Hacker News Reader

Comment by lajawfe | Hacker News Reader

I can't stop but speculate if departure of Ive had anything to do with this. I guess there was a lot of push-back internally about this, but because of Ive, they had to endure 4 generations of butterfly switches. Touchbar also is just a resource hog for nothing extraordinarily useful. I haven't seen people use it too often. I bet they did user studies and found out that the Touchbar wasn't the new interaction method they hoped it would be. And now, they are planning to introduce new macs without them. I bet Ive feels bad about having to see his decisions being rolled back. Anyway, I hope the rumored 16' Macbook pro actually caters to the professionals by prioritizing thermals over thinness, and if one can wish, it would be nice if Magsafe could ride this rollback train.

View on HN

This app was released recently:

https://pock.dev/

It puts the dock in your touchbar. It's the first time in the 9 months I've had this laptop where I've actually gone "ok, this is useful" and I am actually using it. I now have the dock auto hide and I mostly use the touch bar to open apps.

That said, I'd still prefer they ditched the touchbar in favor of function keys. I'd be happy if they shrunk the ridiculous size of the touchpad a bit, and put a row of function keys in between the touchpad and keyboard as well.

honestly what do you use the dock for? i find i set up my windows in different workspaces at the beginning of the day and just toggle between them. the dock is more of an annoyance nowadays.

The https://pock.dev Touch Bar is great. It can show you the DateTime, battery life, all of your open apps, but the thing I use it for most is Spotify. You can do swipe gestures on the Spotify Touch Bar icon to control the music player without opening the app at all.

I do that as well, but I don't keep every app open all day long so the dock still comes in handy.

Personally, while I have never once used the touchbar, I do think the ability for apps to display contextual function keys has a lot of use cases. I would be happy if they released physical keys with little oled screens on them, like that old Optimus keyboard. Apparently it was garbage but the tech has come a long way in ten years.

A slight improvement over that invented by Apricot 36 years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACT_Apricot

I think that one thing holding this back is the lack of a desktop keyboard with a touchbar display. If there was a normal sized keyboard where you could have a full keyboard and a TB display, that would help give an incentive to have more touchbar apps like pock.dev.

Unfortunately, so many people hate the current version of the touchbar that there hasn’t been much innovation in this area.

Apps can display contextual functions on the screen! The main problem with the touchbar is that you never look at it. It's not discoverable.

The problem with the touch bar is that you have to look away from the screen to use it. Physical buttons would allow you to touch type, and I don't think it's a problem to scan the keys a few times when you start using a new app. In that sense they are just as discoverable as keyboard shortcuts. You look them up a few times, and eventually you use them without thinking about it.

We're working on that currently for an entire keyboard

www.sonderdesign.com

Interesting, I've been wondering for years why nobody makes e-ink keyboards. I'm old enough to remember the $1,200 Optimus keyboard that had OLED screens in each key. Everybody wanted one, but then it turned out they were total shit to use. E-ink should have far fewer challenges than oled screens though. Just a bit of feedback: your product page doesn't tell me anything about the hardware design. I would want to know what kind of switches you are using, materials, travel distance, tactility, etc before I would consider buying one. You might want to include some detailed technical specs on another page if you want to attract the hardcore keyboard nerds. While they aren't a large market, they are influencers. I'd also like to see some video of the keyboard being used before I plop down $200 on a preorder.

Windows laptops are far worse than the touchbar: replacing the function keys with volume, brightness etc.

The two worst keys are the touchpad lock key, and the WiFi key. Both of which "crash" the laptop when your average user hits them unintentionally: because either the touchpad stops working or the internet stops working. Absolute madness.

They did themselves disservice by replacing the f keys with a Touch Bar

In all the laptops I've seen, volume and brightness controls require the Fn modifier to be pressed (or can be set to do so), else they behave as F1-F12 normally.

It's seemed wildly obvious to me that Ive, whatever good work he did under Jobs, did horrible work without Jobs to constrain him.

I hope that Apple returns to making quality hardware without Ive present.

Outside of the keyboard fiasco what else has Apple designed that’s so bad?

I quite like Face ID, the latest gen iPad Pro, and even the new Mac mini, and Mac Pro.

Sure the keyboards were bad, but like it or not Apple has a pretty obvious goal to get MacBooks as thin and light as possible. At some point they needed a switch from the existing keyboard design to make it thinner.

iOS 7 with zero affordance was slap in the face. It was epitome of form over function. Unfortunately the entire joined the bandwagon and it took yeas to dial back and undo the damage and or people just got used to it.

> Outside of the keyboard fiasco what else has Apple designed that’s so bad?

How about the first generation Pencil? To charge it you had to plug it in to your iPad.... it looked ridiculous and was very distracting. Thankfully, they fixed this in the second generation.

It’s pretty suggestive that Ive leaving was precipitated by this. He may have been forcing the keyboard against criticism. I’m sure he had huge clout from his big successes over the years. Good riddance, I say. I hope they make a dramatic back step on their laptops.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com