Hacker News Reader

Comment by retrac98 | Hacker News Reader

99%+ of my usage of the touchbar is pressing escape, adjusting screen brightness, speaker volume, or accessing music controls.

All of these worked flawlessly when I had physical keys, but now it's hard to know what I'm pressing without looking, and sometimes the controls become unresponsive to touches or drags.

I'm a programmer/business owner, so perhaps it's useful for other sorts of creative professionals, but it feels like a total gimmick to me.

I applaud Apple's innovative spirit, but the touchbar wasn't useful at launch, it isn't useful now, and they don't seem to have put any effort into making it better. I hope they kill it with the next Macbook pro release and just go the touchscreen route like everyone else.

View on HN

I blame this mostly on Apple's human interface guidelines:

https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline...

Scroll down to "Design Considerations": "Use the Touch Bar as an extension of the keyboard and trackpad, not as a display."

But what I really want is for the touch bar to be a display and input device for things normally elsewhere: time, date, maybe CPU usage, etc. This to me is not a hardware problem, but one with policy.

Edit: what I really want is for Apple to let people experiment with new hardeware, rather than impose their vision on how it should be used. Unlike many others I don't actually hate the touch bar and see some potentials, but not if Apple restricts its use.

Doesn't Apple itself use it as a terrible little mini-display in some multimedia apps, like Logic, to show a ridiculous multi-track "view" on the damn touchbar itself? Like several individual tracks all squished together? And they talk about "human interface" ?

It's not just a view, it's a control. There's a difference between sticking random, non-interactive information in the Touch Bar and having it be a contextually dynamic control.

Personally, I feel as though Apple got it wrong in the HIG. It is a display and it can't be treated as an extension of the keyboard (in a useful manner) given its lack of tactile differentiation. If Apple doesn't want people to look at it like a display, and the content of it is dynamic such that I don't know what the bar represents, then you can't fulfill the HIG. If Apple had an in-OS feedback mechanism that asked users, once a month, if they found Touch Bar useful or an impediment and then also collected number of keystrokes (opt-in) in that month my guess is the distribution of users who interact with their computer primarily through keyboard input will respond that the Touch Bar is an impediment. Those largely clicking for a majority or interaction would likely find it useful. Either way Apple got it wrong by assuming users would always find it better than giving buyers the option without.

Checkout Pock - https://pock.dev

This looks really cool. Thanks!

Haptic Touchbar also helps a bit (but I am not going to buy it) https://www.haptictouchbar.com

Why on earth do I need to tap twice to adjust the screen brightness? I couldn't find a way to just have two increase/decrease buttons. Why can't I adjust how long the touchbar stays active for? Why does it disappear at all? I can't imagine the touchbar would exist in its current form if Steve were alive.

If you hold the brightness button on the Touch Bar you can slide your finger left and right to adjust the brightness so it’s one (long) press. Same with volume.

And if you don't want to wait for a long press, you can do one or more quick swipe to the left or the right, and it do the same as a press on the previous buttons.

FYI you can press and drag on the brightness/volume buttons to make adjustments immediately, no need for a second touch

I'm not complaining about the drag. I'm complaining that I have to tap once to open the slider and then drag it. Whereas it was easier just to have two buttons, one for increment, and one for decrement, that I could just tap or hold down.

Right - you don't have to let go and then grab the slider after it opens. You can just press and hold then slide left or right to move the slider immediately.

I guess there's a still tradeoff: this way you need to move your finger around, but you can immediately skip to exactly the level you want. With holding a button down you have to time it to get to the right spot instead.

Personally I like the slider better but that's just my opinion.

I understand why some people like the slider, but as someone who can type without looking, I'm used to being able to navigate with my fingers up to the brightness and volume controls without having to pay close attention. Now I have to look down in order to hit the right area of the touchbar.

I don't mind since it's barely below the bottom of the screen, but if you're in the middle of something it does mean taking your eyes off it.

If that bugs you enough to bother with a workaround, you could try something like this using HammerSpoon: https://gist.github.com/spinscale/fd82f00da29447990f27f36b3f...

Just put your finger on the icon and slide it one way or the other. You don't have to wait or tap more than once.

Edit for clarity: when you do this, your finger is not actually "on" the slider handle itself. The slider shows up in its usual place, which is offset from where your finger is. But the sliding still adjusts it.

It's a shame that this is not intuitive or discoverable. Its much more efficient but I had to have someone tell me about it.

I just tried what you said. That's slightly better, but it's overall a downgrade from having actual buttons. Thanks for the tip, though!

It sucks that it drags away my focus away from what I’m doing, and has me leave my typing position. Having a fun slider as a visual indicator when there already is a visual indicator on screen doesn’t make up for this inefficiency.

You can touch and slide the finger to adjust brightness and volume.

I don't want to touch and then slide. I want to touch or hold once and either increment or decrement those properties. That was possible with the old keys. Now I have to tap and then perform an action, even though my touchbar has plenty of real-estate.

My issue more is, if not looking and you press the wrong one (brightness/volume), you have to either wait for it to go away and try again or move your hand to clear it.

I feel that if you do the press and slide, the interface shouldn’t change to a slider (that needs to fade away).

Turns out if you do a small rightwards/leftwards swipe on the brightness or volume buttons, then you can increase or decrease them by one notch without opening the slider.

It’s not an intuitive or discoverable command.

Yeah, but that's still two gestures instead of one.

You don't need to tap then swipe, just swipe.

Genuinely curious about the intuitive part: I found it intuitive because it’s a similar gesture in iOS (control centre). In addition, many other gestures on force touch trackpad such as peek-and-pop, are similar to iOS. I can carry my habit from iPhone to Mac without giving it much thought. In fact, to me it feels natural and expected behaviour after being used to the gestures in general. I don’t have a touchbar (still using 2015 rPro), and I agree about discoverability part — no way I’d have tried to swipe on a button.

So my question: once you discovered that you could do a swipe gesture, did you find yourself using it often?

Hey ravenstine, this was 1000% the same frustrations I had with brightness and volume.

The best fix for this for me (the sliding was still a pain) has been to customize the touchbar like this:

In keyboard settings:

1. Change "Touch Bar Shows" to "Expanded Control Strip"

2. Add the 3 button volume and the 2 button brightness controls.

This setup behaves the most like the functional keys for me and has been the best at alleviating frustrations.

I still hope Apple nukes the touch bar though, it's the worst aspect of the Macbook aside from the missing I/O ports.

You don't need to tap twice. Put your finger down on the button and just drag; yeah your finger isn't actually touching the visible slider that opened up, but it work anyway, and the slider will collapse itself again automatically a second after you let go.

There's a preference "Touch Bar Shows" -- change it to "Expanded Control Strip". That makes them work like the actual keys used to. I barely notice its a touchbar and not the old keys now (absurd of course, I'd prefer to have an actual choice).

99% of my interactions with the touch bar was pressing it accidentally with my right pinky.

Fortunately I got an external keyboard.

It could have worked so much better as a display above the function keys. An extra long-and-thin screen that showed stuff and happened to be touch enabled.

App specific stuff, window-manager customisable stuff, all kinds of things. This would have given app developers an opportunity to do stuff with it that you can't do on a PC.

Developers could have liked it instead of feeling mightily pissed off and betrayed by the company they had given so much money to over the years.

I agree with all this. However, even though I still use Macs for everything, it's been clear to me for a while that Apple 'Pro' users are not tech people. There is a big difference in keyboard necessity between a developer and any 'Pro' user. Key travel, actually having real keys, are all a big deal to devs.

I think Apple lost their function and form way a while ago. It's never coming back. The new Mac Pro is the latest example of this. I bought a 2018 MB Pro 13" last year and the touch bar is a waste of space in my mind. We see now that Apple is ditching the scissor keys, but regardless, their design decisions for a while have just been wanting to have something look cool instead of a balance of looking good and functioning great.

The Mac Pro is the perfect example of function over form. It’s big, not that beautiful and expandable like crazy. Did you mean the MacBook Pro?

I thought the mac pro wasn't super expandable. No spinning drives possible, miniscule flash drive space, no pcie power plugs.

Although apple doesn’t publicise the fact all that much on the new Mac Pro coming later this year, it does actually have two SATA ports and some 8 pin power connectors. Apple don’t provide the necessary “cage” to mount the drives (at least as far as we know so far), but third parties have already announced some products that mount internally and use these ports to connect a bunch of disks.

As for power, I believe the two MPX bays provide dual 8pin connectors for up to an extra 300 watts, so should support most power hungry pci-e card designs.

Honestly though, if you can afford this machine it’s not like really any of this matters, this isn’t exactly a hobbyist computer people are going to buy and upgrade themselves all that much.

Thank you, that does sound a little more hopeful.

(It does matter to me, I have owned several mac pro towers and wouldn't touch the trash can with a 10-foot pole)

Just to make sure we are on the same page, the parent poster said the “new Mac Pro”.

https://www.apple.com/mac-pro/

They haven’t announced the maximum amount of flash drive space you can get from them (and I wouldn’t pay Apple prices for it anyway), but you can get 4TB of overpriced SSD storage on the current iMac Pro.

but they said:

"Storage Configure up to 4TB of SSD storage"

(You can get that from a single 2.5" ssd right now on amazon)

Sort of underspec'd when you consider the 1.5tb of RAM you can configure.

Would you really want a lot of internal storage space on it? Wouldn’t you want a separate redundant external very fast SAN?

Part of an innovative spirit is trying things, and letting them breathe even under criticism. But then killing them if they don't work out. You need to adjust to feedback.

I think they may be clearing inventory. At least I hope so.

The touchscreen is even worse on laptops. Windows is a horrible touch screen OS, the interface itself is a mismatch of operating systems seemingly going back to Windows 95.

MacOS wouldn’t fare any better as a touch screen OS.

Windows is a tolerable touch OS because at least it has a touch mode. Linux (GTK+3 at least) is a lot better of course, even though this does involve a bit of a disadvantage for pure keyboard+mouse users.

I really don't know why Apple doesn't do the typical Apple thing here: make it a $600 add-on item. If they can transform 3.5mm headphone jacks into a huge upsell opportunity, I don't know why they'd miss out on that opportunity for something like the Touch Bar. People can then have their standard keyboard with function keys AND an external controller if they make use of an application that would make it useful.

That's exactly what they did. When they introduced the Macbook with touch bar in 2016, they raised prices by $700.

If you check the lates "innovations" you see almost all of those are like that (previous version was better).

- magsafe vs new charger

- ports on 2015 MBP vs now

- keyboard on 2015 vs now

- physical keys vs touchbar

The only improvement that is really an improvement is CPU speed and memory, which I could not care less about. In the same timeframe (2015 to 2019) Apple went from the most innovative company to the 17th position.

https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/gadgets-news/apple-is-no...

Agreed, the Touch Bar is a hassle at best. They should at least make it optional.

Yeah, in my opinion actually Asus has gone in better direction with placing touch screens inside the touch bar. That makes more sense imho and doesn't reduce keyboard capabilities/make it weird to use.

and here I am always on the look out for a good external keyboard that has separate buttons for volume, brightness, and more. This is because on the desk top front Apple long ago decided that multi-key combinations was better than separate keys for some functions and too many vendors followed suit.

Agreed. I don't use them often but I made sure to program discrete volume/media/brightness controls into my keyboard.

Touchbar has been used effectively by Zoom. Only app that I use and love using touchbar with right now.

Probably don't want to advertise using Zoom right now LOL

I didn't know what this refers to. Apparently Zoom has a vulnerability where someone can send you a web link and if you click on it, it will start the camera immediately, allowing them to see you.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20387298

It's worse than that, IMHO. The zoom client installs a web server that remains after zoom is uninstalled with the ability to reinstall zoom.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com