Why did the touchbar not take off? It's pretty cool

[mattkime]

The M1 macs should have gotten two touchbars.

[M A V I C]

Most things took more effort. Each app maker did things differently. Usually it replicated buttons on the screen which had keyboard equivalents that were quicker to hit.

Also, I never made it to the desktop keyboard. So if you were switching between the laptop keyboard and desktop, you had to switch how you did things on both.

Finally, no web access so web apps could never make use of them.

[bfd]

Only slightly cool thing about the touch pad was some of the apps it supported as time went by. Like the Piano app - cool, but a toy - Pock moved your dock down to the Touch Bar so that was somewhat helpful. Photoshop has had some touchpad support, too, but none of it is really missed on the M1 here. Possibly too much ahead of its time. There may be a point when the entire keyboard is a touch screen, but not today or next year.

[Acer]

If the touch bar was in addition to, and did not replace the F key row, I suspect we'd all have a lot more positive view. Even just a half-height physical F-key row.

[sekker]

First gen epic fail was no hardware escape key for programmers.

Second failure was putting this with the terrible butterfly keyboards.

Third was not taking workflow issues seriously. Needed far better options to customize, or it was more work and not less.

I believe if Apple had waited to launch with M1 Macs, people would have given the touch bar a real try.

I’d likely hate it myself. I’m too set in my ways.

[davester]

With most PC makers offering full touchscreens, the touchpad was IMHO an idiotic also-ran. The first time I saw it, my first thought was "FAIL!" Steve would never have allowed such a worthless POS.

[JoeH]

My thoughts at the time it was introduced was that the touchbar was a cool solution in search of a problem. Almost everything it could do was easily done using existing methods already in place. Those existing methods also were more consistently implemented, reimplementing them for the touchbar ended up being left to developers who didn't have good guidelines.

[mrbigstuff]

davester wrote:
With most PC makers offering full touchscreens, the touchpad was IMHO an idiotic also-ran. The first time I saw it, my first thought was "FAIL!" Steve would never have allowed such a worthless POS.

this is what I thought, also (except maybe for the Jobs part). and it could be applied to the two-button mouse era, when Apple thought it beneath them to emulate an extremely useful, dexterous function since they were not first to market with it.

[kj]

mrbigstuff wrote:
[quote=davester]
With most PC makers offering full touchscreens, the touchpad was IMHO an idiotic also-ran. The first time I saw it, my first thought was "FAIL!" Steve would never have allowed such a worthless POS.

this is what I thought, also (except maybe for the Jobs part). and it could be applied to the two-button mouse era, when Apple thought it beneath them to emulate an extremely useful, dexterous function since they were not first to market with it.
I agree with Davester on this. I actually would have moved the dock onto it, because that little extra screen space would have been useful to me. But, I'm afraid it's usefulness just didn't justify the cost and effort for most people.

[gabester]

Tiangou wrote:
...my frequent accidental brushing of the Escape-key corner which was awkward much of the time and occasionally catastrophic.

This was a periodic issue for me as well - over the years I've learned to rest my left pinkie over the escape key in case I need to suddenly stop/cancel something. Havoc ensues when you take that surface and make it touch-sensitive rather than a physical key needing to be pressed...

I wonder were the touchbar's introduction to have been delayed until post-Ive Apple with the improved keyboard/layout of the 16-inch MacBook Pro with the physical escape key if it would have been a different story.

I also think the best place for the touchbar would have been across the "front" of the MacBooks where the divot to open the screen lives so that it could be used when the screen was closed...