How the Touch Bar could have succeeded
Apple tried to invent the future with the Touch Bar in 2016. The futuristic concept promised to have app-specific, useful, easily-understandable function buttons. For example FaceTime could display a red “Decline” and a green “Accept” button for an incoming call instead of the user having to memorize that accepting is assigned for the F1 key. It makes much sense. Apple did not stop here, added support for dynamic behavior, like photo rotation in iPhoto, and enabled developers to implement their own ideas. Many of them did.
This all sounds nice, right? But the Touch Bar’s reception was very bad. Both professionals and novice users started to complain about losing their physical buttons. Apple slowly, but responded with an updated version, which gave back the Esc key. The complaints remained. In the third iteration Apple moved the Touch Bar row a little bit upwards to avoid unintentional touches. And… basically that’s all.
Apple stopped here, beside this small changes the Touch Bar was “untouched” during its lifetime.
Because of this, the main complaints remained the same and half of the people never changed their mind about hating it. And Apple responded to these complaints by removing the Touch Bar from the 2021 M1 MacBook Pro line completely instead of trying to improve it, which is just sad.
The problems
I’ve identified three main problems:
- Buttons don’t feel as a button
- Unintentional activation
- You have to look down to see what’s on it (you cannot operate it blindly)
But there are also two other problems which are equally important I think, and nobody is aware of them:
- Lack of wide-spread app support
- The screen turns off after a period of time
Let’s go through all of them and see how a Touch Bar 2.0 could have solved them!
Buttons don’t feel as a button
This is the most common issue, and it makes a lot of sense. Touchscreens on phones work since ages now, and everybody is used to them, but people expect a row of buttons to behave like physical buttons on a keyboard. And Touch Bar pretends to have buttons.
The solution — in theory — is simple: adapt the same haptic feedback mechanism, which the Force Touch trackpad uses below the keyboard. Apple changed the mechanical trackpad in MacBooks a long time ago, it’s all done in software now and nobody noticed. It is magical, it just works. (You can disable the “clicking” in the System Preferences, try it, you will not believe it!)
Apple needs to add a “clicking” feel when you touch the button on the Touch Bar.
Of course not every kind of Touch Bar control need this, but even the scrollers could be much better if they had the little clicking feedback like the picker wheels on the iPhone.
Unintentional activation
When you are using the regular keys, often fingers you are not using to push the button cross the Touch Bar area and touch something which you absolutely did not want. To make things even worse, you just notice this by seeing the result of your action on screen, because you don’t feel with your fingers that you did something wrong.
The solution for this problem lies in the trackpad again.
Apple should let you rest your fingers on the Touch Bar without activating anything, like you can do on regular keys. Activate the controls only when you make a small effort by pushing them. The same how clicking works on the trackpad.
You have to look down to see what’s on it
Well, to be honest, I don’t have a proper solution for this. Perhaps one day we will have technology like this.
But we are not there yet, so bumping the screen to have real physical edges of the buttons is not possible yet. If they solve this issue, you could use the Touch Bar just as blindly as the regular keys.
Lack of wide-spread app support
The same people dislike Touch Bar the most who write the apps for your Mac. Mostly because developers were the most prominent target audience of the old F keys. They were the the people who have used them since decades. Old habits die hard.
If Apple could fix the first three problems, users could turn the Touch Bar as a regular row of F keys (which is possible today) but they would even work and feel as keys. I am sure developers could see the benefit of this, and maybe start adapting the Touch Bar features in their own apps.
My other idea is to add some meaningful functionality to the Touch Bar when used with apps which not implemented it.
For example Apple could add support for adding the NSToolbar buttons automatically.
Or some way for the user to add his own buttons similarly to BetterTouchTool. What about some way to search in the application’s menus, select a menu item, and add it to the Touch Bar as a button without needing support for this from the developer?
The screen turns off after a period of time
Like the background lights of your keyboard, the Touch Bar’s screen is also dimming after a few seconds of idle time then completely turns black until you touch it again.
This seems good and reasonable at first glance, but hey, they supposed to be keys! And keys should remain visible all the time. How could you press some of them if you couldn’t see or touch its edges? I think this issue alone is a very huge preventing factor from a wide-spread adoption of Touch Bar.
I think Apple should give at least a settings option for disabling the complete blacking of the row.
Most users would appreciate it.
Further ideas
Those were just the basic things needed to be changed. Just the ground zero. Apple should also improve the software support for the Touch Bar to have it more appealing for users. I have gathered some of our ideas:
- The “Customize Touch Bar” menu item should have a fixed place in the menu hierarchy, like “Preferences”. It is hard to find it because each app (including Apple’s own apps) puts the menu item into different menu location.
- Control Strip widgets. Apple is now good at widgets. They are on iOS, iPadOS, macOS and even on Apple Watch. I can imagine small apps which provide Apple Watch Comlication-like mini displays directly on the Touch Bar. For example: weather, battery level, stocks, CPU usage, time(!), microphone/camera status, current app’s icon, etc.
- Who said that physical F buttons and Touch Bar can not coexist? I can imagine a laptop having both of them.
- Improve default Control Strip button options. For example the music button could show the icon of the currently active music app (because it is always a problem to find out what app will get the Play/Pause when I hit it), or even the album art. Add swipe support for this button for skipping tracks. Why is there no QuickNote or Copy/Paste button? So many things could be added or improved.
- Enable users to add their own language dictionaries for using with QuickType suggestions. Apple currently provides only a handful of languages with QuickType, because this system is ported from iOS. But macOS already has a system-wide dictionary, where you can install your own dictionaries — why not let users to add their own for the languages they want to use it with?
- Add support in Safari to use the Touch Bar from webapps when the user permits it. Why not?
- Let the users customize the “expanded” state of the Control Strip. Currently it mostly reflects the media keys on a keyboard, but this could be something more customizable, like the compact version.
- Maybe let the users personalize the skin of the buttons? Some might like them rose gold. Why not?
TL;DR
It would be far better to develop an improved “Touch Bar 2.0” instead of killing it. All the problems of the current (basically the first) implementation can be fixed with existing technologies. This way users could benefit from both of the worlds: similar functionality as the old F keys and modern interactive elements. There are also a lot of opportunities to improve the concept further. Apple just needs to put effort in it. I hope they will.
