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No, the biggest problem was the hardware.
It replaced a well-known decades-old paradigm of engage-only-on-user-input buttons with a glowing slider that would always engage out of turn. I can't count the number of times I reached for numbers, only to be greeted with the whatever random function the application and context decided it was relevant there. And of course, whenever I reached for the ESC key, it would never register it properly, because if you're trying to quickly back out or interrupt software that's misbehaving, the touchbar software also had to run on the same CPU and could become totally unresponsive to input. All of this doesn't even begin to describe the rage of being in the middle of words and sentences and realizing your screen has been doing random shit for the last 10 seconds because your fingers accidentally swiped or hovered a 1px portion and activated the $USELESS_FUNCTION slot machine (I do have big hands and long fingers).
I hated it from the first ghost touch back in 2019 until my work Mac was replaced with an M3 in 2024, and after they added some customization settings, I basically disabled all the "glossy and touchy" functionality and set it to display the FN keys regardless of application or context. Then I mapped pressing FN to show brightness control + audio mute/down/up. And even then the occasional F10 or F11 accidental swipe was always a possibility, although way less rage-inducing.
As others mention, the Touch Bar ran on its own CPU, well, SoC.
The T1 and T2 and its associated controllers were actually part of a gradual and public transition to Apple Silicon!
Most people didn’t realize it at the time though.
Yes, and to expand, touch is actually a worse interface, period. The lack of any and all physical feedback on touch makes it unsatisfying to use, and error-prone. From a human-computer interface perspective, it's a downgrade.
We take the downgrade with phones because the tradeoff is worth it for size. For laptops, that tradeoff is different: we already have a keyboard and display, and the size of the computer is fairly large already.
I mean, we've seen those laptops with both touchscreens and a keyboard. How often are people preferring and using the on-screen keyboard as opposed to the physical one? From what I've seen and experienced, almost never. Which makes sense, it's a worse interface.
We also see this same problem in cars, and it's actually much worse there. On-screen buttons are a pain in the ass, and with cars we don't have the luxury of searching with our eyes. I have friends with fancy cars with touch everything. You know what they do? They just never adjust the AC while driving, because they can't. That's insane to me, but they put up with it. If car manufacturers would just test these interfaces on a few thousand miles of driving, they would realize they suck.
> the touchbar software also had to run on the same CPU
It actually ran on the separate T1 CPU.
> It actually ran on the separate T1 CPU.
Thanks for the clarification, I guess that didn't really change the result. Perhaps the Intel CPU was busy burning CPU cycles and couldn't process interrupts properly, or because the communication was USB-based, it couldn't reliably deliver the required messages. The end result for me was that whenever I needed to use the ESC key, it wasn't available/visible or was unresponsive.
The Tx SoCs communicated with the main system over Ethernet, IIRC, at least with the T2 SoC.
The Tx SoCs themselves should have never locked up because there was a watchdog that would power cycle it when it became unresponsive.
> The Tx SoCs communicated with the main system over Ethernet, IIRC, at least with the T2 SoC.
The Wikipedia page linked in your other comment reports: "The T2 communicates with the host via a USB-attached Ethernet port.". So in the end it's really both, Ethernet AND USB.
> The Tx SoCs themselves should have never locked up because there was a watchdog that would power cycle it when it became unresponsive.
Perhaps I was reaching in the corner too far due to physical ESC muscle memory and it wasn't being registered by the touchbar, but regardless, being eth-over-usb means there was a server or kernel process listening on the Intel side to process those keys and raise them as interrupts or keyboard events. I guess sometimes, when some misbehaving application was already stealing all the Intel CPU capabilities or the kernel or some kernel extension had an issue, the touchbar could become unresponsive due to the load on the Intel side, with the T2 part being perfectly fine. And I did get at least a couple dozen times a completely frozen touchbar that left me with no choice but to reboot the system.
Never had any problems with the touch bar. Until it died in a very flashy manner. Never been bothered by it.
I ended up putting insulating tape across mine.
I tried that, but whatever tape I used was slightly too thick and left a mark on the screen.
I settled on configuring it to only show the mute button, somewhere in the middle of the row where I was least likely to touch unintentionally (iirc, you had to have at least one button, and mute seemed like the least-dangerous option)
And then you had to have some paid-for app that let you use Caps Lock as Escape (which was annoying because I'd been remapping it to Control for a couple of decades, so had to unlearn that).
The default setup had really horrible ergonomics for me, with that no-feedback, out-of-position Escape key and the screen dimmer positioned exactly where my hands tended to rest. Ugh!
I would say no.
As someone who actually really liked my Touch Bar, the only problem I had with it was that it replaced a row of keyboard keys. If they had simply put it above my F keys instead of trying to replace them I think the world would have learned to love it like I did.
I wasn’t particularly attached to the Touch Bar, but I agree. Had it been a supplement rather than a replacement it’d been much better.
That wouldn’t have jammed up peoples’ muscle memory and it would’ve encouraged more experimentation from devs.
But there's no way I would give up touchpad space to it.
The immediate problems were software, but the hardware was what doomed it and I don’t see how they didn’t see that from the start. It could never be in all their products (e.g. iMac, well, without requiring a wired keyboard but that was never going to happen) so it could never be more than an accessory.
I think they realized that too late. It’s a shame though. In a MacBook-only world, I wonder what would have become of it.
It could absolutely have been in an iMac's wireless keyboard; witness the "Sidecar" macOS feature that allows use of an iPad as an external display for a Mac.
Battery life was more what I was getting at. You’d basically have to have it plugged in and I couldn’t see Apple going for that.
If they had had individual keys with screens instead of the Touch Bar I think everyone would have been happy. Have it default to a normal function row but give people the option to customize, let apps customize it behind a modifier key, etc.
Yes, there was a lot of buzz about a keyboard like that from Art Lebedev* for several years prior to Apple's touch bar.
The only real function would have been to have customizable icons in that case because you can already assign shortcuts to different functions keys and per app contexts with apps like Hammerspoon
But their only usecase that I remember was a touch sliding bar.
I don't know if that would have worked as individual buttons.
No, you lose the best part - sliding!
I had completely forgotten this existed. Despite adding bettertouchtool I never found a single useful thing to do with it.
Both? The missing Escape was a hardware disaster, but unrealized potential and UI issues was a software one. Though not having multitouch is also hardware.
> 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.
As it should: first, you can cover the slider with your finger, so the level reading becomes hidden. Second, why would you look at the slider instead of the screen where all the other useful information is?
>The missing Escape was a hardware disaster,
They actually have ESC key with a later update. Although I thought it was too late. They should have done it the next year after first Touch Bar was introduced. I believe that is not because product designer don't want to change but some part of the supply chain / operation don't want to waste money on new design so quickly.
> I believe that is not because product designer don't want to change but some part of the supply chain / operation don't want to waste money on new design so quickly.
This was the root of several problems with that era of MBP. Intel wasn’t able to make good on their promise of new efficient CPUs, instead serving up reheated 14nm for the Nth time, and then Apple was stuck with a pile of chassises, heatsinks, etc (and associated tooling) that were incapable of handling the heat output of the CPUs they actually got.
And butterfly keyboard.......
I was taught in school keyboarding class to not look at your hands when using the computer.
That era started with Window 8 when Microsoft wanted the same UI and UX on laptops and tablets. Amalgamation of physical keys with touch screens. Apple's Touch Bar was somehow a symptom or even culmination of it. It's over and let's forget it ever existed.
Automotive seems to have its Windows 8 moment right now.
They had room to put the touchbar above a physical set of function keys with a real escape key and power button.
Many of times I slipped off the delete key and hit F11 to zoom the window.
I loved Touch Bar. I hated missing functional keys. They attempted to fix it by reintroducing physical escape key, but it was not enough.
No, it was just plainly a bad idea.
It removed the physical function keys, which is a huge no-no overall. The initial version also lacked a physical Esc key.
But the bigger issue was the notion that it was created in spite of having a conventional touchscreen on the laptop instead. Apple has been rather weird, petty, and immature about putting touch on Macs, stemming from Jobs' ill-conceived "your arm gets tired if you have touch on a laptop, boo hoo" speech which has never been correct and continues to be misconstrued as scientific when it isn't.
Luckily, the market soundly rejected the Touch Bar and Apple is now due to release Macs with proper touch on them. It took a while, but this era of pretentiousness is over.
The main objection to touch on MacBooks so far is the software, by far. Apple may now, just about, be in a place where they could support it due to Catalyst, Apple Silicon and some of the latest UI changes in Tahoe. Back then, when they released the touch bar, they weren’t even close. Neither was Windows, though they shipped it anyway.
What does Apple Silicon have to do with this, or are you saying that touch screens are impossible without that level of "innovation"?
It allows iPad apps to run natively on macOS. Before Catalyst and later Apple Silicon, there were no touch-native apps for macOS.
I love the touch bar on my M2 and I'm sad that more software isn't aware of it.
In my own applications I often put common functions on the touch bar and I like the convenience of it in that way.
I think most people simply don't use the F-keys much so it's not usually that big of a problem.
> Apple is now due to release Macs with proper touch on them.
I'll believe this one when I see it. "The Year of the Touchscreen Mac" has been confidently predicted for almost as long as "The Year of the Linux Desktop."
...and that just triggered a memory of the ModBook, a pre-iPad aftermarket conversion service that turned white MacBooks into large tablets:
We're starting to see software-level touch support, things like screen mirroring being able to accept touch from iPads rather than only pen. So we are at least closer than we've ever been.
> It removed the physical function keys, which is a huge no-no overall.
Is it? Really? I'd wager most touch bar users never used the F keys and use the volume, media playback, and screen brightness mapping instead.
Inb4 it says "pro" on the lid
But you lose those keys as well.
A volume roller on the side of the laptop would be nice.
Wasn't the Touch Bar just a sneaky way for Apple to mess around with ARM coprocessing and other ARM-based macguffins in production?
We went from Touch Bar + T2 to Apple Silicon pretty quick. The Touch Bar was the user-facing toy to drive adoption, then they just dropped the bar and kept T2 as they built out more functions in it being taken over from Intel hardware.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_T2
It's like how the iPhone Air is just a test device for the iPhone Ultra's hardware capabilities and the 16e was a device to test the C1 modem. Apple's short lived "experimental production" products.
this sounds likely, but they definitely did have real plans with Touch Bar. They thought it was an answer to laptops having a touch screen.
BetterTouchTool cleverly let one trigger the trackpad haptics when using custom Touchbar configs. With the haptics set to high, you could really feel it. It made a huge difference.
I don't think native haptic support would have been enough to save the Touchbar, but like the author I'm a little surprised that Apple didn't even try it.
I'm pretty much convinced they knew it was doomed before it was even released.
The TouchBar's problem was both hardware and software. Because of its poor affordance for text labels it typically only allowed Mystery Meat UI[0]. If you labeled a button it ate up surface area and prevented a dense interface. Because it was constantly in flux you couldn't develop any muscle memory for it. It didn't help that the icons most apps used were inscrutable flat bullshit sigils.
It was made worse since desktop keyboards lacked the feature so you couldn't practice/learn the UI on anything but MacBooks. Keyboard shortcuts were far more useful since they worked on any Mac and whether or not you were using an external keyboard.
That lack of external keyboard support also meant developers couldn't write decent interfaces for the TouchBar unless they had the right MacBook. The simulator was not sufficient to actually test real world usage for positioning/ergonomics.
I found it to be a top to bottom failure of a feature. Small OLED screens on physical buttons would have been far superior ergonomically. Using the space for better cooling on the i7 and i9s would have been a much much better use of that space.
Great article, thank you
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