Why not a touchbar AND function row (half height)?

[MYZ]

After staring at my new macbook pro 14 keyboard out of shear boredom, I realized that there's enough physical space for half height keys, like in the Air, plus a touchbar. It would almost be like a 7 row keyboard.

The full height keys are nice but other than perhaps escape and the power key there's really not a big difference with half height keys. Presumably, those 2 could be preserved as full height.

It could be a neat feature for future macbooks. Those who detest the touchbar would simply set it to act as an additional 12 function keys if they really wanted to (F13-F24?)

Any thoughts?

 

[fwmireault]

There were two majors critics towards the Touch Bar, other than the lack of physical escape/functions keys. The first is that the Touch Bar was far from the trackpad, which was the other touch interface of the MacBook. It isn't natural for your hands to reach this Touch Bar when it's this far from you, and putting it over the function keys would make it even less convenient. The other thing is that you almost always have to look down the Touch Bar to see what you're doing, given the lack of physical feedback and the changing content. It can result in more distractions and less focus on the screen.

I'm sure that they could technically put a Touch Bar over the function row keys, but that would not resolve any of these two issues, meaning that I doubt it would make the Touch Bar greater/more useful. Personally, I never had these complaints about the Touch Bar for the three years that I've had a MacBook with one, but I never used it that much either, so I get the point.

 

[bradman83]

I would assume cost comes into play. It’s a capacitive OLED panel custom manufactured to a specific size, so it’s not like it’s a generic part. Given that the 2021 MPBs are already crammed with other expensive custom parts (the M1 Pro/Max, the retina screen with curves and cutouts, etc.) Apple likely decided to nix the Touch Bar so as to keep its profit margins intact knowing most pro users wouldn’t miss it.

 

[Nbd1790]

Generally speaking, I don't think anyone cared for it. I purchased one a few years back and returned it (for a few different reasons) but I did try and use some shortcuts in creative applications and it just wasn't practical (which was the whole selling point). I found it easier to use keyboard shortcuts than focus on the Touch Bar and try to get to the menu I needed it to be on.

Scrubbing through a timeline was about its only useful feature, but certainly wasn't worth sacrificing physical function keys. I also had times (on both mine and other colleagues) that the Touch Bar interface itself would freeze and wouldn't fix itself until the computer was restarted.

It seemed like a cool concept, but just wasn't practical in just about anything IMO.

 

[jav6454]

I like the Touch Bar and has thus far provided better functionality than the physical F-keys.