Comment by Tagbert
13 hours ago
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.
13 hours ago
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
I think a bigger issue was that so few applications used it in cool, interesting ways. It has the same appeal as the oled button boxes some people have, except it’s right there on the deck… but nobody did anything with it.
I sure did prefer the media controls on it, though. I still have a 16” here and am reminded of what could have been.
I actually think it would have done well if it was just like those button boxes / Stream Deck / etc. Like a row of transparent function keys with screens, but then that would have been a flexibility tradeoff.
Touchbar users, check BetterTouchTool for tons of options
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.