The thing is, you are bound to come across someone who finds a feature useful even if the feature is not useful for the vast majority of the people. I like Apple laptops and own a MBP myself, but I definitely think that the butterfly keyboard and touchbar hurt Apple's reputation. The butterfly keyboard has had a lot of technical problems which is frustrating for the users and hurts Apple's bottom line due to the repair costs. The typing experience on the butterfly keyboard is also not the best due to lack of travel.
The touchbar is a flawed design concept imho. The entire reason I touch type is so that I don't have to look down from my screen. My eyes remain on the screen for 99% of the time I am working. It's jarring and discontinuous for me to have to look down to use the touchbar. That's why I personally never liked it. I think the tactile feedback of a real physical button is essential.
I think Apple realizes this already to some extent because they went and added a physical escape key.
The thing is, you are bound to come across someone who finds a feature useful even if the feature is not useful for the vast majority of the people.
Absolutely, and Apple put function keys in that category. Yeah, maybe you touch-type those keys way up there at the top, but I'd bet a paycheck that the vast majority of MacBook users will look down before hitting a function key. I've touched typed since I learned on manual typewriters, and I still can't reliably hit the one I want blindly.
Doesn't matter anyway, as soon as I Cmd-Tab to annother app, the key functions all change anyway. But those handy "Fx" labels stay exactly the same despite the function change. But since it's always been this way, it is therefore a superior design and should not be changed.
It's a MacBook Pro. Surely it should care to Pros who have leanred how their keyboard works. Apple doesn't think the touchbar is a noob feature, because the Air (and the actual "MacBook") doesn't have a touchbar)
I think pros should be able to embrace new things. I use emacs and vim for about 70% of what I do and I never use the fn keys. ESC is remapped to caps as well so I'd have preferred a macro key or something instead that I can customise as I please (there is probably some software for that out on the net somewhere anyway but I like native stuff) like define app/global specific keystroke patterns (e.g. you define it as cmd-s so you can use it to save or something) .
The touchbar for sure is lacking something, not sure what though. I agree with apple that the fn row could be utilised better so I applaud them for trying something, not sure if the touchbar is the right way though but should apple stick with it and keep going in the right direction again I will for sure customise the hell out of the touchbar.
> The thing is, you are bound to come across someone who finds a feature useful even if the feature is not useful for the vast majority of the people.
Yeah, and I believe that the fn-keys are the exact symptom. I haven't encountered anyone that uses fn-keys to it's full potential (or at least, more than the Touch Bar can provide).
> The touchbar is a flawed design concept imho. The entire reason I touch type is so that I don't have to look down from my screen.
For simple actions, gaining muscle-memory on Touch Bar virtual buttons are possible. (I myself don't look the Touch Bar when performing simple & repetitive actions like open new Tab, or when pressing the escape key.)
> It's jarring and discontinuous for me to have to look down to use the touchbar.
Well, isn't it something like saying that it's discontinuous to move my hands from the keyboard to the trackpad to operate some GUI app? It's a glance away, and mostly the Touch Bar's actions are predictable & you know when you use it (for example, editing the formatting of some text in the MS Office Suite, or opening the emoji selector, or selecting autocomplete, etc...).
> That's why I personally never liked it.
Yeah, the feature has a variety of tastes. I think I can understand why some people just don't like it, but...
> I think the tactile feedback of a real physical button is essential.
> Well, isn't it something like saying that it's discontinuous to move my hands from the keyboard to the trackpad to operate some GUI app? It's a glance away, and mostly the Touch Bar's actions are predictable & you know when you use it (for example, editing the formatting of some text in the MS Office Suite, or opening the emoji selector, or selecting autocomplete, etc...).
I use Vimium for browsing, liberally use keyboard shortcuts and use Vim/vim extensions in other IDE's. So my trackpad use is very limited indeed because I find it discontinuous. But I think the trackpad is much better than the touchbar at least because it's huge, you don't have to precisely touch it in any particular spot, unlike the touchbar.
On my personal lenovo laptop I don't use the trackpad at all and use the trackpoint because it's an easier/faster transition than using the touchpad.
The touchbar is a flawed design concept imho. The entire reason I touch type is so that I don't have to look down from my screen. My eyes remain on the screen for 99% of the time I am working. It's jarring and discontinuous for me to have to look down to use the touchbar. That's why I personally never liked it. I think the tactile feedback of a real physical button is essential.
I think Apple realizes this already to some extent because they went and added a physical escape key.