Once More unto the breach, touch bar edition
John Gruber posted on Daring Fireball this week a link to his appearance on the most recent Vergecast with hosts Nilay Patel and David Pierce. I typically wouldn’t write about it here, but Gruber’s item contained a draw: the much-maligned Touch Bar.
The Vergecast’s episode description asks, somewhat cheekily, whether the Touch Bar’s troubles are attributable to Tim Cook himself or is it his fault Apple didn’t try hard enough to improve on it. Gruber, in response to the question, says in part “going back to dumb fiddly F-keys with functional icons printed on them was uncharacteristically lazy for Apple.” Apple conceived it, developed it, shipped it, and then… gave up on it.
I was at the October 2016 media event during which the then-redesigned MacBook Pro featured the Touch Bar as its marquee feature. To this day, I vividly remember sitting in the Town Hall audience—incidentally, my one and only Apple event I’ve ever covered from the company’s still-in-use Infinite Loop campus—and being mesmerized by Craig Federighi’s demos of the Touch Bar. I loved how more accessible it was to, to name just one example, use the Touch Bar to easily and quickly elect emoji rather than use Character Viewer on macOS. Likewise, I bought Phil Schiller’s marketing pitch that the Touch Bar’s dynamism was a better (and cooler!) alternative to what Gruber called “dumb, fiddly Function keys.” I can’t recall the last time I used the static F-keys on my Magic Keyboard for anything beyond adjusting volume or screen brightness. Again, the allure of the Touch Bar was I could do those things, and then some, right from the sleek little OLED strip above the keyboard, replete with familiar-looking, iOS-like controls.
(That event opened with an accessibility video featuring my friend Sady Paulson.)
I, along with probably everyone else in that room, rightly believed Apple would iterate on the Touch Bar for years to come—maybe even expand to the MacBook Air or the Magic Keyboard peripheral itself. Obviously, that never came to pass. The Touch Bar withered on the proverbial vine before Apple discontinued it with the 2021 release of the M1 Pro/Max MacBook Pros. What was ushered with a bang exited with but a whimper. My understanding over the years has been the software people inside Apple Park more or less fell out of love with the Touch Bar. I’ve never gotten a concrete explanation why, but the enthusiasm evidently was severely, irreparably curbed.
It’s a shame, because hardware was never the Touch Bar’s Achilles heel. It needed improvement software-wise; as I argued numerous times the Touch Bar would’ve been made eminently better had Apple given it haptic feedback. As it was, one big thing that rankled me about the Touch Bar’s public perception from reviewers and the Apple community was how ostensibly “useless” it was because 99% of people are touch typists. I hate to break it to the able-bodied masses, but not everyone is a touch typist. My low vision, coupled with the partial paralysis in my hands caused by cerebral palsy, make touch typing nigh impossible. Indeed, I’m part of the 0.1% who must look down at the keyboard in order to type in my hunt-and-peck fashion. In fact, I’m looking down at my keyboard even as I write this very sentence! The salient point is I staunchly believe the Touch Bar got railroaded perceptually, never mind Apple’s culpability in its demise. The Touch Bar left the world with so much unrealized potential, and I’m still salty over how Apple nerds characterize it. Touch Bar Zoom is/was a masterpiece.
If macOS 27 drops support for Intel Macs, how much time does the Touch Bar have left?
