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Comment by amelius | Hacker News Reader

What was that extra bar of information called on Macbooks?

Were they a success?

Touch Bar. Given that it was removed in 2021 I'd say - No. However, the issue for me with it was that it replaced a functional key that I want to be tactile. While it's nice to slide a finger to control brightness and volume... I still want actual Esc and co to be physical keys.

I agree. The contextual UI was great and I loved it, but having it instead of the top keyboard row was a terrible idea

Agreed. The mistake was trying to make them replace function keys. If it was an additional info display/touch input, that would have potentially been interesting. But instead of getting something extra, we lost something in the process.

Later, they made Macs with both a physical Esc key and a Touch Bar. It was a bit better, but it still sucked.

I think a large part of the failure was around how terrible that generation of MacBook keyboards were. Had they use the previous (or subsequent) keyboard, and put the Touch Bar above actual physical function keys... I'd be down to still have it around

Keyboards were so bad I've switched to using non-apple laptop with linux after a few months with touch bar.

Good news is they've improved a lot in subsequent generations. But if you're happy with Linux, I'd stick with it :)

I have it all now: MacBook, iMac, framework with Linux, pc with windows and Linux.

Sure, but I would never put the linked device on my laptop. I would put it on a headless server.

It wasn't worth the extra cost to Apple to support it since the vast majority of consumers didn't care about it one way or the other.

Absolutely despised that nonsense.

Useless and no physical ESC for vim.

It also wasn’t optional, if you wanted a higher spec’d MacBook it was coming with a touchbar.

The keyboards of that era also had problems.

I've been a vim user for a long time but it still took me a second to sort out "ESC for him". :)

Oops. Just switched to iPhone the other day still learning the keyboard.

That was the last Mac I ever bought for both those reasons. Sure, I had my replacement keyboard, but it was doomed to fail just like the last one. The Touch Bar seemed cool but then it was discontinued, so goodbye ever seeing any more integrations.

I want to believe that a department at Apple, deep in the basement of some outbuilding, knows that there are people like me who feel so let down by them. Maybe if you can find them and you know the secret knock then they’ll slide open a hatch and say sorry before telling you to leave? Sorry.

Ten years later and I am of course much happier with my FOSS laptop.

Nah, Apple has far too much hubris.

“You’re holding it wrong.”

— Steve Jobs re antennagate

Ctrl+c is the same as ESC for vim and easier to type.

I remap Capslocks to ESC which is even easier.

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