Birbla

Join the discussion

Write your take first — we'll ask for email only when you're ready to publish.

Sign in
  • Hacker News
  • BetterTouchTool cleverly let one trigger the trackpad haptics when using custom Touchbar configs. With the haptics set to high, you could really feel it. It made a huge difference.

    I don't think native haptic support would have been enough to save the Touchbar, but like the author I'm a little surprised that Apple didn't even try it.

    I'm pretty much convinced they knew it was doomed before it was even released.

    by mthoms
  • I had completely forgotten this existed. Despite adding bettertouchtool I never found a single useful thing to do with it.
    by mxxx
  • Wasn't the Touch Bar just a sneaky way for Apple to mess around with ARM coprocessing and other ARM-based macguffins in production?

    We went from Touch Bar + T2 to Apple Silicon pretty quick. The Touch Bar was the user-facing toy to drive adoption, then they just dropped the bar and kept T2 as they built out more functions in it being taken over from Intel hardware.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_T2

    It's like how the iPhone Air is just a test device for the iPhone Ultra's hardware capabilities and the 16e was a device to test the C1 modem. Apple's short lived "experimental production" products.

    by kotaKat
  • If they had had individual keys with screens instead of the Touch Bar I think everyone would have been happy. Have it default to a normal function row but give people the option to customize, let apps customize it behind a modifier key, etc.
    by atty
  • The TouchBar's problem was both hardware and software. Because of its poor affordance for text labels it typically only allowed Mystery Meat UI[0]. If you labeled a button it ate up surface area and prevented a dense interface. Because it was constantly in flux you couldn't develop any muscle memory for it. It didn't help that the icons most apps used were inscrutable flat bullshit sigils.

    It was made worse since desktop keyboards lacked the feature so you couldn't practice/learn the UI on anything but MacBooks. Keyboard shortcuts were far more useful since they worked on any Mac and whether or not you were using an external keyboard.

    That lack of external keyboard support also meant developers couldn't write decent interfaces for the TouchBar unless they had the right MacBook. The simulator was not sufficient to actually test real world usage for positioning/ergonomics.

    I found it to be a top to bottom failure of a feature. Small OLED screens on physical buttons would have been far superior ergonomically. Using the space for better cooling on the i7 and i9s would have been a much much better use of that space.

    [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mystery_meat_navigation

    by giantrobot
  • I would say no.

    As someone who actually really liked my Touch Bar, the only problem I had with it was that it replaced a row of keyboard keys. If they had simply put it above my F keys instead of trying to replace them I think the world would have learned to love it like I did.

    by donatj
  • The immediate problems were software, but the hardware was what doomed it and I don’t see how they didn’t see that from the start. It could never be in all their products (e.g. iMac, well, without requiring a wired keyboard but that was never going to happen) so it could never be more than an accessory.

    I think they realized that too late. It’s a shame though. In a MacBook-only world, I wonder what would have become of it.

    by sandcat_
  • No, the biggest problem was the hardware.

    It replaced a well-known decades-old paradigm of engage-only-on-user-input buttons with a glowing slider that would always engage out of turn. I can't count the number of times I reached for numbers, only to be greeted with the whatever random function the application and context decided it was relevant there. And of course, whenever I reached for the ESC key, it would never register it properly, because if you're trying to quickly back out or interrupt software that's misbehaving, the touchbar software also had to run on the same CPU and could become totally unresponsive to input. All of this doesn't even begin to describe the rage of being in the middle of words and sentences and realizing your screen has been doing random shit for the last 10 seconds because your fingers accidentally swiped or hovered a 1px portion and activated the $USELESS_FUNCTION slot machine (I do have big hands and long fingers).

    I hated it from the first ghost touch back in 2019 until my work Mac was replaced with an M3 in 2024, and after they added some customization settings, I basically disabled all the "glossy and touchy" functionality and set it to display the FN keys regardless of application or context. Then I mapped pressing FN to show brightness control + audio mute/down/up. And even then the occasional F10 or F11 accidental swipe was always a possibility, although way less rage-inducing.

    by plqbfbv

Explore Birbla archives