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Touch Bar should have been ADDED, not REPLACED

Made no sense imo, glad they got rid of TouchBar. If it was such an innovative feature that worked well for many customers then it'd string along M1-M4 Macs Book. However it was taken away, which indicates there was a level of dissatisfaction/no use for it.

In long story short it is a gimmick. Apple is notoriously known for adding features that help make it easier for the customer... this was not one of them.
 
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Sadly, it was a gimmick. If they'd ever made a keyboard for iMac/Mac mini/Mac Pro with a Touch Bar, then perhaps it would have taken off better. But as it was, anyone with multiple Macs had to switch back & forth so it never really achieved critical mass.

Personally, I don't think it would have helped. But not enabling it across the entire line told me they weren't really committed to it.
 
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A touch bar like surface has been attempted on Windows PCs as well. It never catches on.

The problem is some people figured out how to make it work well but most users are not going to go through this much trouble. If you can’t get the average person to immediately start using it and figure it out easily then it’s never going to takeoff. It’s the same with 3D touch on the iPhone. It was a really cool feature, but the majority of people never used it.

There’s a setting in macOS where you can choose to have your Mac send usage statistics to Apple. This is how they figure out how people use their Mac. Statistics showing little use, people complaining about missing physical keys and added cost of hardware is the formula for it being discontinued.
 
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russell_314 said:
It’s the same with 3D touch on the iPhone. It was a really cool feature, but the majority of people never used it.
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No, it's not the same. I actually think 3D Touch was way more useful than the Touch Bar. They were able to get 80-90% of the way to emulating it with software tricks, but that last 10% was a quality of life improvement we lost and will never get back.
 
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The touch bar era was the absolute nadir of Macs for me. At that point, they were so expensive, so underpowered compared to all alternatives, and the pinnacle of the thinness fetish at all costs, that I thought I was going to be forced to go back to Windows. Fortunately they recovered and got rid of that nonsense and began to move in the direction of Apple Silicon. Otherwise I would be back on PCs at this point.
 
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Joe's kitchen said:
So MacBook's unpopular Touch Bar is completely gone....

I think it was unique gimmick with something potential and it should have been ADDED to the full keyboard, instead of REPLACING the physical keys.

What do you think?
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I can’t agree. Touch bar was annoying at best. I just replaced the original 2016 touch bar MacBook Pro with an M4 MBP. Much better without it.
 
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redheeler said:
No, it's not the same. I actually think 3D Touch was way more useful than the Touch Bar. They were able to get 80-90% of the way to emulating it with software tricks, but that last 10% was a quality of life improvement we lost and will never get back.
Click to expand...
I miss 3D Touch’s ability to allow you to use your iPhone as a reasonably accurate scale up to about 300 grams
 
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Personally I used Pock and found the touch bar to be super convenient because of the better customization. While I don’t use it all the time I like that I can keep my open apps on it, audio controls, and battery info all the time. Plus if I wanted Mac OS feature or function keys there’s a hot key I could setup (and I did) to switch over.

I wish more apps supported it and that the system gave better customization natively because I found it mostly useless in its out of the box state. Apple missed the mark and it should have left function keys in place even on touchbar models. I love my 2016 13 inch pro and my 2019 15 inch pro. I’ll miss it when I eventually upgrade to an m series.
 
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russell_314 said:
A touch bar like surface has been attempted on Windows PCs as well. It never catches on.

The problem is some people figured out how to make it work well but most users are not going to go through this much trouble. If you can’t get the average person to immediately start using it and figure it out easily then it’s never going to takeoff. It’s the same with 3D touch on the iPhone. It was a really cool feature, but the majority of people never used it.

There’s a setting in macOS where you can choose to have your Mac send usage statistics to Apple. This is how they figure out how people use their Mac. Statistics showing little use, people complaining about missing physical keys and added cost of hardware is the formula for it being discontinued.
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I used to have 3D Touch menus memorized and could use them without looking. Especially in the music app. I miss it so much and when they forced 3D Touch phones to use Haptic Touch I went to android for a year but hated that more. I wish they’d bring it back but sadly it’ll never happen because you’re right, if people can’t figure it out and use it immediately it goes away. Sadly we’ll never have the joy of pressing our screens harder for more options 😭
 
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While using the Touch Bar on a daily basis stains, grease even hand oil made the life of the lovely bar a harsh condition to live longer. At some point the whole Touch Bar union went on a strike, refusing to work properly, why was that. The Touch Bar was the soul reason apple invented something marvelous. It was grey, it was squared, it at had rounded edges, and went for less then 30 bucks.

Still it refused to be compatible with the Touch Bar and went its one way. At some point the Lovely apple cleaning cloth had a flawless victory over the doomed bar and went on, cleaning screens from left to right. But never gave any word about why it refused to clean the loved and hated toucbbar.

As of today its still a mystery why the beloved grey round squared piece of technology refuses to clean that dirty old bar.
 
redheeler said:
No, it's not the same. I actually think 3D Touch was way more useful than the Touch Bar. They were able to get 80-90% of the way to emulating it with software tricks, but that last 10% was a quality of life improvement we lost and will never get back.
Click to expand...
I agree with you, but you missed part of what I said. It doesn’t matter how useful or how well you liked it. Most people that I know who owned an iPhone, never used 3D touch. They didn’t know it existed. I used it all the time and was not happy when it was discontinued. I really don’t understand why people didn’t use this feature and unfortunately, I don’t think it will ever return. I think it’s more dead than the touch bar.

russell_314 said:
If you can’t get the average person to immediately start using it and figure it out easily then it’s never going to takeoff. It’s the same with 3D touch on the iPhone. It was a really cool feature, but the majority of people never used it.
Click to expand...


myhaksown said:
I used to have 3D Touch menus memorized and could use them without looking. Especially in the music app. I miss it so much and when they forced 3D Touch phones to use Haptic Touch I went to android for a year but hated that more. I wish they’d bring it back but sadly it’ll never happen because you’re right, if people can’t figure it out and use it immediately it goes away. Sadly we’ll never have the joy of pressing our screens harder for more options 😭
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I totally agree with you because I was not happy when it was removed. It was one of my favorite features.

Maybe Apple failed to communicate to their customers on how to use it. They needed some sort of popup to let people know what to do.
 
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I found it useful for the fine control of volume and screen brightness. Also some apps made good use of it for certain controls. It would have been great if it was widely adopted and I agree that it would have been great to still have the physical function and escape keys. If Apple had made it a feature on their desktop keyboards it would have been a lot more widely adopted by devs.
 
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I so miss being able to properly Peek and Pop links in Safari with 3D Touch. :(

As for the Touch Bar, it just never really gained critical mass. I think if the original laptops had come out with the 2019+ version (that still had a physical Esc key and separated the TID button out a bit) it might have had a slightly better chance, but it ultimately built up too much enthusiast resentment and general user apathy for it to be worth continuing from an engineering standpoint.
 
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GMShadow said:
I so miss being able to properly Peek and Pop links in Safari with 3D Touch. :(

As for the Touch Bar, it just never really gained critical mass. I think if the original laptops had come out with the 2019+ version (that still had a physical Esc key and separated the TID button out a bit) it might have had a slightly better chance, but it ultimately built up too much enthusiast resentment and general user apathy for it to be worth continuing from an engineering standpoint.
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I actually rather liked the Touch Bar for quickly sliding volume and brightness, but hated not having a physical ESC, and I found the Touch ID to be super unreliable. Personally I wish they'd done something to fix the Touch Bar rather than dropping it entirely. Like integrating it into the top of the trackpad or something and restoring the F keys. And devoting more time to making it a more seamless experience.

It's a moot point now, I wouldn't use it if I could anymore. I've been keeping my laptop elevated to the level of my external monitor and work and at home and use a magic keyboard with 10-key, so I hardly touch the laptop in-use except when I'm traveling. The Touch Bar would go unused at this point if it was still there.
 
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russell_314 said:
I agree with you, but you missed part of what I said. It doesn’t matter how useful or how well you liked it. Most people that I know who owned an iPhone, never used 3D touch. They didn’t know it existed. I used it all the time and was not happy when it was discontinued. I really don’t understand why people didn’t use this feature and unfortunately, I don’t think it will ever return. I think it’s more dead than the touch bar.
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It was more of a quality of life improvement than a feature. Now you can long-press on a link to get a preview, and I'd be surprised if even the average user hasn't done this at least a few times on their iPhone, but with 3D Touch it felt a bit snappier in general. The is because, rather than introducing a perceptible delay to distinguish a long press from a regular press, a 3D Touch press was instantaneous feedback to the user.

The difference wasn't something most people would have registered as being because of 3D Touch, and ultimately Apple decided it wasn't important enough to care about, but it was there. That missing 10%.
 
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The TouchBar was its own touch sensitive OLED display and the Intel model MacBook Pros relied on the additional T1 processor (which also was used for Touch ID). Considering how the vast majority of users never used it for anything other than function keys, nor did many 3rd-party developers adapt their apps to add additional Touch Bar functionality as Apple envisioned, the additional build cost couldn’t be justified. The same goes for 3D Touch on iPhone. If the display was replaced it had to be recalibrated with a machine. Why put extra expense into something not used by many? Apple tried, but it didn’t take off, end of story. Apple doesn’t like making a product or a model that isn’t going to sell enough to justify keeping around. Look at the iPhone mini, the MagSafe battery pack, the MagSafe Duo Charger just to name a few more recents. I own all of them but I don’t cry because they’re not being continued.
 
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