
Making the Touch Bar useful by abandoning Apple guidelines - sneks
http://vas3k.com/blog/touchbar/
======
rwz
The biggest problem with touchbar is that Apple intentionally made non-
touchbar model inferior in terms of hardware and the amount of USB-C ports to
make sure ppl buy touchbar. This is truly infuriating and I'm sure, was done
for purely marketing reasons.

I'd buy a non-touchbar model if it had the same hardware as a touchbar model
in a heartbeat.

~~~
mikenew
Don't forget the huge price hike "because of the touchbar" that included the
non-touchbar model.

~~~
sundvor
That's their "because we know you'll buy it anyway" factor.

~~~
mikenew
I know I’m just one guy, but I was planning on an upgrade before they released
it and I did not, in fact, buy it anyway.

~~~
sundvor
Good. :) The touch bar would be why - as opposed to price, right?

~~~
mikenew
I have been using exclusivly Apple computers for about 25 years. I have been
an iOS developer for about 8 of those. The Mac Pro debacle is a whole
different rant, but there were three factors related to their new laptops
(many other complaints related to developer support, tooling, and so on.
again, different rant) that made me decide to stop purchasing my computers
from Apple and transition away from iOS development.

First, they introduced the touchbar, which is a feature that is _clearly_ not
designed for me (programmer, vim, etc.). In fact it isn't just useless for me;
it interferes with the way I work.

Second, using the touchbar as justification, they raised the price to nearly
$3000 if you want a 15" screen and a 500G hard drive. Upgrading every 3 or 4
years becomes incredibly expensive.

And third, they deliberately crippled the non-touchbar version of the macbook
and _will not_ let you spec it high enough to be competitive with the touchbar
versions. You can't even get it with a dedicated graphics card. If the
touchbar is so compelling then it should be a feature people choose.
Intentionally crippling the machine to force people into an upsell is just
maddening. Especially when I'm a developer that contributes to their ecosystem
and what they're trying to upsell is completely irrelevant to me.

Not only am I no longer in their target market; they won't even accommodate my
needs.

~~~
crispinb
Pretty much same boat. I'm still on a pre-touchbar MB Pro, and it's hard to
imagine any circumstances under which I'd buy another Apple machine (maybe if
I needed to do native iOS work for some reason). I've held off buying another
MB largely because switching habits/software to another OS always seems like
something I'd like to shelve. I've managed to keep my current ageing machine
viable by offloading increasing amounts of work to AWS, Linode, Raspberry Pis,
etc. But this won't go on for ever, and Apple's current laptop line is
completely irrelevant to me.

------
bad_user
I have the MacBook Pro 2017 edition and this is by far the worst upgrade I've
experienced for such a high-end, luxury item.

It's all USB-C. Virtually nobody else supports USB-C, not even Apple. Oh, you
want HDMI? €100 please.

I also have an iPhone 8 which is on the Lightning connector. The audio jack is
gone and guess what, there's no Lightning connector on the MacBook, so you'll
need 2 pairs of headsets or an adapter.

The glowing logo is gone. And the Touch Bar is a clusterfuck. In an ironic
touch, the default Touch Bar setup shows the Siri button at all times. I guess
if you have multiple clusterfucks you make them link to one another.

I still have the 2015 at home. I think that was the best MacBook Pro made thus
far and looking at the differences I'm now contemplating a move to a Linux
laptop — not the same polish, but it won't be this expensive either and I
won't feel bad about supporting a company that's getting increasingly hostile
towards work laptops and touch typists.

~~~
OskarS
I feel like USB-C is on the rise. Nintendo Switch uses it and there's a whole
bunch of new android phones starting to use come with it. I bet in a year or
two, most new devices (e-book readers, phones, tablets) are going to be USB-C,
probably with Apple (ironically) being the only exception. It's neat to be
able to charge my Switch from my MacBook charger and vice versa (though the
Switch charger barely charges the MacBook)

I don't mind so much being part of the forefront here. It's a pain to dongle,
but that's the price of progress, dammit!

~~~
Gregordinary
Careful with the USB-C on the Switch as its current implementation is not
compliant. (Still agree its adoption is on the rise).

[https://plus.google.com/102612254593917101378/posts/2CUPZ5yV...](https://plus.google.com/102612254593917101378/posts/2CUPZ5yVTRT)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16706803](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16706803)

~~~
codefined
This seems to be one of the problems with USB-C implementations, barely any of
them seem truly compliant? I remember this comment from a week ago[0]:

> In watching the evolution of USB-C over the last few years, it seems like
> it's extremely hard to implement correctly with the huge number of modes,
> alternate modes, and power delivery in the spec. > When you connect two
> USB-C devices today, you have almost no idea what is actually going to
> happen, which device is the master, and which way power will flow.

[0]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16706803](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16706803)

------
ProfessorLayton
The Touchbar has been mostly a dud for me, and I don't miss it when using my
older MBP. I have customized by touch bar to include my favorite actions such
as locking the screen, but it is otherwise static.

My 2 biggest issues are:

\- It turns off after 1 min of inactivity, and find it infuriating that I have
to wake it up by before using it. Effectively making everything 2 interactions
away.

\- No haptic feedback. Even having the trackpad click would be useful, since
it can be felt throughout the Macbook.

~~~
dawnerd
Primary reason it turns off is because its oled, and leaving it on would cause
burn-in.

~~~
avhon1
Sounds like a great application for an e-ink display. No burn-in, low power,
and can always emit as much light as the keys on the keyboard do (by front-
illuminating the bar when the keyboard backlight is on).

~~~
DaiPlusPlus
The 2014 ThinkPad X1 Carbon had an e-ink touch strip instead of an F-row
(exactly like the MBP does). It didn’t work very well: poor display contrast,
hard to see in bright daylight, can’t feel for keys, slow response time, etc.
They switched back to real keys for the 2015 model release.

...that’s why Apple’s adoption of it surprised me the most: I saw how it on
the ThinkPad added no value, and while Apple has greater integration and will
undoubtedly encourage third-party devs to use it - it will still be too fiddly
and complicated.

I think Apple’s too proud to kill it off in just one project cycle - but I
can’t see Apple’s management justifying continued investment of time into
maintaining it. The fact they didn’t include it in their latest desktop
keyboard (for a Pro users no-less!) says something.

~~~
Izkata
> hard to see in bright daylight

Huh? One of the defining features of e-ink is that it's _easier_ to read in
bright light, compared to a regular screen...

~~~
DaiPlusPlus
It had a smooth plastic window over it without any matte-finish or anti-
reflective coating. Couple that with how the keyboard area is often in the
shade made it hard to see.

------
huebnerob
I started remapping the Caps Lock key to the Escape command when I got my
tbMBP, and now it's the very first thing I do on every single computer I start
using, touch bar or not. MacOS even now offers this as a 1st party option in
system preferences, it works phenomenally. I even love, at a visceral level,
the balanced symmetry of ESC and ENTER being opposite each other.

~~~
threatofrain
If you're a Vimmer this is invaluable. ctrl-c and esc feel terrible after
that.

~~~
kough
I get bye with capslock remapped as control and using ctrl-[, which is the
pinky of each hand and requires minimal movement. Control in general is useful
for everything, escape not as often.

~~~
eddyg
Ctrl-C is another option that works the same as Escape and is easier to
activate with one hand.

~~~
u801e
Not quite. If you want to append or insert characters using blockwise visual
mode in vim, it won't work with Ctrl-C. It will work with Ctrl-[ or Esc.

~~~
lentil
That's true for the default behaviour. Ctrl-C also won't call autocommands
(like InsertLeave).

But - you can always map <C-c> to <ESC>, so that it'll work exactly the same.

------
arthurofbabylon
I’m a non-tech savvy person who happens to work in tech. I find the touch bar
very useful.

This is what I believe: the touchbar is for people like me... people who never
learned to use the F keys, people who aren’t obsessive about shortcuts but
appreciate them when discovered. In short, it’s for the 90% of software users
that float between general public and pro users. It works.

~~~
usaphp
> In short, it’s for the 90% of software users that float between general
> public and pro users. It works.

Then they should have not called it a “MacBook pro” there is nothing “pro”
about touch bar, it’s something useless that I have to pay extra for and I
don’t need it at all.

~~~
beamatronic
The only time I touch my Touch Bar is to hit the Escape key.

Because I use vi.

Because I am a professional and theoretically the target audience of $3,000
premium quality laptops.

~~~
taftster
Funny that you need a $3000 laptop to run vi. Funny in a sad way.

~~~
haukilup
Just because they work in vi as their text editor does not mean they do not
run other software on the same laptop. There are fields of software
development where performance of your development environment matters.

------
bouke
I’ve been using the 2016 MacBook TouchBar for little over a year now and feel
the same pains as mentioned in the article:

> As a machine, MacBook Pro is great. But not because of the Touch Bar. Touch
> Bar is an inflamed appendix, the same dumb shit as Siri. If Apple had
> implemented it as an additional row and not the F-keys replacement, everyone
> would forget about it in a couple of days.

At least Siri doesn’t get in the way of productivity.

> Once again. I hate sliders on Touch Bar. Changing them to buttons was the
> first thing I did. Now I can tap them blindly. Guess, even my stress level
> significantly dropped when I stopped trying to put the sliders in the
> desired position. It was same to adjusting hot water in a shower — you're
> never gonna get it without burning yourself.

Those sliders are the worst, now requiring TWO high precision taps, while
looking at the keyboard, to tweak the volume. I find myself reaching for the
physical volume controls on my headset more often.

> Starting from MacOS High Sierra Play/Pause button globally controls the
> system sounds. It is not a problem on iPhone, but on Mac it controls every
> ad that pop-up with more priority than Spotify. You tap the button and don't
> understand, why it doesn't stop the music. Thanks, Apple. Very convinient.

Unreliable play/pause button, very annoying.

> Imagine, you want to drag a picture to a browser to upload. You click the
> Finder, but instead opening a new window at the same screen, it carries you
> away somewhere. Just because there's another Finder window opened there. And
> it's fucking impossible to fix that with standard MacOS tools.

Not related to the TouchBar, but I don’t understand why Apple won’t improve on
the Spaces feature. Why does it force me to use one space for an app.

~~~
simonbarker87
You may already know this but you can just tap and hold on one of the
brightness or volume buttons and just slide the way you want and the button
morphs into a slider. I find it is much quicker and more accurate to use the
sliders on the touch bar as a result of this. You don’t even need to pause
after the tap with your finger down, just tap and slide your finger around and
the slider is there.

~~~
Osmium
> You may already know this but you can just tap and hold on one of the
> brightness or volume buttons and just slide the way you want and the button
> morphs into a slider.

Yes, this is actually one of the few things I actively like about the touch
bar.

I love that Apple is trying something new with laptops, but sadly it's been
mostly a dud for me too. I'd take Face ID + a T2 chip (like iMac Pro) any day.
The fundamental problem is you don't tend to look at the keyboard when you're
using a computer; there isn't enough incentive to do so, so it always feels a
bit like a chore to use.

I think there's a kernel of a good idea here, but the current implementation
isn't it.

Edit: Reading this article, I've realized all I really want from the touch bar
is a permanent Dock. The Dock is important enough to always be on your screen,
and it'd be really useful to have at a touch.

------
chvid
I am really "worried" about two features coming out of Apple the past few
years: The touch bar mentioned here and the "3D touch" feature of the iPhone
7+.

These are "obviously" bad interaction designs yet they come out of a company
having almost infinite resources when it comes to design. What is going on
here?

Is it the marketing department taking over? Is it "we have created this chip
and now we have to use it somewhere otherwise the money is lost"? Is it
particular individuals whoes silly ideas are promoted beyond their merits like
the anecdote that the paper clip got in Windows because the project was run by
Bill Gates' wife?

~~~
aroman
Have you actually used 3D touch? Because I use it just about every day, so
much so that it's one of the biggest things I miss when using phones that
don't have it. It also isn't touted as a major selling point anymore -- it
just quietly exists, serving an extremely useful purpose as a better "right
click" for touch screens.

The touch bar I agree is major marketing hype.

~~~
flukus
Have you seen non-technical people using their devices, particularly older
people? Every button press they make is a force touch and if that doesn't do
what's expected they'll press harder. It's hard enough getting them not to
long press or double click and now the company known for making things easy to
use is making things even more confusing for lay people.

~~~
dpkonofa
The number of "non-technical" people is only shrinking every single day. Why
would they continue to design hardware for everyone just to cater to a
constantly shrinking minority demographic?

~~~
flukus
It's not shrinking and it's the majority demographic.

I'd say it's growing in fact, younger people growing up with the internals of
their devices more hidden from them than ever, they will have less technical
literacy than their older peers.

------
wiredfool
I’ve been living with a touchbar machine for about two months now, and the
only useful thing about it for me is the touchid spot.

Escape, slow as hell. Brushing the touchbar and bringing up the man app on
some random argument, useless and annoying.

It’s gotten a lot better now that I’ve switched it from context to function
keys, and am using an external keyboard 95% of the time.

It’s really my third favorite laptop to use in the house, behind a 2012 MBA
and a Thinkpad t410.

~~~
r00fus
I can live with all of the half-baked features of the latest MBPs (I have one
for work, my home one is much older) but the false recognition of the overly
large touchpad drives me crazy.

It's bad enough that I have to disable tap-to-click (which I greatly preferred
- much more elegant) and it still mis-clicks if I rest my hands on it.

I used to think the MBP trackpads were a cut above everything else - now
they're too big and the palm rejection is not good enough.

~~~
ASinclair
I'm glad to hear other people have issues with the enormous trackpad. The
number of times I incorrectly type my password in has increased like 10x on
the new MBP. Unfortunately I can't use Touch ID to login due to an employer
policy.

------
KillerRAK
I refuse to buy the new MBPs for corporate use. Just keep buying the older
model. The new one is an unmitigated, overreaching, disaster. Oh and BTW, if
Apple discontinues the older MBP, I will NEVER buy a MBP with a Touch Bar.
Utterly ridiculous. I look forward to reading about what a stupid technology
blunder this was years from now in a listicle of tech mistakes.

~~~
KillerRAK
And don't get me started about removing the glowing apple logo on the back of
the screen. No reason for it -- now the back of the MBP looks just as shitty
and cheap as every other craptop on the market.

~~~
whywhywhywhy
Found the choice of mirror material awful, looks like the surface of a child's
plastic play mirror you'd find in a dollar store.

------
SomeHacker44
As far as I'm concerned, the Touch Bar is not useful and will never be useful.
I need the physical tactile ESC and F-keys back.

There isn't even an option to make it emulate a standard keyboard row of ESC &
F-Keys permanently (with the alternative functionality when you hit Fn, like
on a Magic Keyboard).

This "feature" alone has sealed the fate of Apple computer hardware for me. I
will not buy another Mac until it has a full developer-level set of features
and a full keyboard, one that doesn't cost $700 and five days to repair when
it keeps breaking.

I literally don't use my MacBook Pros anymore (one personal, one work) without
an external keyboard except when simply impossible. I will literally put a
magic keyboard on top of the internal keyboard when that is the only option I
have.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Somebody should build a row of physical ESC+F-Keys that you could stick to
your touchbar, + software fix that would make the touchbar display the
appropriate keys. Kind of like those analog controllers you can stick to a
smartphone.

------
makecheck
The big problem I see is that my laptop is hooked up to a display half the
time, lid closed. It wouldn’t be useful for showing anything that isn’t also
on the main display. And it can’t have a set of bar-only controls (if Apple
were serious about that use, they would have released an external keyboard
with Touch Bar by now).

~~~
d3sandoval
If you have an iPad, you can use duet to simulate the touchbar on the bottom
of the display. This makes it all the more useful if you're using your iPad to
see chat messages or monitor the status of a terminal since it also takes
advantage of the touchscreen

~~~
makecheck
Yes, surely; Apple _already had_ superior touch devices supporting Handoff,
etc. It would have made way more sense to extend Handoff and let the larger,
more capable touch screens of iOS devices interact with Macs.

------
awalton
...and sadly, Apple will never admit the mistake, and give us back the nice
keyboard of the 2013 model. All in the quest to save a millimeter or two of
height.

My Late 2013 15" MBP is starting to fall apart in its old age - its battery is
broken, its feet are starting to come off, it's got a ding in the display...
it's just barely sufferable, but not for much longer. At this point, I don't
see myself replacing it with a Mac. There's _nothing_ compelling about these
Touchbar machines.

However, I'd buy this same machine again if they updated the processor (maybe
one of those six core i9s that Intel just rolled out) and bumped the RAM to at
least 32GB. More local storage would be nice-to-have, but these days I just
don't have much locally on my laptop - it's all on NASes/Desktops. I don't
care at all about Thunderbolt and probably can go another 5 years without
caring too much about USB-C given how slow peripheral redesign cycles are now.
So that's it. That's the only two (or three) upgrades I'd care about. All of
the rest would be superfluous to me.

Sadly, I don't see that happening. I'll probably break down and replace the
battery in this machine and try my damnest to ride this machine out of the
decade...

~~~
clord
Replace parts. It’s surprisingly affordable. I got my top case, battery, and
display changed through a combination of defect repairs and just paying out to
go the extra mile for 500 bucks. Machine feels brand new. Still plenty fast.
Everything I touch is shiny again.

------
on_and_off
from the article :

> the Touch Bar still remains the useless shit and there is no hope Apple will
> fix it.

> As a machine, MacBook Pro is great. But not because of the Touch Bar. Touch
> Bar is an inflamed appendix, the same dumb shit as Siri. If Apple had
> implemented it as an additional row and not the F-keys replacement, everyone
> would forget about it in a couple of days.

> The reason is simple — that's how you see your laptop 99% of the time:

This is exactly how I feel about the Touch Bar.

If it had been an additional row I would not have minded. I don't dislike
sliders to change the volume and I would prefer to see track title there than
as notification (notifications create a pavlovian response where I think they
are alert for something important, so it is very unpleasant for me to see one
popping up for play music).

However, since it is taking away the functions key that I use all the time and
replace them with a screen, I strongly prefer using my 2015 MBP over the more
recent one.

~~~
SomeHacker44
"If it had been an additional row I would not have minded."

Exactly. I would have configured it to be blank, stay off, and remain off.
Give me my physical ESC and F-keys.

~~~
stiGGG
I only want my ESC back, F-keys are not needed on macOS. They should have made
the TouchBar smaller and kept ESC

~~~
on_and_off
To use the OS; indeed

For some software like Intellij IDEs, function keys are used very often. Since
that where I spend 90% of my time on my work MBP; it makes the Touch Bar very
painful.

ESC is still my top button there; but just getting it back would not be enough
for me.

------
SN76477
I think we are going to look back on this as a dark age of human interfaces.

too much touch, not enough tactile

~~~
delecti
I definitely disagree. I think we're at a great balancing point with
touchscreen laptops, the keyboards aren't perfect but they get the job done,
and the touchscreen augments that wonderfully. Phones are inherently limited
by size, and while I miss physical keyboards, the flexibility of on-screen
keyboards more than makes up for it.

~~~
gray_-_wolf
tbh I don't really understand why that's needed... I still think milestone2
was best phone ever made control-wise. Great construction, solid keyboard...
shame things like that are not made anymore

------
dylan-m
I always find it amusing how developers flock to MacOS saying things like "you
don't need to configure it like Linux; it just works", and then there are
articles like this containing myriads of workarounds for its problems :b This
is cool, though. I'm somewhat envious of the shiny thing. The conky
screenshots are fun, since this is quite reminiscent of it, except done
somewhat usefully. It's a shame that it's tied to a little laptop keyboard
that you definitely shouldn't be using full time if you value your wrists and
your spine, but, it's a start.

(Now, please please please don't do all of your programming on a MacBook).

~~~
ravitation
I find comments like these amusing.

First, you don't _need_ to spend hours configuring the Touch Bar for it to be
a functional machine, like you would trying to run Linux on a laptop... But
some people do, because it's there. The Touch Bar works just fine without this
article.

Second, having a myriad of workarounds for its problems is a positive not a
negative. Everything has problems; I'll take the platform that has a myriad of
workarounds over the one that has a handful.

Be my guest to use something else for all of your programming. I'll keep using
my MacBook Pro.

~~~
dylan-m
Heh, I'm mostly bitter because most of the places I've interviewed at lately
just give everyone a Macbook Pro and that's the end of it, and I'm sick of
cursing at their window manager and then running Linux on the things. (Missing
webcam driver makes me grumpy when the XPS 13 I normally use supports
everything perfectly).

Anyway, I don't mean to rag on anyone's preferred OS. More just taking an
opportunity to grumble pointlessly about a particular unconvincing argument
people like to use for it. (Unfortunately, that argument _is_ convincing for
the people who buy the hardware I have to put up with at work).

Also to remind people about ergonomics, because we mustn't forget these
things. Please don't be too drawn to the shiny touchbar, it is still attached
to a keyboard which encourages squishy hand position and which is attached to
a screen that is not at eye level.

~~~
ravitation
I totally get that, but in a lot of cases it _is_ easier to use MacOS than to
run Linux (like not having to worry about hardware drivers pretty much at
all).

Also, those are characteristics of laptops... Not specifically Macs... And I
do need a mobile computer...

------
losvedir
The default touch bar was pretty useless to me, mostly because the buttons
keep moving around on every app and I never remember what it can do. But a few
tweaks and it's useful again:

In System Preferences > Touchbar I manually added all the applications I
normally use into the "always show Fn keys" mode, so now the touchbar
basically always shows Esc and the Fn keys.

Then, add Apptivate to tie each Fn key to my most used apps (F1 = Finder, F2 =
Slack, F3 = Chrome, F4 = Sublime, etc), and I can easily switch among my most
used applications. It's not quite touch-typeable like with hardware fn keys,
but close enough.

I briefly looked around for a utility but didn't find one, but basically my
goal is this: a static touch bar that never changes, which switches to or
launches a set of specified apps. Is that possible?

------
ramijames
I went out of my way to buy a 2016 macbook without the touchbar as my new
machine. I have a macbook pro with touchbar as my work machine and I hate it.
The build quality is garbage, the keyboard is a huge step down, and the
touchbar is incredibly fucking annoying. Why would they take away quick access
to critical functionality like display brightness and volume?

------
JDiculous
The touch bar is absolutely atrocious, and shows that Apple is either
completely out of touch or doesn't give a crap about it's users. There is
absolutely no reason to force those who want the latest hardware with a
dedicated graphics card to have that touchbar keyboard. They could've offered
the touchbar keyboard alongside standard keyboard models, giving users the
option to choose what keyboard they want while also giving Apple valuable A/B
testing data to see what the public prefers.

I really hope another company out there makes a superior laptop. Apple has too
much of a monopoly on the dev laptop market, and they clearly don't have the
competency to be trusted with it.

~~~
ankka
Even with the bad parts the Macbook pro is still the most capable all-rounder
available - it's durable, the build quality is excellent, the hardware is
(apart from memory) as good as you can get in any portable laptop...

It's really sad that Lenovo for some reason refuses to make laptops that
actually match the macbooks; they are either huge or lack a proper GPU. And
others just aren't of comparable build quality in the first place.

~~~
JDiculous
From the little that I've looked at the Microsoft Surface, I've been
impressed. Almost looks and feels like a Macbook Pro.

Biggest advantage Macbooks have had until now in my opinion is the trackpad.
Shouldn't be that tough for competitors to match.

------
caillou
To me, the touch bar is a deal-breaker.

Here is what they could have done:

Right hand side: a regular power button that doubles as finger-print.

Left hand side: a regular esc key.

Replace F keys with a touch oled screen.

I could actually live with that.

------
gargravarr
This is where things get very awkward, I find, because those of us who say
'the older generation was better' are frequently derided by those who adopt
the newer with comparisons to being dinosaurs or luddites. The answer is that
we're neither - we just want devices that are _usable_.

Apple seem to be going out of their way to break the usability of their
devices. All the Touch Bar seems to do (and the Apple guidelines themselves
demand, which this article deliberately tears up) is replicate keyboard
shortcuts. Things that most existing users have by now memorised. It creates a
distraction and makes it harder to interact with your computer.

It's not just hardware, but software too - one thing that really stuck out at
me in this article is this:

>Starting from MacOS High Sierra Play/Pause button globally controls the
system sounds. It is not a problem on iPhone, but on Mac it controls every ad
that pop-up with more priority than Spotify. You tap the button and don't
understand, why it doesn't stop the music. Thanks, Apple. Very convinient.

Why would you do that? On every platform, the media keys control the current
media player application. Opening it up to a web browser too is asking for
exactly this kind of trouble - breaking the usability of media applications by
something completely unrelated hooking into previous functionality.

The best reasoning I can come up with is the iPad. It's often touted that even
your great-grandmother can pick up an iPad and learn to use email, Facebook
and search for things online. That same person would panic (I know my
grandmother does) if you ask her to try using a laptop. It seems like they're
trying to market these phenominally expensive machines to a small subset in
the hopes of turning them into a new market, at the great expense of their
existing user base. Rather than an already heavily-marked-up iPad, they would
reap the profits from even greater markup on their laptops, which the target
market would use for exactly the same things as the tablet, but with a
considerably greater repair bill when the cat accidentally knocks it off the
table...

I got a 2014 Retina machine this year. That's usable. It has buttons. It has
ports. It does exactly what it appears it will do. People would happily call
me a dinosaur for rejecting the current lineup and getting one of these
instead. Thankfully, I could not care less.

------
p3llin0r3
I bought a Dell XPS for less than half the price and better specs. No regrets.

Apple hardware isn't that amazing, and even if it is, who cares. "Build
quality" is just an excuse to spend more money on a luxury designer laptop
that is becoming more and more hostile to its end users.

I dont need a thinner laptop or a dumb touch bar or a"minimalist" os design. I
need decent Docker impl and ports to plug my phone and monitor into and to not
spend $3k on a computer with mediocre specs.

The OS everyone loves to harp on about isn't as revolutionary as people like
to pretend. Windows has better Docker support and that is a huge win in my
book. Also windows doesn't make me enter payment info when I'm trying to
install tools I need to compile my code.

For a few years I worked for a consulting firm. The laptop I chose was a $500
Lenovo with a decent processor and 1080p screen. I bought 32 gigs of RAM and
an SSD and upgraded it. The cost of a comparable Mac is laughable.

Installed Linux on it. Used it for years, never had any issues, even with
external monitors. The thing is still running to this day, though now I have
it sitting under my TV as a media PC.

#itsjustoverpriced

------
memco
> I decided to steal this feature and make the "coffee break" button. It locks
> the laptop and switches the screen off.

Ctrl+cmd+q = lock screen. Display will dim/sleep shortly after that. (Found
this out myself not too long ago, I think because of HN).

Incidentally, I just switched the touch bar to the standard function key
display with fn switching to the buttons just like the keyboards of old. I
found I almost never look at the touch bar and there's absolutely nothing I
found that it added that I couldn't already do with the old setup. I hate that
the escape key is no longer where it used to be (fully left-aligned). I also
hate on the new keyboards that the left and right arrow keys are so big. I use
the space on the smaller keys of my old keyboard as a tactile indicator of
where my hands are (perhaps it's finally time for vim?).

~~~
SomeHacker44
Ctrl-Cmd-Q does nothing for me on my tbMBP using the external Magic Keyboard
(because I refuse to use the ESC-less, painful, loud internal keyboard) on
macOS 10.12.

~~~
yeahboats
I believe this is a High Sierra addition.

------
wintorez
Touch Bar had made me consider abandoning MacBooks altogether and move to
Linux.

~~~
henriks
I took this exact path, and so far I'm quite happy with it. I used a touch bar
MBP 13" for over a year, hated it, and came to the realization that I was no
longer in the target group for these machines, or OS X, and couldn't really
rely on any future updates not making things even worse.

I decided I'd rather have a larger degree of control over the machine I use
for work, so I took the plunge and installed Linux on a ThinkPad. It took some
tinkering, but I don't really miss anything from my Mac now. Also, I can
finally run a proper tiling window manager!

------
ef4
Thanks, I have been dreading the upcoming time when my pre-touchbar macbook
pro is too old and I will check out these tips when it does.

One bit of feedback:

> RAM usage: Useless. In modern OS it's always nearly 100%. That's natural.

A good ram usage indicator is still really useful, and along with cpu and
network usage it's one of the first things I install on any machine.

The issue is that your indicator needs to show you not just "how much is used
vs free", which is indeed useless. It needs to show you the breakdown of
wired, active, and inactive memory. This makes it clear when some app is
starting to blow up and consume a huge amount.

I use
[https://member.ipmu.jp/yuji.tachikawa/MenuMetersElCapitan/](https://member.ipmu.jp/yuji.tachikawa/MenuMetersElCapitan/)

~~~
rbinv
> This makes it clear when some app is starting to blow up and consume a huge
> amount.

And how often does that actually happen anymore, really? Yes, Chrome and
friends are memory hogs, but a constant RAM indicator? If a MacBook (or any
other device for that matter) starts swapping, you'll know right away.

~~~
saagarjha
> And how often does that actually happen anymore, really

Pretty often, especially if you open an app that decides to allocate a lot of
memory very quickly (Xcode, VirtualBox) or when you switch to an app that
causes a lot of memory to be swapped in.

~~~
glhaynes
But if I just started up one of those apps, I'm _wanting_ (and expecting) it
to allocate a lot of memory because that's what those apps do. So I don't
really see what actionable information an always-visible meter does for me.
But I don’t begrudge those who like them!

------
exabrial
The only thing genuinely useful on the touchbar is the fingerprint reader,
after you enable the PAM module. Well technically the reader isn't part of the
touchbar, so I guess that doesn't count now that I think about it.

~~~
SomeHacker44
I dislike the fingerprint reader and don't use it on my tbMBP. Someone could
physically force me to use the fingerprint reader, or might just cut off my
finger to use it, which is even worse.

I wish macOS had a built in TOTP system.

~~~
acdha
> Someone could physically force me to use the fingerprint reader, or might
> just cut off my finger to use it, which is even worse.

If that’s your threat model, move to a safer country. No authentication system
in this class will protect against coercion and for 99.999999% of people the
risk is much lower than the risk of not locking their device.

------
prepend
I’ll install this plugin and pay $5 just to avoid tapping the dot durn
brightness buttons by accident or instead of escape. Happens many times every
day. Even though I’m trying not to. Can’t remove it from the touch bar.

------
BLanen
The structure of this article is weird. I just gave up reading it because it
was too annoying to keep up. Or is it just me?

~~~
aspaceman
No. Both the writing style and the page breaks lead the reader to think the
article has "finished" several times before it ends. While I completely agree
with a lot of this article's recommendations, it's funny that an article
criticizing Apple's design would be designed so poorly itself.

------
nerfhammer
I wonder if haptics will ever be good enough that we'll have a purely
touchscreen keyboard that doesn't suck.

~~~
saagarjha
> a purely touchscreen keyboard that doesn't suck

Many people would consider an iPhone keyboard to be this…

~~~
nugi
You can pry my model m from my cold dead fingers. Haptics is no substitute for
actual physical feedback.

~~~
saagarjha
Have you tried pressing the home button on iPhone 7 or 8, or clicking a
trackpad on a recent MacBook Pro?

~~~
FridgeSeal
Yes. Still, you can pry my mechanical keyboard from my cold, dead hands.

The home button on the new iphones feels _weird_, almost as if there's this
strange, unnatural delay to the click actually occurring. For something that
purports to be "just like real life" it does a poor job.

The click on the mbp trackpads is not too bad though.

~~~
efrafa
Huh I actually thinks home button is pretty much not recognizable that its not
a hardware one. My wife couldn’t even believe me.

------
matthewmacleod
Counter point: I have a 2017 Pro with the Touch Bar, and it's pretty nice. I
got used to the escape key in a couple of days, and I've found that it tends
to keep me away from the trackpad more. Some of the UI on it is great –
trimming clips in Quicktime feels lovely, and scoping searches in Dash. Some
of it isn't as useful, like tab switching in Safari, but I never find that it
gets in the way at all.

Honestly I'm not sure what problems people are generally having with it.

~~~
samastur
We are touch typists ;)

Seriously though, I don't look at my keyboard and therefore have no idea what
is on touchbar at any moment. I am not offended as some by its existence, but
I also don't find it useful except touchid bit.

------
mesozoic
They missed a much simpler solution that will solve the issue. A nice cheap
roll of electrical tape. Cover that sucker up and never look back.

------
alkonaut
They should make the touchbar have tactile feedback so you can feel where the
areas begin and end.

Then tbh they could just fix the areas to make it cheaper, so it's always say
15 equally sized tactile button areas.

And further, they could really just skip the dynamic display bit and just put
fixed labels on them such as F1...F12 and let the user remember what button
does what.

Oh wait

------
nkkollaw
It's really amazing how little insight Apple showed with their latest moves.

They removed all ports, replaced keyboard with a noisy one that stops working
unless you clean it daily, reduced battery life to make the thing a few
millimeters thinner.

The touchbar is the worst part: a solution in search for a problem.

So sad.

------
ngngngng
I was upset about the touch bar because of the esc key since I am a heavy vim
user. Then someone recommended I switch my esc and caps lock keys, now it
doesn't bug me anymore. The caps lock key is in a much more convenient
position for the esc function anyways.

~~~
stiGGG
What annoys me is that this esc capslock swapping option only shows up on macs
with touch bar. If I should get used to it I need it on all of my machines.

~~~
ninkendo
That's not true, it started showing up in Sierra when the MBP's with touchbar
were released. But every mac gets the option.

Source: I also made the switch to capslock-as-esc when I got the TB MBP and it
made me decide to switch the keyboard on my other two macs as well.

------
scarface74
Slightly off topic. But I always hated AppleScript. I first started trying to
play with it in 1992 with System 7 and it always fell in the uncanny valley of
being almost a natural language but not really. What’s strange is that I did
like HyperTalk with Hypercard

~~~
ken
These days you can use JavaScript for anything that has an AppleScript
interface, and you can use automation (either language) from a shell script.
For applications that support it, automation is pretty nice.

------
dawnerd
I actually like using the sliders for changing brightness and volume. Although
you nailed it, the new media play/pause functionality is absolute garbage.

I've been meaning to get the status line from Atom and have it displayed in
the touchbar.

------
mratzloff
The Touch Bar is great for one reason: I can put a Do Not Disturb button right
on my keyboard to silence the damn OS update notifications when it
occasionally ignores my Do Not Disturb settings.

Anti-feature vs. anti-feature!

------
zeveb
Reading this, I realised another fatal flaw in the Touch Bar: if you're using
a laptop stand with an external keyboard & mouse (as one would do in an office
or at home), then having to reach out and hit the Touch Bar would be a huge
annoyance, and might even knock the laptop off of its stand.

What with this, the mouse which cannot be used while charging, removing the
headphone jack, AirPods &c., one wonders if Apple computers are made to be
actually _used_ or just win design awards.

------
tolger
I agree with this article. The Touch Bar is a useless gimmick. Not only that,
but it removed the actually useful Esc and F-Keys. Oh, and it made MacBook
Pros more expensive.

I admire the author for finding ways to make the Touch Bar somewhat useful,
but to me it's just too much work and just reminds me how stupid and ill
conceived it is. When you remove useful things and replace them with useless
crap, it will make people angry. Don't get me started with the port situation.

------
lima
> What else do we have? Ubuntu? To use Photoshop in Wine? To watch Plasma
> crashes like in good old days? No, thanks.

The best experience I've had is Fedora with Gnome. Red Hat employs many
developers working on desktop Linux, and most of them are working on Fedora.

That being said, you'll have a better time with macOS if Photoshop is one of
your requirements.

------
emergie
I'm pretty happy with Caps Lock remapped as Escape key.

I think it's super useful to do this with any keyboard if you use vim.

------
vosper
I've used BetterTouchTool to create named touchbar buttons for some of the
functions I use semi-frequently in Jet brains IDEs. Things where I don't have
the keyboard shortcuts memorized. So I have "Declaration", "Find Usages",
"Rename", etc... I find that quite useful.

------
bjoli
That actually seems pretty useful. On that row I only use escape and f12
(quake-style terminal) without the fn-button (with which I control volume and
brightness). The occasional keyboard macro recording and replaying in emacs I
can just as well bind to something else.

------
lou1306
Is the "Call Jony Ive" in the header picture a subtle stab at Apple? If so,
well done.

------
dandare
It forever puzzles me, how come modern keyboards don't have dedicate buttons
for COPY and PASTE. Average user or pro, we use the silly combination of two
keys much more often than maybe 5 other least used dedicated keys, ON TOP of
the F keys.

~~~
cup-of-tea
Why is a two key combination silly? Only normal typing characters need to have
a dedicated key. For everything else there are control keys. Some of those
control keys I use far more frequently than copy and paste, believe it or not.

------
toxblh
If some interesting we write alternative btt with the same functional and more
battery frendly
[https://github.com/Toxblh/MTMR](https://github.com/Toxblh/MTMR)

------
anentropic
The biggest problem with the TouchBar is that it's inaccessible inside my
closed laptop. I need to it to be on the external keyboard where I can use it
when I'm working.

Does anyone actually _work_ with their laptop on their lap?

~~~
strictnein
I do when I work from home. I stay more focused than at my desk for some
reason. Although I guess it isn't directly on my lap, typically it's on a
thin, firm pillow that's on my lap.

------
rcarmo
I absolutely loved this. Might be the lateness of the hour here, but I
actually giggled when I got to the "Fine, I'm gonna code my own
BetterTouchTool. With blackjack!" bit.

------
egypturnash
This article makes me really glad I custom-configured the most powerful
Macbook Pro possible that _didn 't_ have the Touch Bar.

------
laythea
I find it amusing that they label the product that removes the actual touch
buttons, a touch bar.

------
artpi
I use BetterTouchTool to remap § to ESC on touchbar MBRO. It solves any ESC
problems.

~~~
lapfi
You can do that with a simple terminal command as well, btw.

[https://gist.github.com/lauri/84674ab22aafc4e0f398a52a53cfd7...](https://gist.github.com/lauri/84674ab22aafc4e0f398a52a53cfd7ec)

------
pfarnsworth
I would have bought a Macbook Pro last winter, but given the abomination that
is the Touchbar, I refused to buy one. If the next iteration of the Macbook
Pro doesn't get rid of it, I'm going to just get a Windows laptop instead.

~~~
X-Istence
Go buy a Windows laptop instead. I don't think Apple is going to do away with
it.

------
__m
I wish every ui would just show the the same buttons

------
everyone
How do you use a computer without function keys?

~~~
masklinn
Normally? The only program I use regularly which needs function keys is htop.
The only other I can think of is gitk, and I try to avoid that thing.

MacOS/OSX doesn't really have a history of using function keys, so pretty much
the only software which does is stuff which was "ported" from other unices
where relying on function keys is more standard.

~~~
crispinb
Xcode (a macOS exclusive) uses function keys by default (for debugging).
Cross-platform apps (not just ports) very commonly use F keys (eg. JetBrains
stuff).

------
notadoc
How about abandoning the Touch Bar instead?

Apple should ditch it entirely, or at least make it optional on all MacBook
Pro models.

~~~
reificator
I'm sure I don't matter to Apple anymore, but the touchbar is the reason I
haven't upgraded my laptop yet.

I enjoy having an Apple laptop to complement my Windows and Linux desktops,
but if the touchpad doesn't go away by the time I decide not to wait any
longer, I'll probably grab something else. Maybe a Chromebook with a
replacement OS, maybe an Ubuntu or Fedora laptop. Probably not Windows as it's
mainly for games and hobby game development for me. But whatever it is, it
won't have a touchbar.

~~~
dawnerd
You know they sell a version without touchbar right?

~~~
simcop2387
Only in the smaller lower performance bracket models. They do not make a 15
inch macbook pro without a touchbar.

EDIT: In fact I didn't realize that it's significantly different spec wise to
the 13 inch with touch bar. Only going to a 2.5Ghz base clock speed on the
non-touch bar. And this is with only intel integrated graphics and a dual core
cpu only, compared to the 15 inch models. This can be a big deal for anyone
who wants to do even basic video editing or many other content creation type
activities.

[https://www.apple.com/macbook-pro/specs/](https://www.apple.com/macbook-
pro/specs/)

~~~
dawnerd
Huh, I just assumed it was the same specs just without touchbar. That blows.

------
franga2000
I generally dislike Apple products, but holy shit, AppleScript is awesome! We
NEED this on Linux!

------
saagarjha
> Things got even worse when Apple "reinvented" the Play/Pause button in High
> Sierra.

Actually, this was introduced midway through macOS Sierra;
[https://developer.apple.com/documentation/mediaplayer](https://developer.apple.com/documentation/mediaplayer)
is available in macOS 10.12.1+.

> Buttons rock. It's always faster to tap, not slide.

If you press Fn, the slider will go away and the "normal" function buttons
will appear.

> I want to have instant access to Finder, anywhere. Default Touch Bar can't
> do that. Weird.

Why is this weird? Finder is _always_ in the Dock for every user.

> E.g., the eyedropper tool, to take the hex color code from the screen.

/Application/Utilities/Digital Color Meter.app

> Standard Touch Bar will never support the most useful feature — to display
> the name of track playing.

Slide out Notification Center.

> Would be cool to display the name of the YouTube video on the Touch Bar,
> right?

See above.

> You have a script running once in 20 seconds, and praying it won't overload
> the CPU.

Don't do this. Use AppleScript to watch for changes, instead of polling.

> I decided to steal this feature and make the "coffee break" button. It locks
> the laptop and switches the screen off.

Press the power button.

Not offense, and I'm sure you enjoy your setup, but I really think it would do
you well to learn a bit more about _why_ your computer was designed that way
rather than writing a rant online and spending time making it "just right".

EDIT: it looks like this comment is pretty controversial, since it's flip-
flopping between ±5 points rapidly. Let me give a more detailed response.

Personally, I don't have a computer with a Touch Bar. I have, however, used
one a borrowed one for a couple days. Personally, I would be fine switching
(there are other issues with the MacBook Pro that are preventing me, but
that's a story for another day).

I don't use the function keys _that_ often, so I don't feel as if I'm "losing
out" on them. Many of the supposed grievances that I normally hear are easily
solvable ("oh, I didn't know I could control the volume slider without lifting
my finger", "I didn't know I could add sleep to the Touch Bar"). Really, I
think the main issue with the Touch Bar is people view it as a second screen
rather than an extra set of controls as it's supposed to be. The Touch Bar is
meant as a place to have surface extra controls that would be nice to have at
your fingertips; what it is _not_ is a place to show you data or be a Dock or
menu bar or Notification Center or Activity Monitor. Why? Because you're not
always looking down at it. There's no point putting any significant
information there.

That being said, Touch Bar is not perfect, of course. It's a nice idea, but it
could be improved if it provided more tactile feedback (e.g. haptic feedback,
some sort of dynamic change in texture). And given that it's new, Apple's
guidelines, while good, may end up changing as real-world usage influences
them. Overall, though, I feel that much of the Touch Bar criticism is based on
knee-jerk reactions or issues that are not difficult to resolve. Yes, there
are some deeper issues, as I've outlined above, but I think the concept as a
whole is interesting.

~~~
tcfunk
> Press the power button.

Where is this power button? I've been searching for it since I got this
laptop.

Edit: Wow thanks, don't know how I missed that.

~~~
quantumleap22
Lol Apple made it impossible to understand how to turn on and off the laptop
and removed the startup sound leaving you with zero feedback when you start
the laptop for an eternity.

Awesome work.

~~~
saagarjha
> Apple made it impossible to understand how to turn on and off the laptop

Open the lid.

> leaving you with zero feedback when you start the laptop for an eternity

1\. Startup doesn't take long.

2\. There's a progress bar when booting.

------
jgh
cyberpunk linux desktop in 2007? What a newb.

------
josephjrobison
Best part of the touch bar is emojis....in some applications like Evernote

------
crankylinuxuser
I'd rather just buy decent hardware to begin with and not gimmicky crap like a
1280x80 pixel screen jammed onto an arm chip on a laptop. Nope. I heard its
especially fun if you have to reinstall - you need both firmwares or the
machine goes in frowny mac mode.

I'd much rather put time in a decent Linux desktop. You don't need
neuromancer-syle cyberpunk interfaces to make a really nice Linux system. And
you can pretty much do whatever you want, rather than have to break Apple's
"standards" for something that doesn't resemble brushed aluminum dogshit.

(psst, look at username. I'm even somewhat OK with Windows, given some of my
3d design workflow is there. My last job was a linux shop with Macs.. Hated
the macs every second.)

