Comment by ValentineC
1 day ago
> I swear, this reign of visual artists as dictators has to stop.
> I'm sure people noticed this issue internally and brought it up but some thing by some designer was seen as biblically sacred and overruled all reason.
Funny how Apple went from Jony Ive sacrificing hardware usability for "beauty" (touch bars and butterfly switches) to Alan Dye mucking up macOS and iOS with Liquid glAss.
The Touch Bar implementation sucked but I'm going to defend that attempt 100 out of 100 times. If Apple didn't remove the function keys I think it would have been a hit feature. There wasn't proper commitment to the feature.
Full agree. The TouchBar was a genuine innovation that gave new ways to interact with data and context. But without the function keys (and the real ESC) there were frequent accidental touches on the bar and a real tactile loss for existing function key intuitions. And now an extremely rare, genuine, programmable HCI innovation is scuttled because of an unthought-thru roll out. A missed opportunity. (I keep my 2019 MBP with the good keyboard largely for this, but ultimately the laptop was ruined by the super hot Intel cpu, which also makes the touch bar uncomfortable to use at times.)
Bret Victor being behind the touch bar explains so much about its potential. Apple has such a weird track record of releasing really interesting stuff that they let languish without enhancement. And then you have weird episodes where they have too much conviction on the wrong things, like the butterfly keyboard, where they release multiple iterations which all end up failing.
True, if they'd kept the function keys and just added the touch bar above it it would have been great. Weird thing is there was more than enough space for both so I don't understand why they didn't do that.
Or replace them with physical keys with tiny LCDs screen on them to indicate their meaning in the current context.
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Curious why you liked it so much. Removing the fn keys was a big no-no, yes, but also it was just located in a place I'm never going to look at. So why do you think it would've been a hit feature?
Modern UI design has trended toward hiding more and more things. I think it's super useful to expose a new, hyper-malleable control surface to the user (the stream deck is popular for a reason!). If the touchbar was ubiquitous, competition would force developers to think more deeply about interaction design and building apps that thoughtfully use it.
Adoption engenders development, and development engenders adoption. All of the best use cases of a touch bar are ones we would have seen had such a virtuous cycle been allowed to occur.
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The fn keys you can almost circumvent, but the escape key? Common!
the esc key is still there. i'm still using the m1 macbook pro with the touchbar.
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