Comment by JeremyHerrman
12 hours ago
Apple loves to stealth test new tech in full public view by sneaking it into relatively mundane places, so debuting agentic AI via accessibility is very on brand.
A few other examples:
- The Touch Bar was much more than an OLED strip, it was Apple’s first move in the transition to Apple Silicon on macs. The Apple T1 chip in the 2016 Touch Bar MacBooks was the first solely Apple-designed processor to appear in a Mac and took over several responsibilities away from intel chipsets like power management, fans, sleep/wake, access to the camera & mic, and the secure enclave powering touch ID. Then the T2 added encryption of the SSD, audio management, image processing for the camera, and prevented tampering with the boot process
- The iPhone 3G shipped with a Liquidmetal SIM eject tool, which is made from a strong custom metal alloy which is "practically unbendable by hand unless you want to hurt or cut your fingers." Although Apple hasn’t released anything with the alloy since then, now nearly 20 years later Apple is rumored to be using liquid metal in their upcoming foldable iPhone.
- RealityKit had 3D scanning and a lot of other cool AR capabilities for years which didn’t make sense until the Apple Vision Pro was released.
You're reading way too much into it. These are just failed attempts at commercializing something.
- People hated the touchbar. Only years after it became liked, and only under tech enthusiasts that hacked and tweaked it to have much deeper functionality.
- Making the ejector out of an expensive alloy made no sense.
- Realitykit (and the Vision, which is also crashing and burning) is a solution looking for a problem.
- 3D touch had both discoverability and usability problems.
- etc etc.
You're underestimating Apple's meticulous planning, which has only become more intense in the Cook era. Bad feature/UX or not, each one of those decisions was calculated.
Read this ars quote from 2010 [0]:
>Apple used the small part—one that is not integral to the device’s functionality—to see if the company was capable or producing a custom design to Apple’s specifications. Typically, manufacturers prefer to have at least two sources for parts, so that a supply problem from one supplier won’t halt manufacturing. Since Liquidmetal is only available from one source, Apple needed to make sure the company could deliver.
For Apple Silicon, there was no way they'd make the switch in one go, so they had to figure out a way to hedge that bet. That's what the TouchBar really was, with all its warts and solutions for problems nobody had.
And as someone else in this thread pointed out, the first custom cellular chip wasn't released with a flagship model - they exclusively paired it with the budget iPhone 16e.
Apple is always calculating and hedging.
[0]: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2010/08/apple-tested-liquidm...
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You're misunderstanding how difficult it is to make major architectural changes to products the way Apple can. One of the ways to do it is to hide the architectural change as something else, something niche, and only when it has survived the fire of deployment there try to scale it up to the full market. It's actually quite genious, and you can expect more of it now that Apple's hardware guru is the chief.
I can't help but wonder if this agentic-via-accessibility angle is the result of this new leadership. If it is, it's a very good sign for Apple, because software and especially the AI gap is Apple's achillies right now.
I liked the TouchBar. There were two problems with it:
1. It replaced the F keys. I suspect pros wouldn’t have complained so loudly if it didn’t. And it was too expensive for the cheaper computers where it may have been more popular.
2. They never changed it. Ok the first version wasn’t a big hit. Other than bringing back the escape key they never did anything. They sent it out to be a hit or to die and gave up there.
#1 bothered me the most. A lot.
And the stupid thing was that there was plenty of space for a row of function keys and the touch bar.
no2 is what annoyed me the most. I liked it for the most part, but it was never updated, even on the software side we had very few changes. It could've been great.
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Even at the time I remember it was widely cited that the SIM eject tool was a test for their new manufacturing process.
Vision is hilarious as it is more than just a solution looking for a problem. It was also desperately avoiding the current market that exists for it. Anything but games, it seemed.
Even more strange given 60-70% of all app store revenue for Apple is games - see Epic vs Apple trial for data
Also their first own modem, shipped in their cheapest tier starting with the iPhone 16e.
Interesting - I knew they’d been trying to get off Qualcomm for years, but didn’t realise that they actually managed to do it.
'liquid metal' sounds cool. It's probably a metallic glass. I super dislike that it seemingly will be synonymous with the brand name by Apple even though that stuff has been around for decades.
Not that there are particularly many places where this is used - mostly because it really is just very expensive. In the awesome position that Apple is in, economic feasibility is so much easier to achieve, with like tens of millions of guaranteed parts to be preduced.
It's not metallic glass. It's an injectable, super strong alloy. You can manufacture things like you're using injection molded plastic.
To be honest, British also has an injectable stainless steel, but its application domain is much more different.
Are you sure? Liquid metal was the name of a bulk metallic glass. There were usb flash drives using it as a case https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquidmetal. Wikipedia lists apple licensing this technology.
Metal injection molding is also a thing but I haven't heard it called liquid metal. Usually its MIM.
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And their upcoming smart glasses are the best UX for almost everything they showed the user holding up her phone for.
I read their glasses when taking video or pics the lense will light up and or flash more prominently then Metas. Maybe that will help the whole privacy issue and also it's not Meta (do love my Meta or smart glasses as a whole will ditch Metas for Apple quickly as both pair of Metas broke & there's no store for support).
I also am looking forward to Apple smart glasses. I use Meta glasses because thre useful since I'm totally blind. I'd much rather have on device recognission though if possible. I also trust Apple more then Meta. At least I'm technically enclined enough to realize I shouldn't wear them in the bathroom or bedroom. At least when humans look at my AI prompts there maily seeing food boxes or computer bios screens.
Same for me! Both pairs of Metas are now inoperative because I can't get them back to factory reset. Once you pull that little blue tab out of them when they're new, it's GAME OVER.
Dang, really? Why would that be? I mean, I believe you, I'm just shocked. I'm glad I read this, as I was thinking of getting some but not now.
There is a factory reset procedure, I think you hold the shutter button while switching them off and on again.
Well do want to add more detail. First pair bought in Oct 2023 and used them up until March 2025 where a software update hosed them. Then in April 2025 bought a new pair that lasted til the end of June 2025 cause of water splashes. So i two pairs of dumb sunglasses until March 2026 when my pair with the water damage came back alive.
Overall tho Meta doesn't make durable smart glasses and they only have two flagships store for support while Apple has tons of stores for tech support.
I’ve had excellent luck with their warranty process.
Man I miss the touch bar. Never got why people hated it so much
The hate was because it replaced function keys many people use by tactile touch, without looking. Doing the same on a touch screen is very difficult.
If the bar had been added on top of those, I don't think there would've been the same kind of hate for it.
I didn't really mind the fn keys being there. I rarely use function keys unless I'm RDP'd to a Windows machine.
What drove me crazy though was the escape key. They later added the physical escape key back but I think at that point it was a bit too late.
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Even without tactile elements it was two keys to use function keys.
I would have been fine with the touchbar if it just default displayed function keys. Hitting fn+f5 to quicksave is annoying.
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1) First generation made ESC button a touch button. Aside from ergonomics (or lack of them), at least for me, on a psychological level "abort" button needs to be something you can smash. Also, macOS already had the worst input handling under load, making it virtual button made it worse.
2) While "happy path" on macOS pretty much never requires you to use Fkeys, but my workflow does. Blindly using touch buttons is harder than real buttons.
3) I'm not huge media keys users, but I bet #2 applies here as well.
I liked the touchbar in every other sense. If it was just an addition to an existing keyboard, people wouldn't have hate it[];
[]: At that time it was hard to not be frustrated using mac (butterfly keyboard etc), so touchbar might have gotten more hate than it deserved because of overall frustration.
Also, the Touch Bar seemed to be abandoned as soon as it launched. It only ever launched on the Pro line. There were never any feature updates. They never made it flexible enough for people to customize it.
> They never made it flexible enough for people to customize it.
I feel like it was fairly customizable - the Mac system settings let you do a lot of drag and drop of controls, and I recall iTerm having a similar interface for customizing the bar in its own settings.
I do think it should’ve been given a lot more love, but that’s Apple for ya I guess
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It was extremely flexible in customization options, and there were SDKs to make it do additional cool stuff in apps, but nobody really cared for the most part.
I honestly think it was mostly a "we have a custom secure coprocessor now, what can we do with it?" sort of thing, which also worked out for Touch ID and disk encryption.
I still have a personal Touch Bar MBP, and I find it annoying.
My problem is that I lightly rest my hands on the keyboard (including the f keys), and this habit is harmless on most Macs, but inadvertently activates the Touch Bar functions.
I actually like the idea a lot, and would probably love it if it required a little more pressure to activate.
One more on top of others. Many people felt it was a solution in search of a problem. As in, there was no problem i had that it solved. And it was forced on us, in place of something useful. From the start i read that as: This wont be here in a couple years. Which then made it annoying to deal with in the meantime (the hate).
Things that stick around, are generally value adding across a large or complete subset of their users. Touch bar was always niche, and thus always doomed. I think a good counter comparison is Apple VR headsets. For me, i have no use and little interest. But i can see them as a hedge at the very least, or as an enthusiast entrant into an emerging market, where future products in that segment may become interesting. And on top, it doesnt impact me - i can ignore their existence until it becomes useful.
If touch bar were launched like VR, i suspect it would have gotten similar level of dismisals, but less hate.
I didn't like it, and was happy when they got rid of it. But I didn't hate it.
I did hate the butterfly keyboard that was introduced at the same time. Probably Apple's biggest hardware mistake of the past 15 years or so.
I am fortunate enough to have both a butterfly keyboard MBP and a touch bar MBP. Obviously the butterfly keyboard has the known issues, but the touch bar MBP also has the very common issues with that hardware.
I can replace the butterfly keycaps myself. It's something like $10 from aliexpress for a full set of keycaps and clips and a minute's work to pop the busted one and replace it. Annoying, but not fatal.
The touch bar needs a full battery, keyboard, track pad, and upper case replacement to fix. I just have to live that that thing flickering brightly at me every day, or spend AU$500+ to get it fixed.
IMO the touch bar is the bigger mistake.
Was "LiquidMetal" anything more than a good aluminum alloy ?
Yes, it was an amorphous metal alloy. I knew people from grad school that worked for the company.
They have interesting properties: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_51frrQzCYM
Yes.
I have a Sandisk Titanium flash drive which is the first practical application of the alloy, shortly before Apple snapped it.
It's feels solid, not wearing down and pretty robust for what it is. It doesn't get scratches like aluminum alloys.
It's entirely something else.
So it's Titanium? That's cool - what's the name of the flash drive and or do you have more info ? Always loved titanium stuff
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There's nothing agentic about these features. Live captions have existed on other platforms for more than 6 years now, before "agentic" had even been coined.
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