Something that seems to satisfy users _and_ is less costly seems to be a no-brainer business decision.
The touchbar is a flawed design concept imho. The entire reason I touch type is so that I don't have to look down from my screen. My eyes remain on the screen for 99% of the time I am working. It's jarring and discontinuous for me to have to look down to use the touchbar. That's why I personally never liked it. I think the tactile feedback of a real physical button is essential.
I think Apple realizes this already to some extent because they went and added a physical escape key.
I think this sentiment holds true for function keys in general. I the vast majority of people never used them.
Absolutely, and Apple put function keys in that category. Yeah, maybe you touch-type those keys way up there at the top, but I'd bet a paycheck that the vast majority of MacBook users will look down before hitting a function key. I've touched typed since I learned on manual typewriters, and I still can't reliably hit the one I want blindly.
Doesn't matter anyway, as soon as I Cmd-Tab to annother app, the key functions all change anyway. But those handy "Fx" labels stay exactly the same despite the function change. But since it's always been this way, it is therefore a superior design and should not be changed.
The touchbar for sure is lacking something, not sure what though. I agree with apple that the fn row could be utilised better so I applaud them for trying something, not sure if the touchbar is the right way though but should apple stick with it and keep going in the right direction again I will for sure customise the hell out of the touchbar.
Yeah, and I believe that the fn-keys are the exact symptom. I haven't encountered anyone that uses fn-keys to it's full potential (or at least, more than the Touch Bar can provide).
> The touchbar is a flawed design concept imho. The entire reason I touch type is so that I don't have to look down from my screen.
For simple actions, gaining muscle-memory on Touch Bar virtual buttons are possible. (I myself don't look the Touch Bar when performing simple & repetitive actions like open new Tab, or when pressing the escape key.)
> It's jarring and discontinuous for me to have to look down to use the touchbar.
Well, isn't it something like saying that it's discontinuous to move my hands from the keyboard to the trackpad to operate some GUI app? It's a glance away, and mostly the Touch Bar's actions are predictable & you know when you use it (for example, editing the formatting of some text in the MS Office Suite, or opening the emoji selector, or selecting autocomplete, etc...).
> That's why I personally never liked it.
Yeah, the feature has a variety of tastes. I think I can understand why some people just don't like it, but...
> I think the tactile feedback of a real physical button is essential.
I personally use HapticKey[0] for that.
I use Vimium for browsing, liberally use keyboard shortcuts and use Vim/vim extensions in other IDE's. So my trackpad use is very limited indeed because I find it discontinuous. But I think the trackpad is much better than the touchbar at least because it's huge, you don't have to precisely touch it in any particular spot, unlike the touchbar.
On my personal lenovo laptop I don't use the trackpad at all and use the trackpoint because it's an easier/faster transition than using the touchpad.
I used Better Touch Tool[1] to add the buttons that execute the scripts.
Wait, that might not work for me -- I use emacs in a terminal.
about butterfly switches... garbage
Hmm, I think I've never used my ESC key when using Emacs, I bind Ctrl to Caps-Lock and call it a day.
BTW, I also frequently (~3-4 times a day) use vim, and I never found it hard to edit with the Touch Bar Esc key. I can find the Esc location without looking, I'm pretty sure anyone can do that. It's just simple: just press the most left part. The non-display part left on the esc button display also works as the esc key, so no problem with that.
(Yes, and that's why I believe that people who hate the Touch Bar b.c. of the no Esc key have never used the MBP. It's really a non-issue.)
It was the thing that finally got me to rebind my mode switch to `jj`. Which works great, until the keyboard decides that "j" is the key it's going to double that day, then it's very frustrating... Fortunately today the keys it has decided to double are "bb" and "88"
There’s no physical feedback for the escape touchbar area even after you learn to strike it without looking. It sucks.
Ah, I also agree that it's a problem. For now, I use the HapticKey[0] app to mitigate the problem. It's wonderful.
For you. It's a non-issue, for you. That doesn't make other people's experience invalid.
Slightly confused emacs user.
Especially things like Esc : (which is Esc then Shift-;) is surely easier to type than Alt-Shift-;.
Reading through the comments here, it’s amusing to see how many people make assumptions about how things should be just because that’s how they work.
Someone above claimed that not being able to blind type function keys shows severe keyboard incompetence, something all trained computer typists should be able to do.
Well what about us poor souls who are trained mechanical typewriter typists? We didn’t have function keys?
The age discrimination is real!
This works pretty great, especially since eg. ctrl + backspace (I don't know about Macs, does cmd + backspace work?) deletes the entire last word.
Without remapping the capslock you need both hands to execute this shortcut, which makes it much less practical.
It's very useful to switch input layouts.
I'm so glad this model has a Touch Bar.
I have seen numerous people who have a MBP 2016 or later which just can't use computers without the Touch Bar experience.
If somebody doesn't find it useful, that's OK, but please, there are a lot of people (who doesn't loudly complain at HN) that finds the Touch Bar useful & incorporates it in one's workflow.
I for myself uses my Touch Bar extensively, from when I'm using Emacs (with a bit of scripting & BTT), Terminal.app, Safari, MS Office Suite, and on and on and on.
I really won't care if Apple would release a MBP without one, but I'm worried Apple will remove the (IMO very useful) concept altogether just because of the loud complainers on the net (like the butterfly mechanism).