I never used function keys, so I never missed them. I work as a writer and graphic designer for a living. So much so that I feel ambivalent about upgrading right now because I know I’ll miss it big time. Personally, I love it - and it’s become an integral part of my workflow. Why I loved the Touch Bar Is this the end of the road for the Touch Bar?Īt this point, you might assume that I’m a Touch Bar hater. I suspect Apple will make a killing this quarter, thanks to pent-up demand for high-end machines with function keys. They ordered these new machines the moment Apple announced them. I personally know many developers who have been waiting for years for the demise of the Touch Bar. They simply were not able to do their jobs without it.
It’s not that pro users “love” that tactile feel.
That’s why at this week’s special event, Shruti Haldea, Apple’s Mac product line manager, explained that the new function keys offered “the familiar tactile feel of mechanical keys that pro users love.” This oddly made a standard feature of pretty much every keyboard ever sound like rocket science. To do that, you need to feel the keys, which isn’t possible on a touchscreen display. They never look down at the keyboard or trackpad because they touch-type. When pro users are using a Mac, their eyes are always on the screen. Thanks to the Touch Bar, the Terminal app now offered 20 function keys! Far more than the 12 available on a standard Mac keyboard.īut there was a fundamental flaw in this reasoning.
The flaw in Apple’s thinkingĪpple didn’t see the problem at first. For these users, the Escape key and function keys are indispensable.Īpple had confused a premium feature with a pro feature.Īfter the Touch Bar’s arrival, only the lowest-spec MacBook Pros shipped with function keys, creating a bizarre situation where pro users couldn’t buy machines with the high specs they needed. Developers loved the slick graphical user interface of a Mac combined with the power of being able to run Unix command-line apps in Terminal.
The Mac has been a popular platform with software developers ever since the introduction of Mac OS X, with its Unix underpinnings. Instead, Cupertino made the calamitous decision to introduce it on the MacBook Pro - a high-end workstation. If Apple had introduced the Touch Bar on its consumer notebooks and desktops, things might have turned out very differently. The problem was that pro users are not regular users. Just like the way the keyboard on iPhone offers you a handy “.com” key when you type a web address. Rather than displaying generic and meaningless numbers like “F1,” function keys could finally display what they actually did and change depending on context. With this in mind, a customizable touchscreen seemed like a logical enhancement. Even when Craig Federighi, Apple’s VP of software engineering, gave an unequivocal “ no!,” it failed to stop the speculation. Many analysts believed Apple was behind in this area and wondered if the company planned to merge macOS with iOS to create a multi-touch MacBook.
Touchscreens have been a staple of Windows notebooks for years. When multi-touch finally came to the Mac, it wasn’t what most users expected With the introduction of a revolutionary new feature like the Touch Bar on the 25th anniversary of Apple’s first notebook, Cupertino made a powerful statement: The Mac was back. Even popular models like the MacBook Pro and iMac only got the occasional speed bump. Their processor speeds were so far behind the competition, it was embarrassing. Some models, like the Mac Pro and Mac mini, hadn’t seen updates in years. Apple had been so fixated on its burgeoning iPhone business, the Mac was all but forgotten. When Apple first introduced the Touch Bar in 2016, I was stunned. Cupertino finally showed the Mac some love again