[briandear]

The Touchbar is a source of many complaints? Or just a small slice of people who complain loudly? Anecdotally, I have many relatives with touchbar MacBook Pros and they haven’t complained about it. Is it possible that many people actually like the touchbar but they don’t spend their time on specialized forums singing its praises? It just seems like the assumption that people hate the touchbar is selection bias. Aside from the aforementioned relatives, I have a few friends in the pro video/audio/photo world who love the touchbar.

I would caution Apple against placing too much weight on any particular opinion. Pleasing the curmudgeonly neckbeards might mean that you piss off the creatives, or vice versa.

[diegof79]

The TouchBar is fine and looks nice. The problem is not the TouchBar itself, but how Apple decided to not care about many usability details complementary to the TouchBar (besides the ESC key).

Something really stupid (related to TouchBar design) happened to me about 2 weeks ago.

I watched a movie using an external TV, and I set the laptop screen brightness to zero. The movie ended, so I shut down the machine using the TV as a monitor.

Next day, when I turned on the laptop (without the TV). Zero! No sound, nothing, only the artificial "ESC" key in the TouchBar. My first reaction... "ohh the brightness", it happened before with older MBP models.

But... Where are my brightness keys!? For some reason, there were not displayed. (after a little bit of search in support forums, I found that some users were not seeing TouchBar keys during login too).

I connected the TV again... nothing. I tried to login... but since I couldn't see the login screen, I ended in the password recovery mode. In total desperation (that included trying to reboot in recovery or to do a SMC reset without any visual and auditive feedback), I found by chance that the screen displayed the right brightness if I open/close the lid.

When I saw the password reset mode screen, I was happy. But if I restarted the brightness remained in zero! and no TouchBar... After another trial & error of open closing the lid, I saw the pass recovery screen again. Then I deactivated FileVault to reboot in recovery mode, and finally, I saw the brightness keys in the TouchBar!!! (it was a WTF moment).

I searched in a lot of forums if it was possible to change the brightness with another key combination, but it wasn't possible. My secondary keyboard is a MagicKeyboard that is Bluetooth only... so I almost have to contact support for a very stupid design decision to not give the users a secondary method to control brightness when the TouchBar fails.

BTW previous Mac models emitted a sound during power on... that would have been helpful. It's very hard to know if your computer is working without any feedback. And it's also very hard to hit the recovery key combination without auditive feedback.

I like the aesthetics of Apple design, but as an Apple user for many years... the change of priorities in the hardware user experience is noticeable.

[jonplackett]

Guaranteed anyone who doesn’t mind just doesn’t need to use escape very much.

The problem with touchbar is it’s hard to use without looking at it - like most professionals do because it’s just muscle memory.

Give me a real escape and I won’t mind the rest being a touch Bar.

But I hope they make it like gaming keyboards that have real keys with tiny lcd displays on so you can customise the function but still have a real key to press.

[chrischen]

I am a heavy programmer, and I do not mind the touch Esc key. It’s a bigger hit box. Though it does not offer tactile feedback, I find that just something to get used to as you don’t really need to locate it through tactile feedback.

It very much is a small set of people who complain loudly about the touchbar, and many of whom have not even used it that just think they won’t like it.

[alashow]

You can map your Caps Lock key to Esc.

[rbanffy]

Caps lock is where God wanted Control to be.

[foldr]

You can map it so that tapping caps lock is escape and holding it down is control.

[sooheon]

Then you have to set a timeout, which introduces lag in your typing.

[foldr]

Only for the escape key. I don't find that there's any noticeable lag in practice.

[darkpuma]

It can be both. I know people who have it configured to be escape when it's pressed and released, but control when it's held down in combination with another key.

[zerkten]

How do you do that? I normally use the keyboard preferences to change the capslock on my MBP to control. I'd like escape there too, but I'd like to avoid running additional software to enable it.

[switz]

I use Karabiner and it's truly a wonderful piece of software. I'm super sensitive to any lag or missent keys, but this actually works very well and I don't even think about it anymore.

Here's the modification I use: https://pqrs.org/osx/karabiner/complex_modifications/#caps_l...

"Change caps_lock to control if pressed with other keys, to escape if pressed alone."

[darkpuma]

I'm not sure. I think on linux/X11 it's just xmodmap wizardry, any maybe on macos you need third party software, but don't take my word for it. It's not something I've really investigated since I'm personally satisfied with capslock=escape.

[pushpop]

Which just means you then rewrite your muscle memory to hit caps lock on all your colleagues computers by accident.

No thank you.

[kosievdmerwe]

I use Ctrl+[ instead of escape a lot of the times. Granted this is with mapping caps lock to control.

I’m afraid of mapping the caps lock to escape as a holdover from flash games where escape quit your game and so I fear destructive actions if I accidentally press escape instead of the “a” key, whereas if I accidentally press control nothing happens.

[gothroach]

Am I the only one who actually uses the caps lock daily in this era? I see people remapping it all the time, and wonder.

[fitzroy]

Would it be that hard to just have both a Touch Bar and a row of keys? At this point the Touch Bar component can’t add that much in terms of manufacturing cost. An entire A10 iPod Touch is only $199.

[pier25]

Would those people that like the TB actually prefer paying (hypothetically) $200 less for their MBPs without it?

To me it adds zero value so whatever it adds to the cost of the product is an extra I don't want to pay.

I think if Apple had given the option to get their MBPs without the TB I doubt very few people would have bought it.

[Gigablah]

Ah, Schrödinger‘s Silent Majority.