[JeremyHerrman]

Apple loves to stealth test new tech in full public view by sneaking it into relatively mundane places, so debuting agentic AI via accessibility is very on brand.

A few other examples:

- The Touch Bar was much more than an OLED strip, it was Apple’s first move in the transition to Apple Silicon on macs. The Apple T1 chip in the 2016 Touch Bar MacBooks was the first solely Apple-designed processor to appear in a Mac and took over several responsibilities away from intel chipsets like power management, fans, sleep/wake, access to the camera & mic, and the secure enclave powering touch ID. Then the T2 added encryption of the SSD, audio management, image processing for the camera, and prevented tampering with the boot process

- The iPhone 3G shipped with a Liquidmetal SIM eject tool, which is made from a strong custom metal alloy which is "practically unbendable by hand unless you want to hurt or cut your fingers." Although Apple hasn’t released anything with the alloy since then, now nearly 20 years later Apple is rumored to be using liquid metal in their upcoming foldable iPhone.

- RealityKit had 3D scanning and a lot of other cool AR capabilities for years which didn’t make sense until the Apple Vision Pro was released.

[jorvi]

You're reading way too much into it. These are just failed attempts at commercializing something.

- People hated the touchbar. Only years after it became liked, and only under tech enthusiasts that hacked and tweaked it to have much deeper functionality.

- Making the ejector out of an expensive alloy made no sense.

- Realitykit (and the Vision, which is also crashing and burning) is a solution looking for a problem.

- 3D touch had both discoverability and usability problems.

- etc etc.

[JeremyHerrman]

You're underestimating Apple's meticulous planning, which has only become more intense in the Cook era. Bad feature/UX or not, each one of those decisions was calculated.

Read this ars quote from 2010 [0]:

>Apple used the small part—one that is not integral to the device’s functionality—to see if the company was capable or producing a custom design to Apple’s specifications. Typically, manufacturers prefer to have at least two sources for parts, so that a supply problem from one supplier won’t halt manufacturing. Since Liquidmetal is only available from one source, Apple needed to make sure the company could deliver.

For Apple Silicon, there was no way they'd make the switch in one go, so they had to figure out a way to hedge that bet. That's what the TouchBar really was, with all its warts and solutions for problems nobody had.

And as someone else in this thread pointed out, the first custom cellular chip wasn't released with a flagship model - they exclusively paired it with the budget iPhone 16e.

Apple is always calculating and hedging.

[0]: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2010/08/apple-tested-liquidm...

[troupo]

> You're underestimating Apple's meticulous planning, which has only become more intense in the Cook era

"Meticulous planning" and then: butterfly keyboard, wireless charging, Mac Pro, Liquid Glass.

And those are just off the top of my head.

[gsquaredxc]

I think you confuse long-term planning with long-term success. Just because something is meticulously planned doesn’t guarantee the plan wasn’t flawed fundamentally.

Additionally, wireless charging is viewed as a flop? MagSafe (wireless) is a really strong product option. Lightning vs USB-C doesn’t matter, no need to fiddle with anything in the dark, etc. MagSafe for mounting in a car is also a strong offering. Most Android phones use Qi as well.

[apparent]

I think the reference to wireless charging was to their rumored-but-never-released product that was going to allow charging at a distance, not mere magsafe charging.

[troupo]

> I think you confuse long-term planning with long-term success.

No. Long-term planning presupposes actual planning and execution, including failure modes, usage patterns etc. There's markedly less and less of that under Cook's leadership.

Oh, by the way. You can't really have long-term meticulous planning when everything is on an artificially enforced yearly cycle. The hardware division has mostly emerged unscathed, but that's a miracle in Cook's Apple.

> wireless charging is viewed as a flop?

I was referring to AirPower. Announced, never shipped. I should've looked up the name for it. Otherwise yes, wireless charging has been used everywhere, and Apple was just one of very last holdouts to implement it.

[moralestapia]

4 trillion dollars disagree, though.

[virgil_disgr4ce]

I'm gonna echo the sibling comment here because you're conflating different things. The point is that all of these seemingly weird things that were sometimes failures were part of more or less elaborate plans, and most importantly, that *commercial success for any given feature was not necessarily the purpose of the plan.*

[troupo]

You're conflating what I wrote with "you're talking about commercial success".

Broken keyboards shipped for years, "we didn't think about thermal throttling", "we have no working replacement for a widely used professional machine", and "hey, here's this half-assed redesign that we still can't properly fix after release" have nothing to do with either commercial success or meticulous planning.

[dylan604]

The keyboard issue was prolonged only by the nature of Apple's hardware release cycle. When the keyboard was released to the public, the next gen hardware was already way into the design/build cycle that it could not just be replaced. The fact they even had time to put the condoms under each key for the next year's model was surprising to me. They wanked the plug on the keyboard faster than I've seen them yank any hardware design.

[tskj]

What are you on about, wireless charging is great, and using the magnet to hang my phone is also great. If that goes away I might have to consider switching phones!

[bdamm]

You're misunderstanding how difficult it is to make major architectural changes to products the way Apple can. One of the ways to do it is to hide the architectural change as something else, something niche, and only when it has survived the fire of deployment there try to scale it up to the full market. It's actually quite genious, and you can expect more of it now that Apple's hardware guru is the chief.

I can't help but wonder if this agentic-via-accessibility angle is the result of this new leadership. If it is, it's a very good sign for Apple, because software and especially the AI gap is Apple's achillies right now.

[dwaite]

ML-related improvements to accessibility has been the trend for a couple of years now.

Changes which might not meet the quality bar to be a default user experience have a different calculus when they can be packaged up to be opt-in, and life-changing for certain people.

Global Accessibility Awareness Day also leads WWDC by a few weeks, so it serves as a taste of what Apple has been working on for the last year.

In terms of changes being led by a smaller feature, my favorite was night shift (which adjusted blue lighting at night) - which provided API months leading the first device with adaptive color adjustments from ambient light sensors.

[MBCook]

I liked the TouchBar. There were two problems with it:

1. It replaced the F keys. I suspect pros wouldn’t have complained so loudly if it didn’t. And it was too expensive for the cheaper computers where it may have been more popular.

2. They never changed it. Ok the first version wasn’t a big hit. Other than bringing back the escape key they never did anything. They sent it out to be a hit or to die and gave up there.

[pasc1878]

I would note that Steve Jobs would have probably supported removing the F keys.

See the NeXT keyboards - no F keys. http://xahlee.info/kbd/NeXT_computer_keyboard.html

The ones with the command key beneath the space were nice - except for the help key being so prominent.

[vkou]

Steve Jobs also thought that the abomination that was that stupid circular mouse was the pinnacle of UX.

Requiring the use of two hands in order to right click is also a fascinating hill to die on. I'm surprised that the operation didn't also require a foot pedal, all to, presumably, not confuse their users with the inclusion of a second button on their mice.

[chocochunks]

What's wild is they STILL haven't built a mouse with two switches for clicking. Right clicking is on all their mice/trackpads faked with things like touch sensors. They are just dead set against it for some reason even though it does actually mean it's impossible to play something like a modern FPS* with a Magic Mouse.

* With the default control scheme anyways.

[lossyalgo]

Thankfully 3rd party devices are supported otherwise I'd have gone insane with just one button.

[wolvoleo]

#1 bothered me the most. A lot.

And the stupid thing was that there was plenty of space for a row of function keys and the touch bar.

[DroneBetter]

I don't think that's true, at least in the 13" model.

and the F keys come back on the touch bar if you hold the fn button

[cwsx]

My main issue was the loss of _tactile_ F keys - hard to touch type when you're finger mashing a narrow touch screen

[wolvoleo]

Not on the 13" no but they could have made the touch pad slightly smaller.

For me touch keys will never work, like the other poster said I need tactile feedback. Apple's keyboards are pretty bad at that already by the way, even the return to scissor models. The only ones I find workable are the ones of 2015 and before.

[jkxyz]

Removing the escape key is what bothered me most as someone using Vim keybindings. It made it feel very unpleasant to edit code because the Touch Bar had no physical feedback. I still have a visceral memory of how much I disliked touching the glass with my left ring finger.

[ngcazz]

That's how I moved on to reassigning caps lock to escape on my computers.

[dwaite]

I have never got into macros, so missing a row of function keys didn't impact me. A row of system integration actions (like dynamic volume and brightness controls) was nice.

However, a capacitive touch surface should not be so close to tactile buttons. This made it way more likely to falsely register actions.

Move it a half key width farther up and make it taller to have greater flexibility on how it uses the space and I think it would have been a much better feature.

IMHO the big problem is that the five year hardware cycle of the MBP is not conducive for revolutionary improvements. They had the MacBook back then, which would have been a great platform for faster design iterations.

[sysworld]

no2 is what annoyed me the most. I liked it for the most part, but it was never updated, even on the software side we had very few changes. It could've been great.

[shagie]

Even though it's showing its age (and support is being phased out in recent builds), I still liked IntelliJ with the Touch Bar laptop.

https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/touch-bar-support.html

Having the Touch Bar screen show up the relevant buttons for the context I was in was really nice compared to trying to remember which F key was which debug option.

A "I wish..." would have been a $200 usb bar and hub that could sit right behind my keyboard for a desktop.

[MBCook]

That was one of my two primary uses!

The other was I made some Shortcuts that were very handy for me and set them up as buttons. It’s been over a year, I still miss them.

One would pop up a dialog I could type a Jira ticket number into and it would open it. I tried to do that with Salesforce but they’re insane so you can’t.

My favorite would open my next meeting. Know I have a meeting in 5 minutes? Hit the button and my browser would open the right Google Meet or Zoom and come to the front.

So useful.

The desktop problem is a real one too. It was great… as long as you only use your laptop as a laptop or your keyboard. Use anything else and you list it.

iMac? No. Mac Pro? No. Mac Mini? Don’t be stupid. No.

MBP only.

[rprwhite]

My primary issue with the TouchBar, losing the F keys was a concern but lot my primary one, was that it required me to look at it to use it. With keys you can feel them, and learn their place. But, the TouchBar had me looking at it and not the screen to do something. If it was angled so I could see it in my periphery whilst looking at the screen it would been awesome.

[Fr0styMatt88]

Even at the time I remember it was widely cited that the SIM eject tool was a test for their new manufacturing process.

[Danox]

Vociferous tech people hated the touchbar same with the butterfly keyboard or Neo laptop. And it makes perfect sense to test out new chips in small ways before you release them in a major product that is Apples edge today with Apple Silicon in comparison to most of their competition.

[theshrike79]

> - People hated the touchbar. Only years after it became liked, and only under tech enthusiasts that hacked and tweaked it to have much deeper functionality.

We hated the touchbar because it took away esc + f-keys.

If it had been on top of the F-key row, everyone would've loved it.

[taeric]

Vision is hilarious as it is more than just a solution looking for a problem. It was also desperately avoiding the current market that exists for it. Anything but games, it seemed.

[socalgal2]

Even more strange given 60-70% of all app store revenue for Apple is games - see Epic vs Apple trial for data

[Danox]

The Apple store doesn’t do geek games casual games don’t count…

[djhn]

Casual games ≈ IAP gambling addiction abuse

[darkwater]

I mean, they literally said that the touchbar was the first iteration and production deployment of Apple Silicone. Didn't judge the usefulness at all.

You are making a textbook straw man argument.

[JV00]

Also their first own modem, shipped in their cheapest tier starting with the iPhone 16e.

[greggsy]

Interesting - I knew they’d been trying to get off Qualcomm for years, but didn’t realise that they actually managed to do it.

[Danox]

Apple is on the three generation C chip I think the contract is up in the next two years with Qualcomm and within the next two generations that will it for Qualcomm modems next up Memory? The way things are currently going?

[paul7986]

And their upcoming smart glasses are the best UX for almost everything they showed the user holding up her phone for.

I read their glasses when taking video or pics the lense will light up and or flash more prominently then Metas. Maybe that will help the whole privacy issue and also it's not Meta (do love my Meta or smart glasses as a whole will ditch Metas for Apple quickly as both pair of Metas broke & there's no store for support).

[jareds]

I also am looking forward to Apple smart glasses. I use Meta glasses because thre useful since I'm totally blind. I'd much rather have on device recognission though if possible. I also trust Apple more then Meta. At least I'm technically enclined enough to realize I shouldn't wear them in the bathroom or bedroom. At least when humans look at my AI prompts there maily seeing food boxes or computer bios screens.

[bookofjoe]

Same for me! Both pairs of Metas are now inoperative because I can't get them back to factory reset. Once you pull that little blue tab out of them when they're new, it's GAME OVER.

[paul7986]

Well do want to add more detail. First pair bought in Oct 2023 and used them up until March 2025 where a software update hosed them. Then in April 2025 bought a new pair that lasted til the end of June 2025 cause of water splashes. So i two pairs of dumb sunglasses until March 2026 when my pair with the water damage came back alive.

Overall tho Meta doesn't make durable smart glasses and they only have two flagships store for support while Apple has tons of stores for tech support.

[diseasedyak]

Dang, really? Why would that be? I mean, I believe you, I'm just shocked. I'm glad I read this, as I was thinking of getting some but not now.

[RobMurray]

There is a factory reset procedure, I think you hold the shutter button while switching them off and on again.

[bookofjoe]

Doesn't work for me, as I noted above.

[hawaiianbrah]

I’ve had excellent luck with their warranty process.

[ksec]

And they do it with products on relatively small volume. A lot of these used to happen on Apple Watch. And at one point I thought Apple Watch would be the place to do a lot of testing work.

Until Apple Watch became so popular it is now back to volume manufacturing and operation efficiency mode.

Liquid Metal never got anywhere because Apple couldn't figure out how to mass manufacture it at a cost they were willing to pay.

[rgovostes]

Apple Vision Pro's hand tracking was first alluded to in a section of their first machine learning research publication. It was about using GANs to add realistic sensor noise to synthetic datasets. The bulk of the article is about eye tracking.

[gnatolf]

'liquid metal' sounds cool. It's probably a metallic glass. I super dislike that it seemingly will be synonymous with the brand name by Apple even though that stuff has been around for decades.

Not that there are particularly many places where this is used - mostly because it really is just very expensive. In the awesome position that Apple is in, economic feasibility is so much easier to achieve, with like tens of millions of guaranteed parts to be preduced.

[bayindirh]

It's not metallic glass. It's an injectable, super strong alloy. You can manufacture things like you're using injection molded plastic.

To be honest, British also has an injectable stainless steel, but its application domain is much more different.

[s0rce]

Are you sure? Liquid metal was the name of a bulk metallic glass. There were usb flash drives using it as a case https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquidmetal. Wikipedia lists apple licensing this technology.

Metal injection molding is also a thing but I haven't heard it called liquid metal. Usually its MIM.

[shawn_w]

Shoot, the article even outright says

>Liquidmetal has also notably been used for making the SIM ejector tool of some iPhone 3Gs made by Apple Inc., shipped in the US.

[bayindirh]

Honestly, I didn't know that "amorphous metal alloy" is also called metallic glass. I computed it to something else entirely. So you're right on that front.

MIM is something else, that's right, but properties of Liquid Glass allows it to be injection molded AFAIK.

MIM process is completely different from casting Liquid Metal. MIM generally starts as a powder and heated and molded, Liquid Metal can be just "melted and molded".

I have a stainless steel razor built with MIM. Has no resemblence to SanDisk Titanium's feel (which I also have).

[s0rce]

glass is the general materials science term for an amorphous non-crystalline solid

[bayindirh]

TIL.

I did my Ph.D. by developing BEM evaluators for working on metals, but glasses (as in class of materials) were not in my domain, so I'm thick as a brick on that part of the materials science.

Edit: BEM methods is as fun as USB buses and PSU units.

[wuschel]

Yes, it is injectable, which is a unique property a material that exhibits some properties of steel.

The downside is that it is brittle.

[Danox]

You can buy shares in the company that makes and holds the patents on liquid metal they are currently a penny stock and have been for several years and at one time the shares sold for $23 a share at its highest point many years ago..

I don’t expect anything out of it, but I own 12,000 shares just for fun.

[SmirkingRevenge]

Man I miss the touch bar. Never got why people hated it so much

[mjamesaustin]

The hate was because it replaced function keys many people use by tactile touch, without looking. Doing the same on a touch screen is very difficult.

If the bar had been added on top of those, I don't think there would've been the same kind of hate for it.

[landr0id]

I didn't really mind the fn keys being there. I rarely use function keys unless I'm RDP'd to a Windows machine.

What drove me crazy though was the escape key. They later added the physical escape key back but I think at that point it was a bit too late.

[phatskat]

I’ve always been a “remap capslock to escape” kind of guy (vim), so I didn’t mind much. Access to the brightness (screen and keyboard) and volume slider was neat but superfluous with the OG fn keys. Context-driven controls were probably the best thing about the touch bar, and I don’t think it got enough love to make that stick.

[tokenscoper]

Adding to the list of grievances, the functionality and the options it presented differed from app to app. I understand that the function keys also change their function app to app, but the visual noise the Touch Bar (wow - the word even gets autocorrected to have the right capitalization!) added as you switched between apps was too distracting.

[SoftTalker]

I haven't used function keys since I used mainframe applications on a 3270 terminal.

[SmirkingRevenge]

Ah yea, I've only owned one with the physical escape key. That would be annoying.

[prepend]

Even without tactile elements it was two keys to use function keys.

I would have been fine with the touchbar if it just default displayed function keys. Hitting fn+f5 to quicksave is annoying.

[plufz]

But wasn’t that just a setting changing it to default to fn? It was some time since I last used them…

[troupo]

> But wasn’t that just a setting changing it to default to fn

They relented and added this settings two years in, IIRC. It wasn't there from the start

[0x457]

1) First generation made ESC button a touch button. Aside from ergonomics (or lack of them), at least for me, on a psychological level "abort" button needs to be something you can smash. Also, macOS already had the worst input handling under load, making it virtual button made it worse.

2) While "happy path" on macOS pretty much never requires you to use Fkeys, but my workflow does. Blindly using touch buttons is harder than real buttons.

3) I'm not huge media keys users, but I bet #2 applies here as well.

I liked the touchbar in every other sense. If it was just an addition to an existing keyboard, people wouldn't have hate it[];

[]: At that time it was hard to not be frustrated using mac (butterfly keyboard etc), so touchbar might have gotten more hate than it deserved because of overall frustration.

[Tagbert]

Also, the Touch Bar seemed to be abandoned as soon as it launched. It only ever launched on the Pro line. There were never any feature updates. They never made it flexible enough for people to customize it.

[phatskat]

> They never made it flexible enough for people to customize it.

I feel like it was fairly customizable - the Mac system settings let you do a lot of drag and drop of controls, and I recall iTerm having a similar interface for customizing the bar in its own settings.

I do think it should’ve been given a lot more love, but that’s Apple for ya I guess

[dd8601fn]

I think a bigger issue was that so few applications used it in cool, interesting ways. It has the same appeal as the oled button boxes some people have, except it’s right there on the deck… but nobody did anything with it.

I sure did prefer the media controls on it, though. I still have a 16” here and am reminded of what could have been.

[Fr0styMatt88]

I actually think it would have done well if it was just like those button boxes / Stream Deck / etc. Like a row of transparent function keys with screens, but then that would have been a flexibility tradeoff.

[Barbing]

Touchbar users, check BetterTouchTool for tons of options

[sneak]

It was extremely flexible in customization options, and there were SDKs to make it do additional cool stuff in apps, but nobody really cared for the most part.

I honestly think it was mostly a "we have a custom secure coprocessor now, what can we do with it?" sort of thing, which also worked out for Touch ID and disk encryption.

[donkyrf]

I still have a personal Touch Bar MBP, and I find it annoying.

My problem is that I lightly rest my hands on the keyboard (including the f keys), and this habit is harmless on most Macs, but inadvertently activates the Touch Bar functions.

I actually like the idea a lot, and would probably love it if it required a little more pressure to activate.

[lynguist]

The touch bar and the butterfly keyboard were the only Apple features in recent memory I ever hated. I hated them because they introduced them for (what felt like to me) anti-consumer reasons. It felt pretentious and useless and prone to breaking and created problems instead of improving product use.

[cloverich]

One more on top of others. Many people felt it was a solution in search of a problem. As in, there was no problem i had that it solved. And it was forced on us, in place of something useful. From the start i read that as: This wont be here in a couple years. Which then made it annoying to deal with in the meantime (the hate).

Things that stick around, are generally value adding across a large or complete subset of their users. Touch bar was always niche, and thus always doomed. I think a good counter comparison is Apple VR headsets. For me, i have no use and little interest. But i can see them as a hedge at the very least, or as an enthusiast entrant into an emerging market, where future products in that segment may become interesting. And on top, it doesnt impact me - i can ignore their existence until it becomes useful.

If touch bar were launched like VR, i suspect it would have gotten similar level of dismisals, but less hate.

[rjrjrjrj]

I didn't like it, and was happy when they got rid of it. But I didn't hate it.

I did hate the butterfly keyboard that was introduced at the same time. Probably Apple's biggest hardware mistake of the past 15 years or so.

[codebje]

I am fortunate enough to have both a butterfly keyboard MBP and a touch bar MBP. Obviously the butterfly keyboard has the known issues, but the touch bar MBP also has the very common issues with that hardware.

I can replace the butterfly keycaps myself. It's something like $10 from aliexpress for a full set of keycaps and clips and a minute's work to pop the busted one and replace it. Annoying, but not fatal.

The touch bar needs a full battery, keyboard, track pad, and upper case replacement to fix. I just have to live that that thing flickering brightly at me every day, or spend AU$500+ to get it fixed.

IMO the touch bar is the bigger mistake.

[rjrjrjrj]

The butterfly keyboard's known issues resulted in a huge recall.

The touch bar didn't fail at anywhere close to the same rate, although yes... it was expensive to fix if it did fail.

[lern_too_spel]

There's nothing agentic about these features. Live captions have existed on other platforms for more than 6 years now, before "agentic" had even been coined.

[Melatonic]

Was "LiquidMetal" anything more than a good aluminum alloy ?

[s0rce]

Yes, it was an amorphous metal alloy. I knew people from grad school that worked for the company.

They have interesting properties: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_51frrQzCYM

[bayindirh]

Yes.

I have a Sandisk Titanium flash drive which is the first practical application of the alloy, shortly before Apple snapped it.

It's feels solid, not wearing down and pretty robust for what it is. It doesn't get scratches like aluminum alloys.

It's entirely something else.

[Melatonic]

So it's Titanium? That's cool - what's the name of the flash drive and or do you have more info ? Always loved titanium stuff

[bayindirh]

Nope, it's called/branded "Titanium". The thing was built from Liquid Metal.

Image of the thing: https://www.bhphotovideo.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=scale-down,wi...

[Danox]

LQMT Liquidmetal Technologies, Inc. A penny stock at this time.

[s0rce]

I think most of the commercial liquid metal like the sandisk drive were zirconium based.