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.

I had completely forgotten this existed. Despite adding bettertouchtool I never found a single useful thing to do with it.

They had room to put the touchbar above a physical set of function keys with a real escape key and power button.

Many of times I slipped off the delete key and hit F11 to zoom the window.

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.

I loved Touch Bar. I hated missing functional keys. They attempted to fix it by reintroducing physical escape key, but it was not enough.

No

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.

No, it was just plainly a bad idea.

It removed the physical function keys, which is a huge no-no overall. The initial version also lacked a physical Esc key.

But the bigger issue was the notion that it was created in spite of having a conventional touchscreen on the laptop instead. Apple has been rather weird, petty, and immature about putting touch on Macs, stemming from Jobs' ill-conceived "your arm gets tired if you have touch on a laptop, boo hoo" speech which has never been correct and continues to be misconstrued as scientific when it isn't.

Luckily, the market soundly rejected the Touch Bar and Apple is now due to release Macs with proper touch on them. It took a while, but this era of pretentiousness is over.

Great article, thank you

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.

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