Deeper dive: Were Touch Bar’s problems software rather than hardware? – Unsung

The Touch Bar arrived in 2016 seemingly already pre-doomed, on a generation of machines that had a “we’ve run out of ideas” smell all around them. The arrow keys were reshaped, the keyboard got a slimming down, and even the beloved MagSafe wasn’t, in fact, safe. All of these changes would prove unpopular and get reverted in time, and the axe would eventually come for the Touch Bar, too. With an enormous benefit of hindsight, a decade after its arrival, and on the (rumored) eve of fully multitouch MacBooks, I wanted to look critically at the Touch Bar in more detail. I put a spicy title above this post, and while I’m not sure I can answer it in the affirmative, I feel I got surprisingly close to that. What did the Touch Bar do? The Touch Bar replaced the top row of the keyboard with a narrow touch screen and a Touch ID surface/button on the right. The touch screen provided a constant virtual Esc key on the left, and the remainder could become one of a few things: app controls – whatever the app wanted (either buttons or more interactive surfaces): control strip – roughly the same as what function keys do today by default (brightness, transport controls, volume): a hybrid mode of smaller app controls on the left, and expandable control strip on the right: F1–F12 keys: a few smaller modes, like showing spaces, quick actions, or emoji: small submodes where only the middle of the Touch Bar would be taken over: The Verge has a five-minute video that shows a lot of this stuff nicely. Functionality Touch Bar arrived with a hybrid of functionality for casual and pro users – some built into the macOS itself, and some coming from specific Apple-owned apps. A few apps offered basically a subset of their toolbars (although often without customization), with an occasional submenu, like digging deeper into font options or choosing a color adjustment. Some apps like Safari and Photo would invest in tiny previews of objects. Particularly demo-friendly were sliders for volume and brightness, and those in specific apps – playback in QuickTime, or swiping through the photo gallery, clearly inspired by similar controls on the iPhone. Even though Touch Bar was referred to as “multitouch,” it really only supported tapping and horizontal swiping, with just the latter being something classic function keys clearly couldn’t do. A simple but effective was also an arrow pointing to Touch ID authorization and payments – a small example of software proprioception – which Apple even included as a GIF in their press release: But there were also some strange moments, the strategy feeling a bit like “let’s throw a lot of stuff at this and see what sticks” (then again, it worked for the first Apple Watch!): Any system dialog would show its buttons repeated in the Touch Bar. This felt puzzling to me, as those were already served well by both mouse interactions and keyboard (Esc/Enter). It was nice that you could drag the volume or brightness control, but then the slider would be disconnected from your finger and the volume would also appear in the old HUD on the screen, altogether feeling like different parts of the system weren’t aware of each other. Xcode offered a button to comment out the current line or selection, which must have felt almost insulting to programmers – is there anyone who’d prefer that over the ⌘/ key combination? Lastly, for the first edition, the IA felt complex: Word completion was in the middle of the bar, but the emoji entry point was on the left. There were many kinds of chevrons (at least three!), and the action didn’t fully match their arrows – some of the chevrons indeed made the controls expand in an expected direction, but some instead drilled deeper and took half of the bar, and others took over the whole thing. (On top of that, some controls had regular horizontal scrolling.) Some controls that looked like regular buttons expanded on tap, too, so in effect it was never truly clear what a control would do when touched. The close boxes were sometimes on the left, and sometimes on the right of the buttons. Settings Strangely for such a high-profile feature, the Touch Bar settings arrived sprinkled in between older keyboard options, rather than in a separate Touch Bar tab that could help you understand the whole system easier, and also perhaps offer nice previews of what was possible. Apple’s penchant to brand even small things also backfired a little bit – customizing the Touch Bar required facing strange phrases like Quick Actions, App Controls, and Control Strip (this is where the usually non-nostalgic Apple reused a classic name, rather than naming it System Controls to mirror App Controls). On the other hand, the Customize Control Strip interaction here was an absolute highlight, providing a magical-feeling bridge between the world of the Touch Bar and the heavens above it – this was perhaps the best-designed part of the whole system: (That kind of customization was also available in some, but not all of the apps that supported the Touch Bar.) By the way, Apple seems to have learned the settings lesson since 2016, or even overlearned; the action button introduced to the iPhone in 2023 came with a lavish new interface: First public reactions and the evolution Back in 2016, the Touch Bar arrived to muted optimism (“not great, perhaps promising, looking forward to season two and three”), mixed with loud frustration from seemingly every single person who relied on the physical Esc key. Touch Bar was only revisited once, in 2019; this slight update reintroduced a mechanical Esc key, and felt slightly faster in use. There were no other hardware improvements, and I believe zero software changes from Apple’s side during the whole lifetime of the feature. Some third-party apps added Touch Bar support in the first few years, but even then the verdict seemed somewhat reserved: Most Final Cut Pro power users will be so used to using keyboard shortcuts for the editing functions they use regularly that they may not find the Touch Bar any quicker for simple editing and playback, but the sheer number of context-dependent settings means it’s likely to prove its value eventually. The Touch Bar never made it to non-Pro MacBooks or other computers, and started being phased out altogether five years after its arrival. Perplexingly and for reasons we might never know, the project was “maintenanced” almost as soon as it launched, and it wasn’t immediately removed perhaps only to save face. Haptics and ergonomics Touch Bar felt unpleasant to fingers. People’s ire around the Esc key was mostly in how “dead” it felt next to the other keys, which was especially important for something further in the periphery, used as an escape hatch or as a core interaction by programmers. (The key was also slightly offset, likely only to preserve symmetry vis-à-vis Touch ID on the other side.) I bet that the unavoidable and constant comparison of the feel of the Touch Bar buttons to the real keys just below was what made the whole thing feel worse than it was, and I’ve always wondered if haptics could have helped here. What if a light touch offered gentle haptic feedback similar to feeling the “ridges” of the keys without pressing them, and a deeper press offered a proper haptic tap? Already in 2016, Apple had similar tech in the trackpad underneath. I bet I’m underestimating how hard or expensive it would be to repurpose it, but: the iPods never had true haptic feedback, yet even in the first model they arrived with a little speaker that emitted haptic-like sounds on actions. It was surprisingly effective, and I was curious why Apple didn’t do the same thing here. On top of that, while the row of function keys above is fun for an occasional press, it doesn’t ergonomically seem as great in prolonged use. Reaching up to the Touch Bar is more effort than reaching for the trackpad, whether you put it below or to the side – there’s a reason keyboards grow wider but they rarely grow taller. In The Verge video above, you can see the reviewer use a Touch Bar button as a modifier key while interacting with the trackpad below, and it feels unpleasant just watching that happen: On top of that, the Touch Bar surface sat lower than the surface of the keys, which made it ever so slightly less pleasant to use – it didn’t only feel like it was above the keys, but also behind them. There were other rough edges that added up: The Touch Bar would go to sleep eagerly (after only 60+15 seconds), hiding all its controls and forcing you to tap it or press a key to wake it up. The quality of the animations was not the same as on the other touch devices or the Apple TV. While the Touch Bar itself was fast enough to support smooth scrolling, there was also some (I think intentional) delay when pressing the Fn key and some Touch Bar controls, plus a general slight, but perceivable latency on every touch. Speaking of scrolling, it was uneven: in Calendar, you could use momentum scrolling but the calendar didn’t update in real time, and stopping the momentum by tapping anywhere like on the iPhone actually selected a different month: Often the only way to escape a submode was to press a close box on the left, which was unpleasant given the position of your hand; there was no thoughtful shortcut, like double tapping an option, to exit faster. Size Using the Touch Bar was being constantly aware of its small size: The previews were tiny, your fingers overlapped content all the time, and scrolling only happened in the horizontal plane. (And you had to keep your finger in a straight line instead of a slight arc – not a natural gesture.)