and upcoming events.

Otherwise i'm not using its app specific features. Just realised that there is a fav button when i have chrome open.

I have a feeling that Apple has been testing the feasibility of adding multitouch to OSX with the Touch Bar gimmick.

Physical controls are so much better! I mean just look at the things musicians and DJs are doing everyday with a keyboard, sliders, dials and a little practice.

The touchbar is a gimmick, but that’s far from the worst sin of that laptop. For me the credit goes to that keyboard being complete and utter garbage. Typing on it cramps my hands up really badly, and instantly makes me want to go back to my Ergodox.

Yes it's a gimmick, I knew the second I saw it. I hate it. It is a nightmare when using VIM. Ugh... When my work said they were going to buy me a MacBook Pro I was stoked. When I found it came with that crap... cringe

The TouchBar has its uses but I think gimmick status has been confirmed since it never made its way to external Apple keyboards. Like the author, my MBP is mostly docked so I can’t actually use it. That being said, I managed to create useful shortcuts with BetterTouchTool. There is potential.

You can, and very much should, remove the Siri button.

Yes. Two years in and it is only available in one out of six models; even Apple has no faith in it.

I think a real fundamental issue (and one that has led to major Apple blowups before too, albeit impacting fewer users) is that Apple made it a zero-sum game unnecessarily, and one not following a strict-superset pattern. They forced an either-or adversarial situation, which of course will drive up emotions more since it by definition dramatically raises the stakes for how useful the new thing must be.

It's true that simplicity is itself a virtue, and cutting old stuff is often at least as important as adding new stuff. It has too often been the case in the tech world that there is always a push for adding new features but not for subtracting old ones at the same time. This has and will continue to cause anger and has been a bone people have picked with Apple since the start of the modern era with the iMac, yet has served them well.

However any virtue can be taken too far or become a bromide, applied as a superficial cultural practice without an understanding of the foundation that previously made it work. Take Apple's aggression on ports for example: a lot of people are (with some justification) upset about having all TB3 ports and thus needing a lot of adapters for older gear. But at the end of the day TB3 is a superset of what came before and then some, it can do everything the older ones did, and the USB-C form factor is genuinely good. How exactly that plays out long term and whether 10 years later everything uses it and it will have all been worth it can be debated, but nothing is lost. But the touch bar simply lacks the features of tactile feedback and muscle memory the function keys offered, so it's not a superset, it's a tradeoff. It offers something new, but it also takes something important away. So whatever is new can't just be "oh that's kind of nice sometimes" and get an easy on-ramp with users, it must immediately be so good it justifies losing what they had before. The Touch Bar doesn't meet that standard, and worse suffers from the fundamental issue of attention requirement. Granted it's not entirely useless, but I don't see how it could ever meet the same ROI particularly for a pro system given that it doesn't really seem to support productivity scaling.

Going back to the start the big tragedy is it's not as if there isn't plenty of vertical space in even a 13" (or 11" for that matter) system on the opposite-screen surface. There was no need to get make it zero-sum, they could have just offered the Touch Bar as a new feature above the function keys. If they had all the angst would have been avoided, it would have been something cool and occasionally useful, and since nobody would lose anything that's all it'd need to be to justify itself. Sure there'd be some grumbling about BOM but that's pretty minor in the scheme of things for these systems.

Incidentally I think this same effect has happened elsewhere for Apple. Consider the reception of the Mac Cube vs the Cylinder Mac, which was effectively the Cube 2. Both tried to do an Apple take on an SFF system, which in the PC world are quite popular, and tried to cram a lot in. Neither ultimately was very successful. But the Cube had some fond users and was generally regarded as "well that's pretty neat even if I don't want one", whereas the Cylinder was awful. I think that's because with the Cube Apple kept the Power Mac. Nobody was forced to use it, so only those who wanted it's unique tradeoffs got it and everyone could be happy. If Apple had killed the Power Mac and said "oh yeah the Cube is totally what all you want" the reaction would have been at least as much (or more) then what happened when they killed the Mac Pro. I appreciate what a horror the 90s were for product line proliferation, and I still hate going to a lot of OEM sites and trying to navigate their multi dimensional product matrixes and a hundred minor variations of the same basic thing. But Apple has cut so much that they've reached meat and bone in some cases and have created problems for themselves unnecessarily and without getting any payoff in return.

Yes.

Apple's in an awkward spot right now: macOS isn't being iterated on, iOS is where they're putting all their engineering effort, and they're marketing iOS devices s being better than computers.

There is no way they will retrofit proper touch into macOS. Instead, in a few years time, you'll run xCode on an iOS device like any other creation tool, with the whole lifecycle on iOS.