Thought on the Touch Bar and Why I like it

I have had a 2016 MacBook Pro for about 6x months now and I feel like that qualifies me to a few more thoughts on the Touch Bar. I was skeptical about the Touch Bar MacBook Pro, but after using it for 6 months I have concluded that I like it. It’s not a reason to go out and buy a new laptop, but neither is a reason to dread upgrading your MacBook Pro. I have recently felt like mapping stuff like brightness and volume to the function keys were kludgy and not something very Apple-y. Apple has been all about multitouch since the iPhone and iPad era and this is their way of bringing it to the Mac without grafting a touchscreen on a laptop who’s software is not optimized for it. You can see this with the size of the trackpad on the MacBook Pro as well, which is comically big when you first look at it, but really great for multitouch gestures. I think eventually MacOS will get multitouch screen support, that much is clear with the iPad apps like Home and Apple News being ported to the Mac, but that is a few year off. In the meantime, I have come to like having it since it is more dynamic than function keys, I don’t have to memorize keyboard shortcuts for every application’s more obscure functions, and it’s customizable. I particularly like it for sliders like brightness or sound controls and also having TouchID built into my laptop is really awesome, especially after installing 1Password or using Apple Pay on it for the first time. I do miss having a physical escape key, but I have remapped my Caps lock to Escape, which has gotten around that issue. I do hope that maybe whenever Apple gets around to releasing a Touch Bar 2 that they maybe reintroduce a physical escape key and maybe replace the TouchID button with a power button to make it symmetrical. I assume that we’ll get a Touch Bar 2 whenever Apple updates the MacBook Pro chassis with FaceID and an Edge to Edge screen like the iPhone X (I doubt there will be notch given how much bezel a MacBook and MacBook Pro has, even if you cut it down). In the future I would also like a Taptic Engine built into the Touch Bar for some haptic feedback when you click a virtual button or move a slider. Most of the applications I use on MacOS now support it in one way or another.

I do hope that Apple brings it to the cheaper Macbooks and the iMac. I think that it would be a great feature for the consumer line to have as well, especially with stuff like the emoji-bar and the formatting tools in apps like Microsoft Office and the iWork suite. I think it would help enable more people on the consumer-level who are not used to memorizing keyboard shortcuts. For Pros, I would like to see more custom buttons in Apple’s own applications like Mail, Calendar, Photos, Garage Band, Logic, Final Cut, etc. Also, it would be nice to be able to make Siri Shortcut buttons on the Touch Bar whenever Apple eventually moves that over to the Mac as well. I think that would make the Touch Bar infinitely more capable for professionals after they’ve created Siri Shortcut workflows. Largely, I like the way it works now and I find it a nice addition to the Mac like the multitouch gestures on the trackpad. I think as the Mac continues to evolve it could become more useful as time goes on. I don’t think that I would be completely heartbroken if it went away, but I have come to appreciate it as a small touch on my laptop that sets it apart from Windows laptops and would miss it. I can see where Apple was coming from when they designed and implemented it and do hope they keep working on evolving the technology because I have grown to enjoy it.