Farewell Apple Touch Bar, Some Of Us Loved You
What made the Touch Bar loved or hated, and now abandoned…
Every so often, but not often enough if you ask Apple’s harshest critics, the Cupertino tech giant still lives up to its “Think Different” slogan long after it was retired in 2002. In 2016, it unveiled with great fanfare a hardware feature unique to the Mac. A bold OLED strip replacing the function row of keys on the MacBook Pros. For the first time ever, you could interact with your Mac via a touchscreen, without touching and mucking up your actual screen. An incredibly brave UX proposal that ultimately, in 2023, with the latest M3 Macs, ended up entirely abandoned. Some of us loved it, some of us hated it, while others couldn’t care less about it. Turns out the haters might have been right all along.
The good…
I admit to being in the camp that does not want a touchscreen Mac. The entire concept of having a screen full of fingerprints sounds so disgusting that I’ll take any solution, even if it comes in the form of an entirely new UX.
Beyond just having fingerprints on a laptop screen, I also find the entire experience very unergonomic, and that’s coming from someone who loves the Magic Mouse — a device known to be anything but ergonomic. In terms of screens, what I touch needs to be…
