I know that sounds like a joke but I really do think the biggest problem with the Touch Bar wasn’t that the first crack at it wasn’t good enough, but that they never took a second crack at it.
One could argue that the second crack was adding the physical Esc key. That took three years. It might have worked out better if the initial version had included Esc and perhaps the volume controls as real keys. Then the focus could have been more on what the Touch Bar could add in place of the keys that many people rarely use, rather than on how it messed up common actions.
I think better software could have helped a lot. First, it would sometimes hang and not respond. But, more importantly, I think it could have been a lot more useful. There’s this amazing, programmable screen, but there wasn’t really any way to empower the user to do stuff with it. You could only rearrange predetermined toolbar buttons. There also should have been a better way to balance global vs. app-specific items.
Hardware-wise, I think it needed some sort of haptics. And, even now, I’m disappointed with how Touch ID works on Macs. With iPhones, it was nearly perfect for me. Through several generations of Macs, it still often rejects my finger and feels like it’s slowing me down.
I thought the Touch Bar was clever and had potential. I think it was immediately and permanently sullied by being paired with the butterfly keyboard and laptops that had too few ports. Being paired with those other problems but being the official identifying feature of those machines painted a target on it.
What was ushered with a bang exited with but a whimper. My understanding over the years has been the software people inside Apple Park more or less fell out of love with the Touch Bar. I’ve never gotten a concrete explanation why, but the enthusiasm evidently was severely, irreparably curbed.
It’s a shame, because hardware was never the Touch Bar’s Achilles heel.
[…]
I hate to break it to the able-bodied masses, but not everyone is a touch typist.
[…]
Touch Bar Zoom is/was a masterpiece.
Previously:
Update (2026-05-06): Craig Grannell:
The problem for me is that it wasn’t everywhere. It’s always a long shot getting devs en masse to support new features. But to support a feature that only a relatively small number of Macs have and that pretty rapidly started to fall out of favour? That’s, er, an even longer shot.
The Elgato Stream Deck became a huge success at the same time the Touch Bar floundered, which tells me the problem was entirely in the software implementation. Fundamentally, the buttons on it should've been user-configured instead of dynamic based on the app. You can't build muscle memory around keys that change every time you switch applications. I used BetterTouchTool to set mine up that way, and I liked it a lot better than the default implementation.
BetterTouchTool Haptics History Keyboard Keyboard Shortcuts Mac MacBook Pro macOS 10.12 Sierra Touch Bar
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