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Comment by mFixman | Hacker News Reader

I honestly never understood the hate for the touchbar. It allows me to be much more granular with volume and brightness, and I never really used F-keys anyway.

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Volume adjustment is actually a great example of why I hate the touchbar.

- I can't adjust the volume without looking at it. Because the touchbar is flat with no haptic feedback when I land on a button, it's hard to remember the exact position of the volume 'button' without looking. Sounds trivial - but combined with point 2....

- The way the volume control expands - it actually moves the 'volume down' button AWAY from your finger, which again requires me to keep looking at the control.

This means that when a loud song comes on, it can take 2-3 seconds to quickly turn the volume down in total. I could do that with one single keypress in half a second or less on a keyboard, without needing to look at the keyboard.

That can also be the difference between missing a key detail from a quiet speaker on a Hangout.

Flashy, but it's a terrible user experience by every metric other than looks, I guess.

You can actually just tap the volume icon on the Touch Bar and slide your finger back and forth immediately and it works; you don't have to tap, then move your finger to the volume slider and move back and forth.

(This is clever, but basically undiscoverable unless someone tells you in, for example, a comment on Hacker News, which is how I found out.)

> You can actually just tap the volume icon on the Touch Bar and slide your finger back and forth immediately

No you can't! There is a pretty long delay. If you move your finger during the delay, nothing happens. Then when it finally decides to switch modes, you have to move your finger again for it to change the volume. Hope you didn't hit the edge of the touchbar yet. Combined with the phantom button presses when using the top row of the keyboard, especially the Siri button, plus other small issues, the whole thing is bafflingly terrible.

It's potentially that I'm using a 2019 MPB, but I can absolutely touch and slide to change volume immediately. Just press and slide on the icon for volume or brightness.

Also pro-tip: you can change the buttons that show up in the touch bar. Settings > Keyboard > Customize Control Strip. I swapped out Siri for a "Sleep" button, which is super convenient when I walk away from my desk.

On my 2017 with Catalina there is an animation that occurs to show the volume slider. Any sliding of your finger that occurs before the animation completes is definitively ignored. Additionally, there is a significant delay before the animation even starts.

I just timed it at ~580 milliseconds, more than half a second from finger hitting the bar to the time when it stops ignoring touch input. It's easy to slide your finger more than the entire length of the volume bar in that time. It's absurdly bad. It would be weird and pretty lame if they fixed this only on newer models.

This is assuming the touch bar isn't asleep and you can even see where the volume button is in the first place. Often I have to touch the bar once just to wake it up, then find the button and touch and hold and slide.... ech I hate it personally.

An app called Pock replaces the touch bar with a custom one that I find a lot more useful - might work for you too

Just go all in with BetterTouchTool + GoldenChaos-BTT (https://community.folivora.ai/t/goldenchaos-btt-the-complete...) -- I don't know why Apple hasn't bought BTT and made this the default, it's truly the best way to use the Touch Bar and the reason why I miss it when I'm using any other keyboard.

I only hate that it replaced the top row of keys. If it were an addition instead of a replacement, I'd be okay with it. It has it's moments, but so do the keys it replaced.

I fully agree with ESC, as that's a universal key and used very often, but the other ones are more specific and having them be adaptable always made sense. Now that they returned the ESC key, that part is solved.

The volume control keys are also pretty universal.

As a developer, how would I step into, step over, step out in Xcode without function keys?? (Continue being ctrl-cmd-Y is the worst shortcut ever). It truly hampers my development because I have to look at the touchbar to see where on earth those keys are (F6, F7) or step in/continue in Chrome (F10, F11).

Also, where on earth is the escape key??

In Intellij IDEA when debugging the touchbar has a debugging-specific menu with all those controls. I don't find myself needing to look at the touchbar all that often. My muscle memory has adjusted over the past couple years I guess.

On the 16”, esc is right there to the left of the Touch Bar. I’m waiting for the next 13”, which I expect will have the same change.

The escape key is back on the new 16 inch, but even on older Touch Bar Macs you can tap anywhere on the left side of the Touch Bar (doesn't have to just be the escape button area) and it will still work.

Different strokes for different folks, but I've never liked using the function keys for debugging. I just click the buttons on the screen. I'm a little surprised they don't have a way to set the Touch Bar buttons up to do that in Xcode though.

I will try the "left of the escape key" trick - thanks!

Moving the mouse cursor up to the toolbar always seems a lot of travel and swishing around if you're hovering over variables to see their contents in the source code.

I have found the auto/local/all view in Xcode to be a bit dumb and unable to properly expand some template objects in C++ so it's all just an exercise in frustration anyway!

Want granularity? Just hold alt+shift while pressing the volume buttons to adjust the volume in quarter-box increments. You can do it without looking and it’s way easier than moving that slide on that gimmick touch bar. Works for brightness, too.

Much of the hate is that the touchbar wasn't optional, at least not unless you wanted to opt out of an Apple laptop. If the touchbar had been something users could choose, Apple users wouldn't have minded so much.

Supporting more options is expensive, so it's understandable that Apple didn't want to give their customers a choice. Still, it seems like a gimick. And it appeared at the same time as the butterfly keyboard, cementing the notion that Apple had lost its way.

I appreciate the touchbar every day (esp. with bettertouchtool) but the soft escape is horrendous as it's used in so many of my workflows and isn't 100% responsive and doesn't give any tactile feedback.

It's a mandatory and expensive feature.

It occasionally freezes. I occasionally touch the buttons by accident. Mine is missing the physical escape key.

It doesn't add any benefit to my experience. I'd prefer real keys that I don't need to look at. I could hit volume up/down easily on the previous models.

Using Terminal, I use the Esc key a lot for navigating and having a touch bar Esc key is not a great experience since you also don't feel feedback that you're touching the right key.

I've also accidentally hit the touch bar a few times while hovering one of my fingers above it as I press down on one of the number keys.

It's just not worth it money/usefulness. To me it's going too far with tech.

It's not awful. It's just that I wish I had actual keys every time I use it.

I’ve had it locked up a couple of times, and couldn’t mute a loud sound.

You can be just as granular by using shift + alt + volume/brightness. That way your changes will be in 0.25 step increments rather than the default full steps.

keyboards are meant to be used without looking at them. with the introduction of the touchbar, you have to look at what you're pressing. it's like a giant touch screen in a car, it works, but you have to look at it, where as if you have buttons, you can find what you want to do by feel/memory.

on a personal note, i've randomly refreshed webpages because i've overreached on the number row with the touch bar.

I hope I didn't get permanent damage but I hurt myself badly with it. I was trying to put the volume up a bit while wearing earplugs (it was very low) so I pressed the "up" volume key. I accidentally pressed few pixels to the left from where I should have pressed and it went to FULL VOLUME without a warning, blasting audio and hurting myself badly.

This could not have happened without the touchbar. This is horrible UX and I will never trust that (work) computer again.

>It allows me to be much more granular with volume and brightness

I press the physical button a few more times? I find that 10 times easier.

"I don't need F-keys, so I don't understand why anyone else would ever need them"

Does that statement strike you as reasonable at all?

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