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2023-07-25 18:27:30Z (last updated 2023-10-16 08:55:03Z)
Apple's Touch Bars are, in my opinion, not that great.
Here are short points on why I think they're not great:
1. They're a display
2. They're inaccessible (at first)
3. They don't get much use
4. It was a horrible idea at first
5. It barely exists anyways
The Touch Bar is a display. It's one you can touch.
When's the last time you had to adjust the brightness for the Touch Bar?
Actually, you can't adjust the brightness for the Touch Bar (AFAIK) and the intention is that *you never have to*.
The auto brightness works quite well until you're in a completely dark room. And at that point, the Touch Bar emits quite a bit of light, and trying to change the brightness of the Touch Bar is practically impossible, but it's probably on the minimum brightness anyways.
Let's say you do not have vision, and you want to enable Voiceover. You have a MacBook with a Touch Bar. How do you even press the F5 key if you can't feel it?
Well, there's already a solution for that. Hold the command key and press the Touch ID button 3 times.
Now how do you use the Touch Bar with Voiceover? Well, you use iPhone/iPad Voiceover gestures. And how do you learn the iPhone/iPad Voiceover gestures? Good question.
If the only thing you need is a web browser, you probably don't even need a Touch Bar.
Heck, most apps in existence probably don't use the Touch Bar at all.
The Touch Bar takes up the space of where function keys are, so you lose your function keys for even more unpredictable things.
The first MacBook I got for me was a 2017 MacBook Pro.
Technical specs for the 2017 MacBook Pro
The Touch Bar included the escape key.
That was a horrible idea, because if the software for the Touch Bar failed, you could not [press the] escape [key].
I had my Touch Bar break for some reason (at a hardware level from what I can tell), and the Touch Bar just did not show anything nor function at all.
So yeah, I was left without an escape key.
Even worse (for the Touch Bar), the Touch Bar barely exists at all.
Apple has this weird page for technical specs for their stuff.
If you take a look at all of the MacBooks with Apple Silicon, well...
Here's all the MacBooks with Apple Silicon, in the order of the Apple tech specs page:
MacBook Air (15-inch, M2, 2023)
MacBook Pro (13-inch, M2, 2022)
MacBook Pro (13-inch, M1, 2020) (my MacBook)
Here's all of them which has a Touch Bar (in the same order):
MacBook Pro (13-inch, M2, 2022)
MacBook Pro (13-inch, M1, 2020) (my MacBook)
A common pattern within Apple Silicon MacBooks is that only 13-inch MacBooks even get a Touch Bar. And that's it for Apple Silicon MacBooks.
Finally, possibly the final nail in the coffin, there is no Touch Bar outside of the internal MacBook keyboards. Not even in external keyboards from Apple *themselves* (AFAIK).
So me using my "dock" setup (external monitor, keyboard and mouse) means I can't use the Touch Bar. But it doesn't matter anyways, because nobody made something for it specifically.