Comment by jorvi
8 hours ago
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.
I don't think that's true, at least in the 13" model.
and the F keys come back on the touch bar if you hold the fn button
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.
Even though it's showing its age (and support is being phased out in recent builds), I still liked IntelliJ with the Touch Bar laptop.
https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/touch-bar-support.html
Having the Touch Bar screen show up the relevant buttons for the context I was in was really nice compared to trying to remember which F key was which debug option.
A "I wish..." would have been a $200 usb bar and hub that could sit right behind my keyboard for a desktop.
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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