Comment by plqbfbv | Hacker News Reader

Comment by plqbfbv | Hacker News Reader

No, the biggest problem was the hardware.

It replaced a well-known decades-old paradigm of engage-only-on-user-input buttons with a glowing slider that would always engage out of turn. I can't count the number of times I reached for numbers, only to be greeted with the whatever random function the application and context decided it was relevant there. And of course, whenever I reached for the ESC key, it would never register it properly, because if you're trying to quickly back out or interrupt software that's misbehaving, the touchbar software also had to run on the same CPU and could become totally unresponsive to input. All of this doesn't even begin to describe the rage of being in the middle of words and sentences and realizing your screen has been doing random shit for the last 10 seconds because your fingers accidentally swiped or hovered a 1px portion and activated the $USELESS_FUNCTION slot machine (I do have big hands and long fingers).

I hated it from the first ghost touch back in 2019 until my work Mac was replaced with an M3 in 2024, and after they added some customization settings, I basically disabled all the "glossy and touchy" functionality and set it to display the FN keys regardless of application or context. Then I mapped pressing FN to show brightness control + audio mute/down/up. And even then the occasional F10 or F11 accidental swipe was always a possibility, although way less rage-inducing.

As others mention, the Touch Bar ran on its own CPU, well, SoC.

The T1 and T2 and its associated controllers were actually part of a gradual and public transition to Apple Silicon!

Most people didn’t realize it at the time though.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_T2

> the touchbar software also had to run on the same CPU

It actually ran on the separate T1 CPU.

> It actually ran on the separate T1 CPU.

Thanks for the clarification, I guess that didn't really change the result. Perhaps the Intel CPU was busy burning CPU cycles and couldn't process interrupts properly, or because the communication was USB-based, it couldn't reliably deliver the required messages. The end result for me was that whenever I needed to use the ESC key, it wasn't available/visible or was unresponsive.

Never had any problems with the touch bar. Until it died in a very flashy manner. Never been bothered by it.

Flashy LCD, or flashy smoke coming out?

Out of curiosity.

The Tx SoCs communicated with the main system over Ethernet, IIRC, at least with the T2 SoC.

The Tx SoCs themselves should have never locked up because there was a watchdog that would power cycle it when it became unresponsive.

> The Tx SoCs communicated with the main system over Ethernet, IIRC, at least with the T2 SoC.

The Wikipedia page linked in your other comment reports: "The T2 communicates with the host via a USB-attached Ethernet port.". So in the end it's really both, Ethernet AND USB.

> The Tx SoCs themselves should have never locked up because there was a watchdog that would power cycle it when it became unresponsive.

Perhaps I was reaching in the corner too far due to physical ESC muscle memory and it wasn't being registered by the touchbar, but regardless, being eth-over-usb means there was a server or kernel process listening on the Intel side to process those keys and raise them as interrupts or keyboard events. I guess sometimes, when some misbehaving application was already stealing all the Intel CPU capabilities or the kernel or some kernel extension had an issue, the touchbar could become unresponsive due to the load on the Intel side, with the T2 part being perfectly fine. And I did get at least a couple dozen times a completely frozen touchbar that left me with no choice but to reboot the system.

I ended up putting insulating tape across mine.

I tried that, but whatever tape I used was slightly too thick and left a mark on the screen.

I settled on configuring it to only show the mute button, somewhere in the middle of the row where I was least likely to touch unintentionally (iirc, you had to have at least one button, and mute seemed like the least-dangerous option)

And then you had to have some paid-for app that let you use Caps Lock as Escape (which was annoying because I'd been remapping it to Control for a couple of decades, so had to unlearn that).

The default setup had really horrible ergonomics for me, with that no-feedback, out-of-position Escape key and the screen dimmer positioned exactly where my hands tended to rest. Ugh!

Yes, and to expand, touch is actually a worse interface, period. The lack of any and all physical feedback on touch makes it unsatisfying to use, and error-prone. From a human-computer interface perspective, it's a downgrade.

We take the downgrade with phones because the tradeoff is worth it for size. For laptops, that tradeoff is different: we already have a keyboard and display, and the size of the computer is fairly large already.

I mean, we've seen those laptops with both touchscreens and a keyboard. How often are people preferring and using the on-screen keyboard as opposed to the physical one? From what I've seen and experienced, almost never. Which makes sense, it's a worse interface.

We also see this same problem in cars, and it's actually much worse there. On-screen buttons are a pain in the ass, and with cars we don't have the luxury of searching with our eyes. I have friends with fancy cars with touch everything. You know what they do? They just never adjust the AC while driving, because they can't. That's insane to me, but they put up with it. If car manufacturers would just test these interfaces on a few thousand miles of driving, they would realize they suck.

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