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Comment by Plyphon_ | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.)

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.

> 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.

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.

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