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?