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Apple kills the non-Touch Bar MacBook Pro

engadget.com

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Re: Apple kills the non-Touch Bar MacBook Pro

#211

Post by prashnts »

Kronopath wrote: post #74
ravenstine wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why on earth do I need to tap twice to adjust the screen brightness? I couldn't find a way to just have two increase/decrease buttons. Why can't I adjust how long the touchbar stays active for? Why does it disappear at all? I can't imagine the touchbar would exist in its current form if Steve were alive.

Turns out if you do a small rightwards/leftwards swipe on the brightness or volume buttons, then you can increase or decrease them by one notch without opening the slider. It’s not an intuitive or discoverable command.

Genuinely curious about the intuitive part: I found it intuitive because it’s a similar gesture in iOS (control centre). In addition, many other gestures on force touch trackpad such as peek-and-pop, are similar to iOS. I can carry my habit from iPhone to Mac without giving it much thought. In fact, to me it feels natural and expected behaviour after being used to the gestures in general. I don’t have a touchbar (still using 2015 rPro), and I agree about discoverability part — no way I’d have tried to swipe on a button.

So my question: once you discovered that you could do a swipe gesture, did you find yourself using it often?

Re: Apple kills the non-Touch Bar MacBook Pro

#212

Post by [deleted] »

manojlds wrote: post #84
retrac98 wrote: post #10

99%+ of my usage of the touchbar is pressing escape, adjusting screen brightness, speaker volume, or accessing music controls. All of these worked flawlessly when I had physical keys, but now it's hard to know what I'm pressing without looking, and sometimes the controls become unresponsive to touches or drags. I'm a programmer/business owner, so perhaps it's useful for other sorts of creative professionals, but it f…

Touchbar has been used effectively by Zoom. Only app that I use and love using touchbar with right now.

[deleted]

Re: Apple kills the non-Touch Bar MacBook Pro

#213

Post by scarface74 »

equalarrow wrote: post #194
retrac98 wrote: post #10

99%+ of my usage of the touchbar is pressing escape, adjusting screen brightness, speaker volume, or accessing music controls. All of these worked flawlessly when I had physical keys, but now it's hard to know what I'm pressing without looking, and sometimes the controls become unresponsive to touches or drags. I'm a programmer/business owner, so perhaps it's useful for other sorts of creative professionals, but it f…

I agree with all this. However, even though I still use Macs for everything, it's been clear to me for a while that Apple 'Pro' users are not tech people. There is a big difference in keyboard necessity between a developer and any 'Pro' user. Key travel, actually having real keys, are all a big deal to devs. I think Apple lost their function and form way a while ago. It's never coming back. The new Mac Pro is the lat…

The Mac Pro is the perfect example of function over form. It’s big, not that beautiful and expandable like crazy. Did you mean the MacBook Pro?

Re: Apple kills the non-Touch Bar MacBook Pro

#214

Post by sbr464 »

dpkonofa wrote: post #139
sbr464 wrote: post #115

Idea: Add gesture support. Two finger slide for brightness or volume. Different from/to direction with 2+ fingers, maps to different functions, to ease use without looking down.

Eh? It already has gesture support. You can flick the volume and brightness buttons to change the levels one step at a time or you can drag on them to pop-up a slider control. Unless you're suggesting global gestures where two-fingers anywhere on the TB would control volume. In that case, I'd have to see a use-case. I can see that going horribly wrong and being triggered accidentally all the time.

I meant multi finger gestures, similar to the touchpad.

If you hit anywhere on the Touch Bar (or maybe left/right side) with two fingers and drag, you could map to volume/brightness.

When you press the wrong key and drag, the buttons disappear and you have to wait a moment for it to clear, difficult UX if you aren’t looking.

Re: Apple kills the non-Touch Bar MacBook Pro

#215

Post by scarface74 »

docker_up wrote: post #9

I will never ever buy a MacBook Pro if they don't get rid of the TouchBar. The sheer arrogance of Apple to think they know better than their customers infuriates me. I only use a 2018 MacBook Pro because work supplied it, and because my 2015 MacBook battery was dying and the only option the IT department gave me was to upgrade to the 2018 model. I may simply go back to Windows at home if that's the case, and will use…

If Apple didn’t know what their customers wanted, how do you explain the Mac revenue numbers?

https://sixcolors.com/post/2019/01/apples-dramatic-q1-2019-r...

Re: Apple kills the non-Touch Bar MacBook Pro

#216

Post by willtim »

na85 wrote: post #107
Eric_WVGG wrote: post #24

This thread is going to dissolve into a pile-up on the Touch Bar, so I wanna jump in front of this. Readers of this site are mostly “hackers,” however mutated or dumbed-down that term has become over the years, correct? Everyone here has their windows and spaces just so, a full complement of shortcuts and trackpad gestures, and if they're serious about the Macintosh tools like TextExpander. As standard as GUIs are, w…

I applaud this sentiment. I use emacs reasonably often and I reached out to Mitsuharu Yamamoto about touchbar support in emacs and sadly never heard back. The ability to bind arbitrary emacs functions to the touchbar, programmatically, would be a killer feature.

Quoting the Emacs web site:

"To improve the use of proprietary systems is a misguided goal. Our aim, rather, is to eliminate them. We include support for some proprietary systems in GNU Emacs in the hope that running Emacs on them will give users a taste of freedom and thus lead them to free themselves."

Re: Apple kills the non-Touch Bar MacBook Pro

#219

Post by eeeeeeeeeeeee »

josho wrote: post #17

The Touch Bar was what finally pushed me over the edge to remap caps lock to escape. I'm shocked at how much I enjoy ESC being close to the home row (I'm not even a big vim user). For this change alone I am glad to have the Touch Bar.

Vim user, I did the same. I do prefer the caps lock placement too since I’m doing it so often. But it still makes the TouchBar a total waste of space (and it adds cost)

Re: Apple kills the non-Touch Bar MacBook Pro

#220

Post by sbhn »

The touchbar looks nice. I am a religious apple fanatic so image is all important to me. My god, i had loads of chicks coming to my mac and sliding there fingers in it. I had to slap a few naughty hands lol. Sad to see it go. Those were the days.
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