They kept the touch bar but it seems that they added (back) a physical Esc key, isn't that the most criticized missing key?

Which other key do you miss now that Esc is back?

Having bought a Macbook Pro with an Esc key earlier this year, lack of an Esc key was 90% of my issue with the touch bar. My biggest issue now is when I accidentally activate it. I didn't have an issue accidentally hitting the function keys on my 2013, so why not bring those back? Or invent something new. Forward or back, I don't care, just admit the touch bar was a dud and get it off my keyboard.

EDIT: My mother also says she gets distracting autocomplete suggestions on the touch bar while she's typing. I vaguely remember doing something to turn that off on mine, but she is terrified of Covid so I haven't had a chance to get at her laptop and fix it for her. I don't know what human factors genius at Apple decided it would be helpful for people to see words hopping around at the edge of their vision while they're trying to type.

> I vaguely remember doing something to turn that off on mine, but she is terrified of Covid so I haven't had a chance to get at her laptop and fix it for her.

You can use Messages to easily initiate screen-sharing (with you controlling her Mac) to do that. No 3rd party software, no action on her side needed.

Settings | Keyboard | Touch Bar Shows

You can choose a few different options there - try "Expanded Control Strip".

I remapped escape to caps lock to overcome this, it might work for others who don't use caps lock.

It's absurd that you had to resort to this. I wonder if someone also released a standalone bluetooth escape key that attaches to the side of a keyboard (equally absurd).

Time for Facetime?

Having used an MBP keyboard, I'd say "all of them".

All of them? I use the function keys regularly and it's much harder to hit the correct one without looking at the keyboard with the touch bar.

This is such a bizarre unforced error. Why would they just arbitrarily remove a row of the keyboard? Taking it away and asking why I need it is like asking why I need right-click, pinch-to-zoom, or my left pinky finger. It makes no sense that we have to choose between fully featured input and active cooling.

Either way, based on this announcement I'll probably hold off on upgrading for another generation. That'll leave some time to see how the transition goes, and with any luck the next ones will include 32 GB RAM, Mini-LED, and 5G (along with a full keyboard).

Don't know why they didn't just add a screen to the blank function key width gap of bare aluminum between the keyboard and the hinge if they were looking to add some decoration to the keyboard. That would have been praised, instead it's been a pariah.

What do you use function keys for? I was thinking about this, and I don't think I've used a function key in years.

Step Over/Into/Out shortcuts in Xcode (F6/F7/F8) are the really obvious ones which I hit many times per day. Play/pause/etc. with the Fn key are easier to hit without looking than the touchbar.

I prefer that they change labels in a context-sensitive way. For keys that I don't use that often the icon is a better trade-off than a tactile response. Sliders are useful as well.

Jetbrains IDEs and VSCcode have a ton of default shortcuts using the fn keys.

I'm happily tapping away with them on a 2020 MBA

I'm not the person you replied to, but I frequently use the play/pause key and also the volume keys. I occasionally use the function keys in my text editor too.

Ok yeah I guess I use volume sometimes.

That's a good question. I can imagine some people never using them because of their particular workflow and software of choice.

In my particular case, I use them all the time. Edit some SQL, press F9. Select some files, press F5. And so on.

I can't work without the function keys.

Do you use IDEs for debugging?

I'm with you. My work computer has the TouchBar, and my personal computer has the physical keys.

While I prefer the physical keys, once you get the TouchBar configured properly (I use MTMR), it's really quite nice. Combined with a physical escape key, it would be ideal.

Considering how the people on HN boast so much about being L337 Haxxorz, I'm surprised they don't see the value in a secondary interactive screen that they can make do anything they want.

I don't look when I type. The touchbar makes me look down from my screen if I want to interact with it.

I don't look when I type, either, except for the function keys, because I don't use them that often. So since I'm already looking down at the function keys, looking at the TouchBar makes zero difference.

One minor annoyance, however, is that the TouchBar isn't visible in direct sunlight, which is to be expected of any screen. Function keys don't have that problem.

The physical Esc key was already added in the previous generation

> Which other key do you miss now that Esc is back?

I really need a Forward-Delete key - pressing Cmd+Backspace just doesn't work for me.

Fn+Backspace would work for you, though :P

It is Cmd+Backspace for me because I remapped my MacBook's keyboard so it matches my ThinkPad's[1] - I really don't want to have to play Twister with my fingers.

[1] Yes, I've remapped/swapped the Ctrl+Fn keys on my ThinkPad too.

I actually miss "Esc" key being in the touchbar, it felt quicker to tap it on previous gen macbook pro instead of pressing it on my new macbook pro.

Funnily enough the MacBook Pro product page actually shows both the physical and virtual escape keys on the touch bar. Hopefully that's a mistake...

Adding back the escape key is not new, they had the same physical keyboard layout in the previous MacBook Air which was announced Nov 2019.

The lock button is super sensitive and prone to being pressed when hitting backspace.

light level down, light level up, mute, volume down, volume up.

That’s great!

Same, the only issue with the current air for me is that the graphics struggle a bit when driving a large 4K monitor.

If the new graphics capabilities are that much better I would be very tempted to upgrade

I can't fathom why Apple couldn't just include both. I'm using a company-provided touchbar'd Macbook Pro for work, and it's handy (I've got it setup with screenshot and screen lock buttons so I don't have to memorize the absolutely bonkers keyboard shortcuts for them); it just seems boneheaded to treat it as a replacement of the function keys instead of an addition.

The MacBook Air never had the Touch Bar, right?

No, it never did.

Almost exactly what I thought, however specs are too low for me to ditch the bar no matter how useless it is comparing to physical keys

as a software dev who went for air before the current gen of pro macbooks with hardware esc, dont do it

the air is really sluggish for anything but the lightest of tasks. there was even extremely noticeable latency using gmail.com

I've been using Airs as my primary machine since 2010. I don't use bulky software (XCode, Adobe suite, Office, etc), so if you use any of that I wouldn't recommend it, but for software dev it's been plenty fast and a real joy to use.

The only time I'm speed constrained is deep learning, but generally I just run tiny test sets locally and then run full jobs on a cluster or the cloud.

In the mid 2010's I had a desktop with like 64GB of Ram and four million processors, and I found programming on the Air I was still more productive. Productivity wise I think it's a very high dimensional space to consider.

(P.S. Can't wait to get this new Air!!!)

Honestly, I'm not even sure if that's an indictment of the hardware or gmail itself.

I place my faith in ARM and 5nm TSMC processing.

There's a noticeable latency using gmail.com on my iMac Pro, too.

I've always used powerful desktops (Mac Pro, iMac Pro) and MacBook Airs while traveling, and while the Airs aren't very good for video games like StarCraft II, I've never had a problem with performance while doing anything else (I work in VS Code on TypeScript). My unit tests run in ~20 seconds on the MacBook Air as well as the iMac Pro.

The OP is likely referring to the newly-announced Air with the same M1 chip.

Agree for the current Macs. The new Air seems to have the same specs as the new 13" Pro though or is there a difference?

Since the new MacBook Air doesn’t have a fan while the MacBook Pro does, I’m sure there are some differences that Apple isn’t admitting right now. The battery life claimed by Apple is also higher on the Air compared to the Pro. Maybe the Air is throttled or runs at lower clock speeds.

The base model air has 7 GPU cores instead of the 8 that the higher end Air, Pro, and Mini have.

If you configured them the same (chose the more expensive Air), the Air and the 13" Pro have the exact same specs from what I can tell other than a slightly brighter screen (500 nits vs. 400 nits) and slightly bigger battery (58.2 whr vs. 49.9 whr) on the 13" Pro.

Which air?

I've used the last 2 Air for developing including Photoshop and VMware fusion but I could work just fine.

I only notice any issues when driving a big 4k monitor - seems like the graphics is the limitation to me.

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I am also not a fan of the keyboard or touch bar, but especially the touch bar. It's a cool idea and I can see useful functions, but not pushed up against a place where you're typing. I am constantly bringing up Siri or changing volume when hitting numbers, -= or delete from a finger swiping across the touch bar accidentally. There used to be a tactile force needed to activate F key functions, but now there's just a capacitive touch bar.

Didn't they revert the keyboard to the previous version? (Magic vs butterfly)

What's wrong with the new keyboard (touch bar aside)? I haven't tried one yet, but I thought it was supposed to be more or less the same as the 2013 - 2015 MBP's.

Has anyone ever seen anyone use the Touch Bar? Like really use it?

Personally I tried using it for F keys which is quite frankly the only requirement I’d have and it was awful. At a fully extended hand, which you need to do if you’ve hit a meta key, it’s impossible to hit the right F keys every time. I don’t know how anyone writes code on those machines.

It went back to the Apple store within a week and I got an air. Which went to the Apple store in a week because the keybbboooaaarrdd wwaaass aawwwful.

Then I bought a thinkpad. Which is less of a shiny toy.

Which Thinkpad did you get, and how do you like it? Are you running Windows, or Linux?

I'm trying to figure out what my next laptop should be, but I have no prior experience with Thinkpads.

T495s running Ubuntu 20.04. Absolutely perfect machine as far as I am concerned. Everything works flawlessly that I've tried and the quality is excellent. Really like it.

Like most oldsters, I have presbyopia, which is exacerbated in low light. When I need to turn up the brightness of my monitor, I can actually see the "button" on a touchbar. On all my non-touchbar laptops, I randomly press F keys and hope for the best or pull out my phone for a flashlight.

Yes, I miss the physical esc, but F-keys are usually SW configurable and I can configure splat-1-10. That said, I am not a frequent programmer...

I love the Touch Bar. All those cmd-opt-shift bizarro keyboard shortcuts, I have mapped to custom buttons across lots of apps. A couple popup apps on globally-available buttons. Even a swiping gesture while on iTerm to fly through command history.

It's great if you take the time to actually customize it.

incidentally, I place the “blame” for the poor uptake of the Touch Bar at Apple’s feet. They relied on uninterested developers to make it useful, and didn't but the necessary tools in the hands of users to make it useful themselves. In five years, they’ve done nothing to expand its capabilities since the debut.

Everything cool I can do with the Touch Bar is thanks to a third-party tool, BetterTouchTool. Also enables some cool stuff like three-finger-trackpad-swipes to cycle through window tabs! Worth the price of admission for that feature alone, give it a look. https://www.folivora.ai

I really have no clue what apple is thinking with regards to the touchbar.

Why should any developer spend time developing sorely lacking features for the touch bar, when they just released the most popular mac without one?

The only way I can make sense of the decision to release the air without a touch bar, is that it must be really expensive to manufacture and they were struggling to hit the $1000 price point.

As a result the touchbar lives in this weird limbo state. Apple themselves clearly are uncertain what they want from it, and it shows. Since its release the touch bar has been left mostly abandoned and it’s been up to third party developers to make it useful.

It can be useful, at least after heavy customization – something a screen lends itself well to. Why isn’t apple doing more to help users customize it?

macOS comes with an application called Automator. Automator is confusing for power and regular users alike and as a result, nobody uses it. Why not rethink Automator completely with the touchbar in mind? Bring the power of programming to regular users with an easily accessible ‘create your own button’ feature that lets users add custom commands accessible from their touchbar?

Automator, or IOS Shortcuts, that’s exactly the kind of thinking the Touch Bar needs.

Add that, plus the ability to map any menu command to a Touch Bar button, and it would be vastly more useful.

My fondest wish is a high-end MBP 16" with no touch bar. The touch bar's sole role is to generate errors and missteps resulting from merely grazing over it.

Even setting the touch bar to vanilla F-keys, grazing triggers F-key actions which is so frustrating.

Yes - I always assumed the eventual goal was a touch bar with the same haptic feedback as the trackpad (and no the trackpad doesn't move).

FWIW there are third-party software options for the Touch Bar such as MTMR (my touch bar, my rules), which at least allows you to activate the haptic feedback in the trackpad when touch bar buttons are pressed. I found that it helped dramatically with accidental touch bar presses.

MTMR also solves the other main problem with the Touch Bar which is that it hides brightness and volume controls behind a tap (so you can't, for example, instantly mash "volume down" when you find it is unexpectedly loud.) With MTMR (and others I believe) you can make multi-touch gestures on the bar to adjust volume and brightness swiftly.

All that said, I'm not convinced that the touch bar adds enough value to justify its cost. If your day-to-day computer use includes tasks it is good it, maybe. As a developer, probably not.

Just my $0.02 as a touchbar-skeptic-cum-macbook-owner.

Give me the 2015 model any day

I use it for exactly what I've always used function keys for- brightness and volume.

I also occasionally use the emoji picker or app specific stuff. For example- my markdown editor has Touchbar selections for code blocks and all that sort of stuff. I don't write enough markdown to remember everything- so the touchbar makes it nicely discoverable without having to click through menus.

I only use it for brightness and volume controls (and TIL about the Emoji picker thanks to a sibling comment). I LOVE the analog-feeling controls on brightness and volume. Even though I know it's the same under the hood as an incrementation button, the UX of it makes me feel substantially happier. I absolutely miss the volume and brightness sliders when I go to use my Chromebook or my wife's laptop.

I normally keep the touchbar configured to only show the ~4 most used buttons (night mode, brightness, volume, and mute), and find that I use the other buttons rarely enough that I forgot what else was on there -- mainly because I use touchpad gestures instead.

I rarely (never?) used F-keys in my IDE (Jetbrains) or other apps, so I don't miss them. I have a physical Esc key (which is nice), though I used it rarely enough on my previous generation touchbar mac that it wasn't very infuriating. Having the physical escape + power keys removed any complaints I previously had about it.

Interesting. Volume and brightness adjustment is my least favorite part of the touchbar. With physical keys I can adjust the volume/brightness without looking down.

If it were a physical slider, I'd totally agree with you.

(Not that there's any right or wrong or answer here.)

Samplr is an example of how cool it can be: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fMlmzTBF_LE

I dislike it immensely, mainly because it changes all the time and this makes ot hard to use worhout looking at it every single time. The best way is to use an external keyboard.

I think that the Photoshop crowd likes it.

Depends on how you use it, if you use a lot of actions (basically macros) via keyboard shortcuts then you probably hate the touchbar, because they can only be bound to f-keys.

It was designed for, and is widely used by, the graphics and audio professionals crowd.

The ability to use touch sliders, filmstrips, etc. is a huge boon.

It just gets a ton of hate here on HN because obviously there's very little overlap between the populations.

A lot of people forget that "Pro" has never referred to software professionals, it's always referred to multimedia professionals.

I do graphics, video and development and my hobby is audio. I have used the Touch Bar about once for all those things. The novelty wears off.

VirtualDJ supports using it for a crossfader, but then, it would be a way better move to buy an Air, and a real audio interface and mixing board, or at least an external controller.

There are quite a few people who look at the keyboard as they type and for them it's great. Seems like it would be more useful in a consumer laptop.

If Touch Bar were in addition to the function keys + Escape key, everyone would praise it as yet another brilliant Apple innovation, and rivals would be copying it the way every notebook nowadays looks like the late-2008 unibody Macbook Pro (and really, all the way back to the 2001 titanium PowerBook). But it's not, so they don't and they aren't.

Has anyone ever seen anyone use the F# keys in a Mac app?