A lament for the Touch Bar
Apple's latest refresh to the Mac line this week claims a victim -- the 13-inch MacBook Pro, and with it, something we're actually quite sorry to see go: the much-maligned Touch Bar.
Apple killed the 13-inch MacBook Pro, and with it, the Touch Bar
While there were rumors and some speculation that Apple might refresh the 13-inch MacBook Pro, it seems in retrospect like an obvious casualty. Apple's laptop line has gotten quite complicated and needed trimming.
Apple positions the MacBook Air as the cost leader, with the M1-series 13-inch model starting at $999, M2 models available in 13-inch and 15-inch livery, and the MacBook Pro now in 14 and 16-inch sizes exclusively, showcasing the M3, M3 Pro and M3 Max processors.
With the MacBook Air encroaching the MacBook Pro for screen real estate with the 15-inch model, something had to go. The 13-inch MacBook Pro seems like the odd one out, so we're not surprised to see it removed from the lineup entirely.
The Touch Bar made its debut with Apple's 2016 model refresh. It was a thin strip of an OLED panel covered by a thin glass digitizer that made it possible to tap and swipe reconfigurable controls, in place of the keyboard's traditional function key row.
By replacing physical function keys with a reconfigurable display, Apple sought to provide the first novel keyboard experience on the Mac since its debut more than three decades before. The Touch Bar offered a dynamic and reconfigurable area that could change based on context, providing users with easy to access features that they'd otherwise have to learn menu bar operations or key commands to access.
Great concept, but it became apparent even during its introduction that Apple itself wasn't all-in on the Touch Bar. It was unique only to specific MacBook Pro models, never gracing any other Mac systems. Desktop Macs and the MacBook Air never saw a Touch Bar.
That severely limited the utility of programming Touch Bar support in apps, although some did. We were always surprised and pleased when we launched a new app to see Touch Bar support included. But they were few and far between.
Apple made a critical error out of the gate by replacing the physical Esc key with a Touch Bar equivalent -- a problem they corrected. But by then, Apple and its critics had made up their mind about the Touch Bar, and it really never saw any evolutions or innovations after its debut. Adding haptic support seemed to be an obvious path, but Apple never went in that direction.
The Touch Bar was the victim of awful timing. It appeared at around the same time that Apple introduced a redesigned keyboard for its laptops that used a butterfly switch mechanism that Apple said was thinner and more stable than its predecessor.
Apple's butterfly switch keyboard design was unquestionably awful. The keyboards were prone to breakage and failure if even the slightest debris got under the keys.
Apple iterated that design for several years, and even covered replacement of those keyboards under extended service programs and a $50 million class-action lawsuit settlement. Apple would abandon the design entirely around the same time it replaced Intel chips inside the Mac with its silicon.
None of this, of course, is the Touch Bar's fault. But by then, the Touch Bar would be relegated only to the 13-inch MacBook Pro. It survived that model's evolution from M1 to M2, but that was the end of the line.
We suspect the Touch Bar is a significant cost sink for Apple when it comes to post-sales service. It's routine, for example, for service techs to swap out top case assemblies when Mac laptops run into keyboard and trackpad problems. Touch Bar-equipped MacBook Pros introduce additional component complexity and higher parts costs for Apple.
Touch-typing Mac users may have found the Touch Bar to be an unnecessary distraction. Accidental contact with the Touch Bar is a key complaint for many, and something we had to train ourselves out of doing.
But for visual typists and those that need accommodations to be able to type effectively, the Touch Bar could be a godsend. We found it especially handy for some games and utilities, saving us from having to free up limited executive function to remember new command key chords and complicated menu operations.
In the end, we accept the Touch Bar was flawed. Apple's own inertia over its support and the limited scope of its deployment doomed it almost from the start.
The Touch Bar was a bold experiment in redesigning the keyboard, a fundamental part of the Mac user experience that had largely gone unchanged since the first Mac debuted in 1984. Maybe we'll even see a similar innovation on the iPhone someday.
We just hope it doesn't take Apple another three decades to take another chance with something new.
Read on AppleInsider
Comments
I briefly used a Mac which had it and I never used it.
1. volume & brightness control sliders
2. the audio waveform previews in QuickLook, with scrubbing. Used this ALL the time, if just to check whether a bounced track looked right.
Logic had some really nice custom controls, and being able to program your own for Mainstage was really nice, but since Apple never made an external keyboard with Touch Bar, the Logic commands never actually got used in this studio…
Shame, really.
Great article. It wasn’t all your fault Touch Bar! Now I guess it’s back to hammering the old ‘volume up’ and ‘volume down’ keys.
at the end of the day it was an expensive and impractical application that was never adopted widely by developers. That the most popular Mac’s (MBAs) and desktop keyboards didn’t have it sealed its fate,
I’ll miss it some, I agree that not enough devs adopted it to make it more worthy. But that 14-inch MBP in space black is like Apple read my mind, so I sorta have to buy that one later this year.
Thanks for the article, I’m 100 percent with you, Peter.
i actually bought my MacBook Pro *because* of the Touch Bar, thinking it was a feature I had always dreamed of. But the reality is I don’t look at the keyboard when I’m working, and — in the rare instances where developers have actually used the Touch Bar to provide useful functions ( (props to Serif and their Affinity apps), I still don’t find it speeds my workflow because shifting focus from one plane to another is so distracting.
No one has time to have customized features for each app on the touch bar - even apps I use most often, I end up learning the 2 or 3 most important keyboard shortcuts to become super efficient - the touch bar can't compete with that, it's always going to be slower, because it requires me to look down from whatever I am looking at on the screen, to the bar, then figure out what to push, carefully, so I don't miss, then look up again.
Add to that a slight delay on the touch bar that was surprising but never went away.... touch bar for some reason was slower than an iPhone screen (no delay).
In the end it wasn't useful for anything I was doing, when I tried using it it was very slow and error-prone.
One of the few failures in product design Apple made - why anyone thought this would be useful is beyond me.
All of which could maybe be forgiven if it didn't _replace_ useful functions I use every day, like brightness and volume buttons ... I just counted besides brightness, volume, escape, and power/touch, there's 7 more buttons I never use - replacing those with a touch bar would be OK, since I don't use them anyway.
I love the concept of the Touch Bar, I just wish that it was done as individual OLED/µLED buttons so that you still tactile control and utility without looking.