I never comment, and I appreciate your view, but suffice it to say that I hate the Touch Bar enough that your comment has spurred me to post.

My company-issued laptop has a Touch Bar, and I can only imagine that it was invented and distributed by some kind of malicious clique of saboteurs within Apple who hate both (1) users and (2) Apple and want both to fail.

Brushing the Touch Bar accidentally with a finger leads Siri to interrupt me, silencing whatever video call I'm on or music I'm listening to. Instead of being able to adjust the volume manually or pause what I'm listening to with a key that I can press without looking, I have to flatten and retract my hands, peer down at the touchbar, and then poke through several options just in order to do a simple operation, all the while terrified that Siri will interrupt me.

You can remove Siri from the touchbar, which I've done on my own Macbook. But I otherwise still trip over the touchbar enough that I always have to have it in the back of my mind, just a bit.

I've been using the touchbar for over a year now, and I still find that I get nothing out of it that physical keys couldn't have done better. I like that I can figure out which keys are for volume or brightness without having to look down. I need that at night when I'm playing something on my laptop but I want to gradually lower the volume and brightness without my contacts in or my eyes shut. If my personal Macbook had a touchbar, I could never do that reliably.

It sort of baffles me why they went with a touch bar and not with keys that have OLED in them that are easily tweakable. Or how about add some bumps to it so that my finger can know where it is without me looking?

No. It's got to be a flat bar.

I recently learned that if you tap the volume + or - and just start dragging left/right the volume will adjust. I used to think you had to tap then grab/slide but that is not the case. Made a difference to me anyway.

You can also (at least in Big Sur) tap and swipe right/left quickly and let go right after and it'll bump up/down the vol/brightness 1 bar, depending what icon you tap and swipe on. If the brightness/vol expands then you've held it down too long.

I do wish Apple would improve media controls on the Mac in general (and touchbar). So often the media icon just doesn't show (e.g. Spotify), or I've had several media apps running and macOS gets confused and the media icons no longer do anything for what's currently playing. It's soo buggy.

That's a nice trick, thank you! Although even knowing _what_ I had to do, I only managed to learn this after couple tries.

I think it has worked that way since day 1. At least I was using it on Mojave

I don't mean to pick on you in particular, but I continue to be flabbergasted by the number of people who claim to suffer from the presence of the default touchbar interface.

MTMR (My Touchbar My Rules) took me all of 15 minutes to install and configure to my liking. Then another few minutes to tweak it (adding brightness and volume buttons on either side of their respective sliders) when I realized I wanted both control mechanisms available.

In the time it takes to complain about the default config you could have fixed 100% of the things about it that bother you.

Unfortunately, my touchbar removed my escape key. Yes, I took a few minutes and remapped the caps-lock key to escape - but, I now have a single mb that has a different key configuration than every other mb and mac keyboard that I use.

This is a perfect example of why Apple is cool at reimagining and reengineering, but it is not an enterprise company. That may not matter to some, but it does to many.

Not to belabor the point, but you could easily configure the touchbar to put an esc key in the top-left corner.

Thank you.

The tb came that way, but it wasn't correct in placement or how many it had to be touched when the tb was dark. The tb isn't good for programmers when quickly typing text. It's also a complete change for changing volume quickly. This comes into play when switching multiple times every day between full volume meetings on headphones and full or medium volume on speakers. The tb doesn't act the same as original keys just by adding virtual keys.

Yes, these are first-world problems, but this was completly needless and makes the keyboard less useful than all of the other mac keyboard I use daily. It's like Apple thinks that people have one and only one computer they ever use.

I hear you, but - again - using a tool like MTMR allows you to create a huge, persistent esc key in the top left corner, and volume and brightness sliders and buttons, etc.

I'd recommend removing Siri (or just disabling it entirely if you don't use it) if you're activating by mistake.

Also with volume/brightness you can press and slide instead of tapping and then adjusting. Hope that helps!

How do you remove it? I have it always disabled but still run into the parent's problem that I'll randomly touch the stupid Siri button...

When Finder is active click on the View menu, press the option key and select "Customize Control Strip", then you can just mouse down to the touchbar and remove the Siri button.

In Preferences under the keyboard settings you can customize the placement and presence of every single button on the TouchBar. Preferences also lets you disable Siri

Also you can make shortcut for "Customize Control Bar...", it helps to quickly adjust Touch Bar in new program or for experimenting

If you often listen to music/watch videos and need to adjust the volume, have you thought about adding a physical volume knob? Something like this: https://www.droking.com/USB-Controller-USB-Volume-Audio-Adju...

I want to get something like that, but designed well with media keys and separate vol/mic sliders for specific apps. Like Discord.

Jesus christ

Just remove Siri from the TouchBar then?

I’ve removed every control besides volume and mute... and I still accidentally brush them every now and then. The Touch Bar is way too sensitive.

If the Touch Bar was adjustable sensitive to force, it would be almost perfect in my book. My biggest objection to it is that it establishes a different UX between laptop and desktop.

Yeah the only time I notice it is when I brush the mute which is a key I rarely want to hit. Also when I want to hit escape I often miss because it is oddly indented.

The escape button is actually quite large. At least on my 2018 MBP, the whole empty left also acts as the escape button so no need to try and hit the escape in the middle of the label.

I used to have this, that I could tap anywhere on and to the left of the esc touch button and it would trigger esc. But after one of the OS updates (i forget which) it stopped working, now I have to hit the etc touch button, if I hit the blank aria to the left, nothing happens anymore. It bugs me so much!

Just curious, what OS version are you using? I'm on Big Sur (but same issue in Catalina). I've got the 2017 MBP 15"

EDIT: I should add, I mean that I could hit the far left blank aria of the touch bar any time in any touchbar mode and it would trigger the esc action. They "fixed" that in an update. I can still press to the left of the esc and trigger esc when the esc button is visible. But often I'll have spotify touch bar "app" open and the esc key won't show, so I have to close the app just to access the esc key, super annoying.

This is the wrong audience to ask about the touch bar, however there is an entire population of computer users out there for whom standard function keys are less than useless.

>About 90 per cent of computer users don't use CTRL-F to search for a word - as they don't know such a keyboard shortcut exists, a Google survey found. The results stunned Google's Uber Tech Lead for Search Quality and User Happiness, Dan Russell.

"I think we just all assume that we all know it, but no one actually does."

https://www.smh.com.au/technology/only-one-in-10-know-what-c...

For the 90% of users who don't know that Ctrl-F is find, having a row of contextual command icons for the foreground program instead of a row of useless function keys is a step up.

I think they should just continue to make standard function keys available for the minority of users who find them important to their own workflow.

So put the Touch Bar on the MacBook Air for non pro users, and the function keys for pro users. They put the training wheels on the Ferrari.

Developers that use Vim aren't the only "pro users" to exist.

The Macbook Pro is a "professional" tool in the same way you can buy "professional" hair straighteners: It's the same thing, but a bit better for a bit more money.

True professional-only tools are things like Jira and Oracle Financials, and you can recognise them because the users hate them.

I always wondered why we don't have keys for Copy and Paste.

We have "Print Screen", which is a function I don't use that often.

(Not a Mac user, so I'm talking about regular PC keyboards).

In the old days I had a Sun workstation with Copy and Paste keys.

Up until the very early 1990s, computer keyboards had a place to position a cardboard (or sometimes plastic) strip, documenting the meaning of the function keys.

The computer (or OS) might come with one, but commercial software would also include a cardboard strip in the box, along with the manuals.

Many examples: https://www.getrevue.co/profile/shift-happens/issues/as-clos...

It's like upvoting is not enough, here. I've witnessed that some users love their Macbooks' Touchbars, at the same time I'm surprised so few users recourse to these extremely low tech tricks. Just like the camera cover thing that's also trending on HN best: pen and paper and other thing just (almost) anyone can use can still benefit proper use of rocket tech :)

edit: Plus thanks for the link! I've not read the article but the pics are great up to the end! So much inventivity on how to upgrade bona fide keyboards with relatively low tech all through computer history!

I should also take advantage of the occasion to mention that I find it a pity that we don't use keyboard keys as 101 complementary buttons for the mouse/trackpad :D

On the one hand, that's entertaining and it's easy to laugh at people who don't know those shortcuts. On the other hand: to this day I don't know if iOS Mobile Safari supports finding text on a page.

Select the address bar, and start typing. At the bottom of the search results it will say “on this page”

> My personal feeling is that the people who dislike the Touch Bar heard the bad things about it, tried it for a time and two, decided that it's not something good, and spreading the word.

That's a very roundabout way of saying "people tried it, hate it, and told others: UNFAIR." In essence that argument can be used to dismiss anyone who dislikes the Touch Bar because they MIGHT have read something negative about it at some point, and therefore have been corrupted from forming their own first-hand opinion (???).

I'd love to ignore the Touch Bar, but since they stole the F key row for it, I cannot. I am forced to use it to interact with software that once worked fine. Since there's no physical feedback, and the virtual keys aren't correctly aligned with the physical ones: it is a frustration. At least we regained the escape key.

As to why I don't actively use it: I look at the screen, not the top of my hands. The content is on the screen, if you can touch type you shouldn't ever be looking down, so the Touch Bar is an anti-feature put in completely the wrong location (i.e. above the keyboard, instead under the screen) for people who struggle to type.

I think he just means some people just spend little time with it, and with whatever reason, maybe it cannot enhance their productivity like their trusty automated scripts or keyboard macro - said aloud that it sucks. Honestly, the most loudest voice against Touchbar is usually us geeky people and not really general users.

I think the touchbar is superb for general non-techie users who are not keyboard shortcut wiz, and there are A LOT of them.

The thing I found sad is the lack of push from Apple, to make it more useful and versatile. It's nearly the same since its inception. People have to rely on 3rd party app, say, BetterTouchTool(which is excellent) to make Touchbar more useful.

> That's a very roundabout way of saying "people tried it, hate it, and told others: UNFAIR."

Hmm, I'm not a native English speaker so I might have not exactly conveyed my intentions. I'm definitely not trying to argue that other people are unfair, but more just that people should try it out a bit more.

> I'd love to ignore the Touch Bar, but since they stole the F key row for it, I cannot.

I'm genuinely curious about this F-keys every time I write about the Touch Bar - I've never encountered use for those keys that are really useful.

> Since there's no physical feedback

Yeah, that part I agree. If you're still suffering about it (regardless whether you use Touch Bar regularly or not), you might want the HapticKey app that I've mentioned it previously.

> The content is on the screen, if you can touch type you shouldn't ever be looking down

Well, because the Touch Bar's layout is pretty stable, I find that I can touch-type the Touch Bar without looking down the screen. It becomes muscle memory, just like a usual keyboard.

> I've never encountered use for those keys that are really useful.

There are some very common operations across apps (Linux/Windows) that I use all the time and can be stabbed without thinking:

F2 - rename

F5 - refresh

F11 - fullscreen

If you are programmer then it's kind of essential during debugging:

F5 - run / continue

F9 - insert breakpoint

F10 - step over

F11 - step in

Not having physical keys for navigating would be a nightmare.

Well, aren't that basically the use case for the Touch Bar?

I've never used any of them you've listed (except for F5-refresh, which I avoid and use Cmd-R). The fn-keys are as context-dependent as the Touch Bar and it's even more opaque than what it does just by glancing the buttons.

For debug tools, Xcode unfortunately doesn't provide Touch Bar buttons for them (which I think is a pity), but IntelliJ IDEA seems to be providing them.

With this example I'm firmly thinking that having fn-keys just for the sake of people who do know a bit of key shortcuts would be a nightmare.

I think it was a good idea to rethink function keys it's just that for their current uses, the touch bar is worse. Things like steering a debugger is an eyes-on-the-road activity benefiting strongly from physical keys.

I would be much more supportive of ideas like "keys with displays" or a non-interactive strip to act as labels. What I dream of is physical pixels for tactile displays or a fleet of magnetic microbots that can swarm together to form switches, knobs and sliders at will.

I hear you.

However, there's also a class of users that _do not look at the keyboard_ (if only, for very specific complex actions which only require lookup and execution, not reflexion).

For this class of people at least, the _visual_ touch bar introduces an uncontrolled* modal change to the keyboard which is a true nature change of the role and expectations one can have of the keyboard.

That, in turn, may be a good enough reason to be very frustratred with it, and not use it at all.

As for me, I'm happy for, although I don't understand, people that appreciate the touch bar. And I don't use it. And I expect to get my next laptop without one.

* uncontrolled, because not triggered by the user.

Yeah! If they were to have a Touch Bar, put it at the bottom of the screen. You are already looking at the screen. Keyboard is for keying, screen is for looking. It would have been cheaper to make, instead of having two screens. They were really proud that they could angle the pixels on the Touch Bar to face the user. THE SCREEN IS ALREADY FACING THE USER!!! Anyway, I still wouldn’t use it :)

> My personal feeling is that the people who dislike the Touch Bar heard the bad things about it, tried it for a time and two, decided that it's not something good, and spreading the word.

Well then your personal feeling is really an untested assumption masquerading as a feeling.

I'm a long-time developer, and more recently, a designer of interfaces and graphics. Aside from my 20 years of muscle memory with vim, the primary reason I hate the Touch Bar is the same reason I hate touch screens in cars: if I have to look away from where I'm supposed to be looking because my controls provide no physical feedback, then that's a design failure. If you're going to provide this as an unobtrusive addition to the current features, then super... but they replaced standard functionality with something that was worse in many ways, and kinda neat in other, much less important ways. Much like when they suddenly replaced Google Maps on iPhones with Apple Maps before Google had their iOS app ready. Apple Maps had a much-touted gimmicky 3d flyover feature, but the users lost street view, transit, and bicycle directions and the directions themselves were significantly worse. Sure, it looked cool and the flyover feature was really neat... but who gives a damn if you're losing core functionality.

Within months of having my first MacBook Pro, I could turn the volume up and down and mute the audio without looking. Same with the screen brightness... I can't do that anymore. Not only that, but the interface for changing the volume— a core system function— changes depending on the current application's context, making me have to hunt for it. Maybe you don't run up against that, but it's inexcusably poor design.

In addition, the Touch Bar isn't big enough to be useful for any serious professional use in media editing apps, which seems to be what it was originally designed for. I can't use it to easily scrub through video clips with any precision, or large amounts of pictures, or anything like that. Sure, it might be a nice-to-have for a less intensive user, but it's certainly not a PROfessional tool for my MacBook PRO.

On top of that, it's totally useless for accessibility, it's easy to accidentally touch and do something unintended, and makes simple tap-n-times motions into awkward tap, wait, drag motions.

All set. Throw it away. Give me my buttons back.

> Well then your personal feeling is really an untested assumption masquerading as a feeling.

I felt this 'tried it for a time and too, decided that it's not something good, and spreading the word' from your comment. Maybe it's not, but the content doesn't really suggest you've used the Touch Bar more than a few times.

> Within months of having my first MacBook Pro, I could turn the volume up and down and mute the audio without looking. Same with the screen brightness... I can't do that anymore. Not only that, but the interface for changing the volume— a core system function— changes depending on the current application's context, making me have to hunt for it. Maybe you don't run up against that, but it's inexcusably poor design.

I can, my friends that use the MBP can, and even friends that don't have an MBP but occasionally use mine also don't need to look to control the volumes or brightness. I can't buy that argument.

Also, in it's default state the buttons are always displayed in the same place - I can't understand about your argument about context-sensitive core system functions, as that's the reason why the control strip is there in the right.

(And usually apps that use the Touch Bar strikes the right balance on context sensitivity - you can expect the same functionality on the same place if you're using the same app, or doing the same action, like text editing.)

> In addition, the Touch Bar isn't big enough to be useful for any serious professional use in media editing apps, which seems to be what it was originally designed for.

> it's certainly not a PROfessional tool for my MacBook PRO.

It's big enough to provide shortcuts that allow professionals to be more productive in apps that the user thoroughly knows in-and-out. That's it's purpose, and media professionals as well as programmers can use it very usefully.

> it's totally useless for accessibility,

Why?

> it's easy to accidentally touch and do something unintended,

I've personally found that's not the case, but well I'm seeing others that also feel like this so...

> and makes simple tap-n-times motions into awkward tap, wait, drag motions.

I can't find any example where that's the case - I've never seen an Touch Bar action that need a tap-wait-drag. It's usually drag on the button or just a tap, or two successive taps if you're doing something relatively complex like setting the color of selected text or something.

I accidentally tap it all the time. All it takes is a key press that’s slightly too high and the edge of my finger grazes the Touch Bar and BAM whatever shortcut was there runs.

I wanted to like the Touch Bar. I actually did for the first two weeks. Then I slowly grew to hate it once I realized I accidentally touched it more than intentionally.

Can it be disabled completely?

I know I'd miss the F keys, but since you don't have them anyway...

You can turn on F keys for displaying in Touch Bar

I never accidentally tap the Touch Bar. I guess I’m perfect

I agree. Shameless plug, but I made a small utility that I use everyday. It let's you create a few handy shortcuts that you can use to paste text.

https://github.com/thomas-alrek/TouchMemes/

I despised the early incarnation of the TouchBar. I live in Vim, and while I use a 'jj' binding for most Esc scenarios, I still need an actual Escape key. Beyond that, I had three brand-new MacBooks die in the first year with TouchBar failures. It also coincided with the disastrous new keyboard (multiple failures there too). It was enough to make me buy a ThinkPad and swear off literally all Apple products for a few years.

My new job just sent me a new MacBook, and I was dreading it. I'm happy to report that it has a physical Escape key (smaller and imperfect, but sufficient), and the keyboard feels better overall. I still don't want the TouchBar, and still get no use out of it, but it no longer enrages me. I'm open to accepting and even embracing it if I ever see a good use case. One thing that continues to bother me is that it changes as I'm typing, and I don't want that. But I can see a path for apps to use it in a positive way.

ctrl-[ can also be used as escape (I think escape sends that control sequence in the terminal).

With caps-lock mapped to ctrl, typing it is not too far off from the home-row.

I mapped caps lock to escape.

I have 20+ years of muscle memory that pushes my pinky into that upper-left-hand corner. No way that's going to change.

If you want to try it, grab https://karabiner-elements.pqrs.org/

Activate the complex modification called "Change caps_lock to control if pressed with other keys, to escape if pressed alone".

Now you have a capslock key that doubles as control and escape and your pinky can begin recovering from the decades of abuse.

That's where Control belongs!

FYI there are various utilities (Hammerspoon and Karabiner Elements, off the top of my head) that can make caps lock act as escape if pressed and released, control if used in conjunction with other keys. This took some getting used to, but thanks to the Touch Bar, I got used to it and now I find it invaluable. YMMV of course.

I agree with both of you :)

https://karabiner-elements.pqrs.org/ has an option that maps caps lock to control when press in conjunction with another key and as escape when pressed alone

Thank you!

> [0]: https://github.com/niw/HapticKey - or you might like 'brew cask install haptickey'.

This is great, thanks for posting.

The touch bar is too sensitive. When just slighly brushing over it activates it then it is useless. Those are keys. And when I want to backspace and accidentically start some other action then this is a design flaw.

It needs to have a force touch, so that just hovering or touching it won't activate it. you need to press down. Until this is implemented the whole touch bar is just annoying.

Oh and when you need to use BetterTouchTool to actually make the touch bar useful then something is really wrong.

Alos use th same too to map fn+<> for volume up down and other things. just because looking for that on the touch bar is just ... stupid.

" My personal feeling is that the people who dislike the Touch Bar heard the bad things about it, tried it for a time and two, decided that it's not something good, and spreading the word."

I have tried to for two years and still find it useless...

With Better Touch Tool I have basically recreated the old Fn key layout and now it's half-ways bearable. If they at least hadn't made it pure touch but something with resistance I wouldn't constantly hit it by accident...

Thanks for this contrary opinion. :) I have been using a Touch Bar MBP for about 18 months. I have my Touch Bar configured for function keys all the time. I touch type fairly quickly, so I rarely look at the keyboard. I spend all day in the terminal, Emacs, Vim, or my browser (which I navigate using the Vimium extension). Unlike you, I run into problems with the Touch Bar on a daily basis:

* I still hit the function keys at least a half dozen times a day by accident.

* I still manage to not register fast key presses to the Touch Bar at least half a dozen times a day by accident.

* About once a month, it seems, the Touch Bar gets stuck on its volume or brightness widget. Previously the only way I found to fix this was to reboot. Last night I may have discovered that touching other, seemingly blank parts of the Bar may get it out of this state, so at least the Touch Bar may no longer force me to reboot.

Text completion on my laptop usually slows me down, but in any case, my editor offers that for me inline, without me having to look down at the keyboard. I know all the shortcuts to delete files in Finder, comment out lines, rename variables, control volumes, change tabs, and control text formatting.

All this is to say that I guess I am not the target demographic for the Touch Bar—and, since all the new MBPs seem to have it, I guess I'm no longer the demographic for the MacBook Pro? I am inclined to agree with the comment from 'GeekyBear that I am probably in the vast minority of users, and most people will find use for the Touch Bar.

I am glad you find the Touch Bar useful. For my part, I hate it, and it's one factor that's got me looking for the exits on macOS.

I would like to second your suggestion to add haptic feedback to the Touch Bar. I use BetterTouchTool for this, and it helps me to know when I have accidentally hit the Touch Bar.

Also, I hate the Touch Bar, but Sampler looks really cool.

Interestingly enough, my experience has been the opposite. I liked the concept of the Touch Bar at first, then got one with a new macbook. I liked it at first, but the more I use it, the more I hate it. Yes I spent time using it, yes I customized its icons, yes, yes, yes. It's been more than 2 years I use it all day long. My next macbook will be the Air one, just so I don't have to use the Touch Bar again.

And I'm not even using F keys on regular keyboards.

> My next macbook will be the Air one

Beware of overheating: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IULkXAHjL_s

For me it's not Vim (remapped caps lock to ESC, plus newer MBPs have a physical ESC key again), it's JetBrains.

The number of frequent operations that use F-keys makes the touch bar a truly frustrating experience.

I switched to a Matias keyboard to avoid the touch bar. An added benefit is their placement of the fn key, which is really nice if you use various OSes.

As a guy that started to use vim since 15-year-old and use it all the time, touchbar is still a joy to use. It took me less than half an hour to get used to the virtual esc and I hardly fail to press it correctly. iterm2's support of touchbar is charming and helps a lot even when using vim

I love the touch bar.

I did find I had to customise the Firefox touchbar shortcuts so I don't brush them accidentally.

But I love things like how VS.Code puts common shortcuts as buttons instead of trying to make me remember them. I have better things to do with my memory than remember keyboard shortcuts.

> I have better things to do with my memory than remember keyboard shortcuts.

Actually you can memorize unlimited number of shortcuts. I remember roughly 500 shortcuts for different programs and OS, it's just a matter of time. As touch typing, this investment pays off very satisfactory over time

I like it so much that I want an Apple Keyboard with it. I hope that happens one day.

the emoji selector, yes. everything else you’ve said is downright wrong. all of those are better with keyboard shortcuts and fn keys are better than the touchbar for that.

i specifically want to call out moving between tabs. in absolutely no way is the touchbar better than keyboard shortcuts. there is one app where it might be better: safari. because they chose such poor shortcut for switching tabs.

i guess there is one more good use case. if you allocated rarely used and hard to locate MS word buttons to the toolbar, that might be perhaps better than monkeying with the ribbon.

i have a streamdeck i use for IDE shortcuts. it’s far far better than the touchbar.

Easily explained: It's a keyboard, not a screen. I don't look at the keyboard when I use a computer, so a random, context-sensitive action which occurs when I randomly miss the number keys is extremely distressing.

It's neither, and both.

As a result of the touchbar I changed caps lock to escape so I could keep using vi. I now make that change on Linux too. Never missed capslock.

I use Vim and I still like the touchbar. lol

For Vim use, I map caps lock to esc. This is built into osX under settings -> keyboard -> Modifier Keys...