I just replaced my 2015 MacBook Pro with a brand new 2018 MacBook Pro with Touch Bar. Lots has been written about Touch Bar over the last few years, so I’m going to focus on two things.
First, there seems to be a commonly held belief that the cost of the Touch Bar is $300. The logic is that the base cost of a 13″ 256GB MacBook Pro is $1499 and the base cost of the next model up is $1799.
Faulty logic. That $300 buys you a Touch Bar, sure, but you also get a faster processor (Dual core 3.6GHz bumped to quad core 3.8GHz), two extra Thunderbolt ports, better graphics, a True Tone display, and, biggest gain of all, a secure enclave and Touch ID. That’s a lot.
Better to think of Touch Bar as the new MacBook Pro default. Like it or not, Touch Bar is the new normal. Though you can buy a 15″ MacBook Pro without Touch Bar at your local Apple Store (old stock, clarify the model year before you buy one), you can’t buy one from Apple’s on-line store.
The second half of my Touch Bar ramblings concern the function keys replaced by the Touch Bar. I have long relied on the function keys, every one of which is tied to a KeyBoard Maestro macro. Those macros still work, but there are two problems I’ve not yet found a way to overcome.
The loss of a physical key means I can’t feel my way to, say, F2, without looking down at my keyboard. That breaks flow. There’s no way around it. I can tap the left most Touch Bar button (the escape key, in most cases) by feel, but my error rate soars the further from the left I go without looking down. It’d be like typing on my iPhone without looking at the keyboard. Maybe some people can do that, but I can’t, even after years of practice.
That aside, there’s a second problem. I can’t find a way to create a one-handed Touch Bar function key tap. To reveal the function keys, I need to touch the “fn” key in the lower left corner of the keyboard. To touch a function key, I need to look down and, in most cases, use my other hand to tap the function key. Compare that to my 2015 MacBook Pro. I can tap any of my function keys with any finger, all without looking down from the screen.
One solution is to use System Preferences to have the Touch Bar always and only display function keys. This works, kinda (no physical keys means loss of touch), but defeats the purpose of having the Touch Bar.
To be clear, I love the Touch Bar. I love the fact that I can touch and slide, all in one motion, to adjust screen brightness or volume. I love all the custom Touch Bar interfaces, customized for many of the applications I use. I would just like some way to set up a one handed set of customizable keys.
One idea: Is there a way to use the fn key as a modifier for non-function keys? For example, is there a way to tie a macro to, say, fn-z (z being so close to the fn key)? If so, I’d just replace all my function keys with the bottom row of my keyboard. As is, fn-z appears to just pass through as plain old “z”.
Yeah, really hope the Touch Bar isn’t one of those ‘new features’ Apple introduces and then fails to iterate on a reasonable timetable, e.g, iBooks Author, Keynote, Contacts, Quicktime, the Mac Mini, Mac Pro, etc., letting them stagnate for years and years and years, ad nauseam.
Yes! I’ve always thought the Fn key was wasted space since it doesn’t work with other keys. I would love my Touch Bar if they had added it as a new row above the function keys.
Really, I thought the MBP with Touch Bar came out in 10/2016.
I haven’t bought a MBP with Touch Bar yet, so it still feels relatively new to me. Therefore, I don’t have the benefit of experiencing it as it grows. Not sure when I will be able to appreciate it’s innovation either, since I prefer to use a closed laptop connected to two screens and external keyboard/mouse.
Yes. Agreed.
im a twenty year dev (type all day, without looking) and have a physical wireless Apple keyboard, and theres no way in hell i could reach for the F2 key without looking down. QWERTY keyboard layout i have, but the function keys just aren’t hit the same and require a brief glance now. so not much loss there in return for the dynamic gains.
Regarding remapping keys, check out Karabiner. I’ve used it to remap the right option key to an “Enter” key.
https://pqrs.org/osx/karabiner/
It’s been 3 (er, 2) years with nary an update, so why haven’t you put it in that category?
I suppose they did take out the time to put True Tone on it. 🙂
I really enjoyed it at first, but now I’m strictly ‘meh’ on it. It’s great for scrubbing videos but really mediocre for all my other use cases.
I have the original MacBook Pro with Touchbar and I love it.
It’s really helpful when filling in forms – I just tap it and [e.g.] my name is typed. The fingerprint scanner is a total winner too.
Finally, the ? works so great that it will probably last several more years. In fact I still use my i7 512GB SSD MacBook Air (Mid-2012) and it works just great.
Sorry, you’re right. Updated 3 to 2.
However, Apple has introduced three generations of devices with the Touch Bar, and the feature set has remained exactly identical (excepting True Tone). High Sierra, the second OS with support for it, has not changed anything, and neither has Mojave. And, as you point out, in many cases people simply don’t use it.
In other words, Apple put a huge initial investment and has shown marginal investment for 2 releases since the introduction, at the hardware level, software level, and product level (no more devices with it). The question is if that counts as “good enough” vs. “stagnation.” I’m starting to feel it’s the latter.
Just as Motorola Cellular spent the 1990s seeking to create a working Star Trek communicator (and succeeded with the StarTac), Apple is clearly aiming for Tony Stark’s solid glass communicator, certainly for the iPhone and possibly for the larger computing devices as well. The Touch Bar is one step in that process.
BetterTouchTool can use the fn key in keyboard hotkeys, so I’m sure other keyboard MACRO utilities, such as Keyboard Maestro, QuickKeys, etc… will allow you to do the same.
How do you “use System Preferences to have the Touch Bar always and only display function keys”? In Sierra I can try to set specific applications to display Fn keys (via Keyboard > Shortcuts > Function Keys), but on Keyboard > Keyboard there’s no way to always display function keys.
(The problem with app-specific function keys is that it only appears to work with Cocoa apps.)
How do you “use System Preferences to have the Touch Bar always and only display function keys”? In Sierra I can try to set specific applications to display Fn keys (via Keyboard > Shortcuts > Function Keys), but on Keyboard > Keyboard there’s no way to always display function keys.
(The problem with app-specific function keys is that it only appears to work with Cocoa apps.)