I've used the touch bar for years, and frankly, it's provided me zero value whatsoever. The only thing I use it for is occasionally adjusting volume or brightness but of course I can no longer do that without looking down at what I'm manipulating. Third party apps have totally ignored it. The physical escape key is the second useful thing in the entire function row, but hey at least it's got two useful things now (an escape key and a touch ID/power button), so that's a 100% increase!

I went so far as to build a physical escape key -- #couragekey -- a few years back (just as a joke, but it does work) https://twitter.com/martinmroz/status/995003391314083840

I just put in my order!

[edit] also the #couragekey was a really fun project to put together, I think I'll write it up to commemorate a real escape key coming back.

You can program your touchbar with something like BetterTouchTool. It's laughable that Apple ships the touchbar with such useless functionalities, but you can turn the touchbar into whatever you want, it's an amazing tool. For example, when I open iTerm I have buttons for my local development env (DB, redis, api, frontend, various microservices) color-coded by status and can start/stop them by tapping a button. You could program buttons for your git workflow, for managing browser tabs, desk spaces... If you can't find a way to make it more useful than fn keys, that's on you frankly.

All of that only applies if you're a dev, so I definitely agree that the touchbar was a fuckup from Apple, but it happens that it's massively useful for me

I can see state indicators for various services being remotely useful. But git workflow? I have terminals open anyway and everything is easily accessible from shell using aliases and ^R etc anyway.

Is there a way to decouple touchbar from active window btw? For example if I have Skype running I'd like to have Skype's buttons on touchbar regardless of focused window. I tried using BetterTouchTool but all I found out was quite hacky ways to mimic keypresses and whatnot instead of pinning app specific UIs.

> But git workflow?

Useless to me too, that's just an example out a million things you could do.

> Is there a way to decouple touchbar from active window btw

You can, touchbar items are global, app-scoped or part of a group that you can open/close programatically (clicking on a touchbar button, usually). The annoying bit is syncing: you'll need to poll for the state of Skype.

> You can program your touchbar with something like BetterTouchTool.

I just have no use for a touchbar. After all, I have a screen! I never look at my keyboard.... it’s all about tactile feedback, which the touchbar notoriously lacks.

> I just have no use for a touchbar

I find this very narrow-minded. You can't imagine a single thing that a programmable tactile interface would bring over keys (that you probably can't reliably touch-type either, fn keys are far)?

I never looked at my keyboard either. I still don't, I look at my touchbar from time to time to do things that would take me longer to do if I had to move a cursor (checking the time, my next calendar event, controlling music amongst a dozen things)

> I still don't, I look at my touchbar from time to time to do things that would take me longer to do if I had to move a cursor (checking the time, my next calendar event, controlling music amongst a dozen things)

Moving the mouse doesn't really bother me, and there are a million ways to wire functionality to keyboard expressions or in-UI functionality. I do miss my hardware volume, prev track, next track, play/pause functionality exactly because I could use them easily without shifting focus at all, even to my keyboard.

OTOH I'm not holding my breath for Apple to meet my needs, they aren't that kind of company.

I agree that there are probably some cool uses for the touch bar if you put some thought in to tailoring it to your work flow, but it is not a tactile interface. Keys are a tactile interface. You can't discern anything from the touchbar by touch, its a flat piece of glass.

Personally, I've never spent any time trying to customize the touch bar because I am never using my laptop without an external keyboard, because of how fuckin' terrible the built in one is. So happy they added some travel back to the keys. I have put off buying a new laptop for years because of how much I hate that stupid keyboard.

I mean, you can always use more screen. On my touchbar I display the time, battery, weather. I also have a script to start a timer and display the time remaining on it (or the output of any script, really). It saves some screen estate. It's nice!

Also there are actions you can program on the touchbar that don't require looking at it. For instance I set it up so that sliding two fingers anywhere on the touchbar changes the volume.

Personally I find more screen real estate doesn’t do anything for my productivity, which is rarely mechanically limited.

Wow that sounds awesome. You can do this with just BetterTouchTool? Could you share your config?

Well, and a few shell scripts that do the glue between docker-compose and an output that BTT can easily understand. You can write shell/applescript with BTT, but it's not really a good experience

Nothing you describe relies on touchbar, only Fn keys

I think the bit where the labels change is a pretty big differentiator, for things that are per-app.

Are you old enough to remember when PC applications came with templates that fit over a 101 key keyboard to show you what all the fn keys did? That's why very little outside professional tooling uses them for anything but system-wide shortcuts anymore. They're horrible for discoverability so unless you live in the app enough to thoroughly memorize them they aren't terribly useful.

As much as I don't care for the Hot Bar in general, it is far better for per-app shortcuts that are used rarely enough not to require (and thus develop) muscle memory. You'd need one of those OLED keyboards to do much better.

The visible status and feedback on what pressing the bar will do isn't replicatable with just Fn keys.

It feels like neither's a complete solution: on the touch bar you see what touching a button would do, but you have to look, and even then you don't know if you've touched it since there's no feedback.

On the keyboard, you don't know what a key would do in a given situation.

Sounds like we need a third option.

It's not necessarily true you have to look. BTT lets you define actions for sliding 2/3/4 fingers left or right on the entirety of the touchbar. You can set it up to change volume, brightness, ctrl+tab, change the size of a drawing tool, undo/redo, whatever. It works anywhere on the strip, so it's very forgiving.

I actually only just now thought of mapping 3-finger swipe to undo/redo. I've only been messing around with it for five minutes but it's kind of nice, honestly! It's better than cmd+z when you need to undo/redo more than once, because it bypasses the key repeat setting.

SAY NO MORE

you do have feedback with the touchbar! As I recently learned, the trackpad click isn't really a click. It can be triggered by software! And bettertouchtool has a specific action for "touchpad haptic feedback". That means you can trigger a touchpad click when you tap a touchbar button, and it perfectly fine as feedback.

Yes you do have to look. I'm not recommending touchbar actions for things that you do so often that it's a problem (though I have a big button to switch between firefox and vscode, big enough that I don't have to look). But it's not like I was using fn keys without looking either

That's really cool, I'ma give it a shot!

There's always https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimus_Maximus_keyboard but it sounds like it was extremely expensive and hard to type on.

I was of the same opinion as you until I discovered Pock: it's a small tool that puts the dock (and optional controls) in the touchbar. This means I can get more screen real estate while keeping my dock accessible. Frankly I'm now pretty much onboard with the touchbar, except for the probably huge battery consumption.

Auto-Hide dock is easier to reach than touchbar.

I realize a lot of people are big fans of hiding their dock. I find it annoying because there are too many moves instead of darting your eyes. When walking up to a random computer it's worse because I often find those people have moved the dock and I have to check each corner one at a time.

I've had the dock hidden for so long I've almost forgot it existed. I do all my app launching and switching with spotlight and keyboard shortcuts. But just recently I was having a hell of a time locating the trash folder in the filesystem or in a finder window, and thought they might have gotten rid of it or something. Then I remembered the good ol' dock icon.

I wouldn't mind the dock being visible when I'm using my large external monitor, but it just takes up too much space on a 13/15inch screen imo.

I find it a lot harder to adjust the volume with touchbar compared to the old keys. It used to be something I could do really quick and accurate, now I have to look down and try to adjust a slider.

On the contrary, I'd say the ESC key is even more important to normal consumers than programmers compared to, say, the backtick key. I mostly use it for coming out of fullscreen for youtube, netflix etc and I'm sure most consumers don't even know what a backtick is.

You're probably right about the unpopularity of the backtick key, and it's too bad. I use cmd-` probably 1000 times every day. For me cmd-` and cmd-Tab completely obviate any need for Mission Control or any of the other 14 different mechanisms in MacOS that show you all your windows and let you click one with the mouse.

Same. CMD+Tab tells me everything I need to know.

My dock auto hides and I only use it to open the downloads folder.

Very rarely I can't find a window and I use a hot corner to show all windows of the space but it happens once a week at the most.

The physical key isn't what's important to consumers. The ability to back out and use the ESC function is and that's still there for everyone who has a Touch Bar machine.

Or, you know, literally any app where `esc` is the "cancel and exit this dialog" key. Which is every Adobe application, all DAWs, etc. etc.

I don't see how that's a negative. The Touch Bar still has an ESC segment that works exactly the same as the button and literally no one in any of the companies that I've worked with that's not a developer has ever had an issue with it while simultaneously finding the Touch Bar far more useful than unlabelled function keys.

I'm glad Apple disagrees with you and is no longer making computers which lack a physical escape key.

I got used to it pretty quickly, and I've had press-Alt mapped to Esc for many years.

It was always annoying, and the 16" with a physical Esc is much nicer.

Now all Apple has to do is add some haptic feedback to the damnable thing and I'll actually like it.

I don't think they do disagree with me. I'm not suggesting that the physical escape key isn't a better option for people. I'm just responding to the person that said the Touch Bar was broken because it didn't include a physical escape key. It's not broken. It works exactly the same, functionally, as the physical key so there's nothing you can do with the physical key that you can't do with the virtual key on the Touch Bar. The physical key is just better because it's tactile and now usable for all the devs that rely on it.

I think Apple putting the physical escape key back indicates that they agree it was broken, relative to a virtual escape key.

The only advantage to a virtual Esc is getting that piece of real estate if you don't happen to want one, and as has been pointed out elsewhere, Escape is an important affordance in macOS-land, even if you aren't a Vim user.

The important report here is a process freezing both the UI and the touch bar, and therefore option-command-escape being unavailable to bring up force quit. That's obviously bad, and I would call it broken. Edge case but an important one!

This is just a quibble about whether it's worse enough to deserve the moniker "broken", though. I'm not personally attached to that, just want to point out that it does in fact break an important action in the core vocabulary.

>I think Apple putting the physical escape key back indicates that they agree it was broken, relative to a virtual escape key.

No it doesn't. All that it indicates is that there was a preference for it by part of their demographic. Again, developers are in the minority here. Most Macbook users don't care and it was an easy concession to make from Apple.

Except it doesn't, because there is no esc key. There's a portion of a touch sensitive monitor that may, or may not, have an active region that simulates an esc key, which you won't know without looking at it, rather than being able to rely on the fact that there's a key in the upper left that you can feel for without ever looking at your keyboard, in the knowledge that it always sends the one key code it has to.

If this has never been a problem for you: nice! But it's been so much of a problem for everyone else, and they've spoke up about this so much, that Apple undid that decision.

Yes, there is. Show me a situation where the Touch Bar wouldn't have the ESC button there. Additionally, if the position and location are that big of an issue, there is a setting that guarantees that the ESC key and FN keys are always on the bar at all times.

There is literally nothing that the physical key does that the virtual key on the Touch Bar can't do.

Actually, that behavior is baked into the OS.

That doesn't bear any relevance to application UI frameworks that don't build on top of the OS's UI framework.

> and find the utility of the Touch Bar for video and audio editing to be invaluable now.

See, the problem is that I rarely use the laptop's own keyboard. Only in cases where I'm actually on the go. If I'm at the office or at home, I'll have an external keyboard (and monitor).

While the laptop's own display remains useful, the keyboard becomes awkward to reach. The touchbar, even more so.

Now, if Apple's external keyboard had a touch bar, now that would be useful.

At this point, I would definitely use an external keyboard or even just an external Touch Bar (unless Apple releases mechanical keyboards with a Touch Bar). I kinda rely on it for media editing/scrubbing.

I haven't had an issue with the Touch Bar, but only because 95% of my usage is through a connected mechanical keyboard; the 5% of time that I do use my laptop's keyboard + Touch Bar, I definitely do not enjoy it.

I can sort of understand the potential appeal of it, especially in terms of customization. But even though the Touch Bar is 3 years old, am I the only one who is reluctant to invest time in learning it (this includes learning how to fully customize and optimize it) because it seems like the kind of feature that may soon disappear into obsolescence? It doesn't help that it's the sort of hardware feature that is literally only applicable to 1 of 3 computers I currently use. But unlike other Apple-pioneered hardware features (multitouch trackpad, built-in Touch ID), Touch Bar seems very unlikely to eventually become a popular cross-platform feature.

I am still surprised that Apple doesn't give the option of non-touchbar. Why is that? A good compromise would be to have both options, imho.

By limiting the customization, it reduces the complexity of supply chains and thus reduces cost.

So where are the savings? Certainly not passed down to the customer.

Plus, Apple is not known for hardware cost-savings as being a primary factor in their key decisions.

> So where are the savings?

Apple is a business and prices its products based on demand. If people are willing to pay a high price, you bet they're going to charge a high price. The savings from not having many hardware variations on a single model are simply accumulated into their bank account.

And they might not cut costs when it comes to the hardware itself, but they are known for having a limited number of options and customizations when it comes to hardware.

Apple doesn't compromise. You either conform to the borgthink, or you go elsewhere.

If you want to Think Different, you don't want apple.

Given that Apple is the only one offering computers with touchbars, I think they are still the Think Different camp.

No, they are in "move fast and break things" camp.

One doesn’t have to exclude the other.

I suspect nobody uses that entire row, so if you're not going to do anything with it besides an escape key, you may as well throw in something interesting.

I've got and used several non-apple laptops that use the row for media keys, and switch them to the function keys with a press of a dedicated fn key at the bottom.

I don't use function keys, but do use the media keys (mostly volume and screen brightness) by touch. The touch bar is hilariously named imho, because you have to look at it to use it.

If that's the case where are the external magic keyboards with touchbars?

Price? I have no idea what the markup on the touchbar is, but I'd guess it's at least in the $50 range, no?

When you're buying a $1650-4000 machine, $50-100 probably isn't gonna make potential buyers balk.

When you're buying a $99 keyboard, $150 is a fairly big difference. And honestly given the $99 price tag on Magic Keyboard, I'd guess Magic Keyboard + Touch bar would be like $199 at least. How many people do you think would buy it at that price tag? You also have to consider that Magic Keyboard currently works with windows, linux, etc, so the potential users are much wider than a Touch bar enabled keyboard, which would only work as intended with macs.

I think a lot of people balk at the price of Macs because it includes useless expensive features.

Where's the iPod Touch of Mac OS?

The Air and the mini.

I assume it's some combination of price, performance, and battery life on the external keyboard.

You can use the Touch Bar on your iPad (using an app like Duet Display, or even with Sidecar if you have a modern MacBook). I find it to be useful in certain situations.

I personally use Vi and so do others I hear from (as in HN) but other than that it would probably never come up as an issue. For the record, you can remap Caps lock to Esc which is as good, if not better than escape. I use this on my iPad and other keyboards as well (even with the esc key)

A bit tricky when I have Caps Lock remapped to Control, like any self-respecting emacs user!

Do both!

You can use karabiner elements to remap CAPS LOCK so that it’s ESCAPE when tapped and CONTROL when held.

I also map my Caps Lock to Control, but don't forget that Ctrl + [ is the equivalent of Escape in vi/vim. It's a chord, but it ends up being much more convenient for me since the keys are both comfortably around the home row keys.

I agree but, as I said initially, I only see this in the developer crowd. I just don't hear that type of criticism from any other segment in any of the companies I work with.

I think one of the main points is that you shouldn't have to.

I do use vi, but I think it's more important that ESC is used to non-destructively dismiss a dialog. Like exiting fullscreen mode, backing out, or dismissing a warning--but not exiting without saving.

I too love the touch bar.

For example I love that apps written to use (eg VS.Code) now have labelled buttons rather than imposing on me to remember strange function buttons.

The problem is most heavy computer users set themselves up with a proper ergonomic setup, i.e. external keyboard. And by not building the touch bar into external keyboards, they killed the entire concept of the Touch Bar, because any "pro" application has to assume that you may or may not have a touch bar and can't put essential functionality there. Which limits the Touch Bar to proper first-class support primarily in Apple first-party apps.

I guess the actual, underlying problem is, the Touchbar is bad UX for a bunch of software engineers, but pretty great for most everyone else. Think about it – you lose some keys you never really had a use for anyway except as media keys, and you get almost analogue-ish volume and brightness controls, apps can give you context-dependent options that are really discoverable (which F-keys totally aren't) and can adapt to your feature use patterns and be a lot richer than static bindings on 12 keys. As a musician, you get a neat little slider – no replacement for a proper external controller, but it's always there when needed, and it can change its behavior dependent on the context. As a photographer, you get a multi-function slider in post that feels (to me) a lot more precise than any touchpad acrobatics I'm capable of. Plus, and most importantly by a long way, it makes emoji really usable on MacOS, and emoji are super, super important stuff, it's hard to overstate their value. Text-based communication loses a lot of emotional cues, that's really hard to get used to if you're used to mostly in-person communication or at least voice, and in my experience keeps causing small (or not-so-small) misunderstandings and microdose vitriol even among people who have been doing this for ages and ages, been socialized in it, aren't too keen on lots of face-to-face, and detest emoji with a passion. Those are things that make the Touchbar a pretty neat feature for lots and lots of people, even given its many "legitimate" issues (it tends to micro-freeze for some people, it isn't as precise as it could be, lots of apps use it in not-well-thought-out ways, it's very hard to use blindly, ...) But not having F-keys is so disruptive to a lot of deeply-ingrained software development muscle memory and UI conventions transplanted from other OSes and other decades that I guess it just wouldn't fly with this crowd in pretty much any shape and form factor.

How does it help with emoji? I've found CMD+Ctrl+space to already work really well.

There is no way to discover Cmd+Ctrl+Space.

I've used Macs full time for 6 years and your post here right now is the first time I knew that was possible. OTOH I've been using Emojis in the touchbar since I got a Mac with one.

I tried to find something like that at least half a dozen times over the years and I didn't know this was possible, this is immensely helpful! Thank you!

> but pretty great for most everyone else

Honestly I think most people would rather save $200-300 than have the touchbar.

If you look at the average mac user, not pros but regular office people, they use stuff like Launchpad and rarely use keyboard shortcuts. You'd be surprised how many macOS users don't even use Spotlight for instance.

Get the Air then. More than plenty horsepower for regular office work, even thinner and lighter and quite a bit cheaper and prettier (do they still have the gold one? I wish they'd offer that on the Pros...) If someone buys a Pro for some Excel and web browsing, I'd imagine those $200-300 didn't break the bank. People sometimes get one even though the Air would have been fine precisely because of the Touchbar (says my little bit of anecdata.) Besides, I guess the Touchbar would be especially neat exactly for those people who never use Spotlight, because it's extremely discoverable. With Spotlight, you either need to know it's there, or discover it on your own (which is going to be hard); it's similar with keyboard shortcuts. Tap "Search" on the Touchbar? Way easier. You don't need to be good with computers to find out how to do that.

> Get the Air then. More than plenty horsepower for regular office work

The passive CPU cooling on the Air is a deal breaker.

For an office laptop? A few Excel sheets, a dozen or two browser tabs, maybe something like Slack?

Yes, even constant low workloads will make the fan audible.

See the NotebookCheck review of the i5:

> At around 30% CPU load (installation of OS updates), the fan is clearly audible and we are already above 40 dB(A), which is hard to understand considering the low performance level.

https://www.notebookcheck.net/The-new-2020-MacBook-Air-Core-...

Weird. At any rate, it doesn't seem to be an issue that deters companies from issuing those things to employees, and looking at the Windows machines some companies issue, that's probably fine; at least it's not a gargantuan brick with a super outdated Atom CPU and Windows 7. Reading the other comments, even some devs are happy with Airs.

I would pay Touch Bar prices for a MacBook Pro without the Touch Bar.

Me too actually :(

> Honestly I think most people would rather save $200-300 than have the touchbar.

This is such a silly comment. You actually have no idea.

Why is that?

The problem with function keys vs touchbar could have been fixed by embedding a small lcd in each key, or in a border above them. Its not like mac's have a shortage of vertical keyboard space given how much they waste on the trackpad.

That way you keep people happy who aren't looking down at the keys, and you give new users/etc nice graphics to help describe what the buttons do.

That eliminates one of the biggest benefits of the Touch Bar - the ability to use sliders and to scrub through media files. I'll keep the Touch Bar any day over LCD keys.

This is basically a repackaged "no true Scotsman" fallacy. We're talking about a laptop here. Most people that bought a laptop are using it because they need something portable and self-contained. On top of that, the Touch Bar isn't meant for "essential" functionality just like the F-keys were never meant for essential functionality. They were meant to be shortcuts for commonly used functions.

I use an external keyboard with the Touch Bar all the time. Pretending like you have to use one or the other is disingenuous.

Touch bar is stupid idea because it is so narrow,and located in such place that it is hard to see it clearly due to the angle. If they really wanted to add touch capabilities to MacBook they should have put touch display in place of TouchPad, like Asus did: https://www.engadget.com/2018-06-05-asus-zenbook-pro-15-scre...