![]() ![]() It’s a constant, like the sunrise and turtlenecks. You click a button and, more often than not, the thing you want to happen, happens. I don’t wanna sound like a boomer - which, of course, means that’s exactly what I’m going to sound like - but you know where you are with a button. Have you ever thanked a button? Take a moment, right now, to lean towards your nearest physical switch, caress it with your fingertip, and whisper “cheers for your help, bud.” Feels good, doesn’t it? So, uh, congrats? And what about its reliability? ![]() If, somewhere deep in the basement of Apple’s headquarters, a crack team of headphone jack-removing, lightning cable-creating monsters tried to come up with a lowkey way of making my life shittier, this is the exact sort of thing they’d do. What this doesn’t change though is how often I brush against that touch strip and press something I didn’t mean to. This can be changed, but requires a dive into some settings. What does this mean in reality? Well - dependent on your set-up - it now can take two or three clicks on the MacBook Touch Bar to change my fucking laptop’s volume. The rest of them change depending on the app that’s currently in use. This means you can select four functions (such as lock screen, play, or pause) that remain on the strip. ![]() With the Touch Bar, there are only four anchored options. But, obviously, my life was too good back then. It was a feature I rarely thought about, as I could alter either with a single click. Predominately, changing screen brightness and volume. Since the MacBook Touch bar has been in my pathetic, needy life, it’s forced me to consider what I used the old function keys most often for. ![]() There are two main reasons: Usability and reliability. So why does the MacBook Touch Bar suck so much? Also please stop touching that,” I’d hear from someone who actually used the MacBook Touch Bar, before ignoring them and continuing my life in blissful ignorance. “Yeah, but it’s annoying and doesn’t work well. “It’s cool,” I’d say tapping at the Touch Bar with a filthy finger, “it’s basically a tiny touch screen… on a MacBook - what a world!” In those simpler, pre-Touch Bar days, my experience with the technology was just messing about on other people’s machines. Users can still bring up virtual function keys if they wish, but the idea of the Touch Bar is that it can be more adaptive and interactive than laptops without it.If you’ve got this far, I assume you have one question: Why? Why now? Well, I recently got a new MacBook Pro with a Touch Bar - meaning I’ve been using it every day. In an app like Apple Mail, it offers quick access to compose, forward, and archive buttons. In Safari, the Touch Bar shows the URL bar, website shortcuts, and other helpful info. The Touch Bar is a small OLED strip along the entire width of the keyboard that changes based on the application being used. It's a setup that's worked incredibly well over the years, but Apple envisioned a more modern approach with the Touch Bar. On most laptops, the top section of the keyboard has a set of function keys used for various shortcuts. It made the laptop considerably thinner, removed many of its legacy ports in favor of USB-C, and added the iconic Touch Bar above the keyboard. With the big MacBook Pro redesign in 2016, Apple introduced a few controversial design changes. Apple's 2021 MacBook Pro brings a lot of good to the table, though it has one big missing feature that's been on the last few generations - a Touch Bar. ![]()
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