16-inch MacBook Pro

Re:16-inch MacBook Pro by mstade on Wednesday November 13, 2019 @02:12PM (#21528174)

You’re right, and I wasn’t very clear with my comment which is unfortunate. I never meant to imply that any of those things were impossible with fn-keys, just that they weren’t very discoverable. The Touch Bar shows me what features are available at any given time, fn-keys don’t. Sure I could go hunting for the relevant docs, maybe I’d even learn a few key combinations along the way, but my experience tells me I won’t. Other people might, but I never much cared for the fn-keys for this very reason – I never knew quite what they did in what contexts, and didn’t care enough to find out.

So for me, the Touch Bar makes these contextual commands discoverable, and that’s worth more than the tactility of physical keys. Doesn’t matter if I can touch without looking, if I don’t know what the keys do. Besides, after a couple of years with the Touch Bar I feel like muscle memory seems to work about the same anyway, I never have to look for the mute button in Zoom for instance, I know where it is.

Thanks for challenging my comment, prompting me to (hopefully) clarify!

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Re:16-inch MacBook Pro by stedaniels on Wednesday November 13, 2019 @04:08PM (#21529581)

:-)

I do have touchbar envy! I tend not to look at my keyboard too much on desktop, but when on a laptop it's definitely in my peripheral vision and would hopefully encourage me to learn it's shortcuts. There's a lot of UX work involved to make it all work perfectly though. App's especially, shouldn't just use the touchbar, they should make it easier with visual in app reminders about what's down there. They should do this with the standard FN-keys too for us non-touchbar folk. I'm a big fan of having keyboard shortcuts shown on screen UI's.

There's no denying it can do more in than Fn-keys.

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