Also, you can actually add the analog inputs yourself. The DIY keyboard community -- which is flourishing with options and new vendors -- has lots of options available. I myself have two analog knobs and one trackpoint on my keyboard. It's absolutely amazing.
But they didn’t. And I was always confused that the Touch Bar never got more love from the hardware developers.
That definitely makes me wonder if it was pushed by Ive or someone at Apple as a pet project, but abandoned once the initial development was done. Seemed very Un-Apple to do something like that these days though.
It also wasn’t easy to build software for the Touch Bar from what I could gather. I had lots of ideas for little tools (think iStat-like gauges, but perhaps for things like the mic input level), but it wasn’t very easy to build one when I tried.
RIP Touch Bar. You might not be missed too much, but I bet something like you will come up again in a decade or two.
I think it was more like they decided to add the equivalent of an Apple Watch to Macs to support TouchID and then asked "what else can we do with it?".
Yes. It wasn't Jony. It came from the software side. I won't name who to protect the guilty.
I was really hoping Apple had a big leap
forward in fingers-on-glass interaction
planned.
While many people happily type on their laptops all day long with no external monitor or keyboard, there are also many people (me included) who think that's an absolute ergonomic disaster and greatly value the extra screen real estate of an external monitor.
So, honestly, there's no way the Touch Bar could have been good enough for me to use it.
The whole idea was just misguided.
What Apple should have done IMO was allow an iPad or iPhone to fill that role. I still do not understand why my iPad can't be an amazing accessory to my Mac. With the right software magic and integration, it could be everything the Touch Bar was while simultaneously doing a lot more, and is of course extremely compatible with external keyboard use.
Well, I can guess why, actually -- it would require a lot of coordination between the Mac and iDevice teams and that is challenging.
(However I'm encouraged -- Sidecar is a good first step. Let's see more...)
So adding stuff yourself is nice (I do it myself!) but not a way to move the industry or even the Apple ecosystem forward.
Sadly, the only company I'm aware of producing that sort of hardware for use outside the music industry seems to be Loupedeck.
I'm sure there's some setting somewhere that defaults to showing whatever the layout for the in-focus app is, but it's failed to make me care enough about it to try to figure it out.
Sure it could; it just has to beat the cost of the lookup. If you could have done some complex operation trivially with it, that couldn’t really be done with some keyboard shortcut, being a dynamic visual field would be fine.
Of course, volume sliders don’t fit that bill, and I don’t think anyone really found something that did… but it’s not some fundamental guarantee that it would be useless.
Apart from developers many professionals do look down all the time because they typically have other devices connected e.g. synths, photo/video editing rigs.
And Touchbar was designed much more for that audience.
The looking was never the problem, IMHO, the problem was execution and utility. It was actually distracting when there was adaptive completion results continually flashing. And the rest of the buttons were never great.
If every single dialog box flashed the buttons, that would be a win as it is easier and faster to tap the touchbar than it is to navigate the cursor and then click. But this obvious use case never really materialized.
And if, like most "professional" users, the laptop is operated via an external keyboard, the muscle memory never develops.