Deeper dive: Were Touch Bar’s problems software rather than hardware? – Unsung

The Touch Bar arrived in 2016 seemingly already pre-doomed, on a generation of machines that had a “we’ve run out of ideas” smell all around them. The arrow keys were reshaped, the keyboard got a slimming down, and even the beloved MagSafe wasn’t, in fact, safe. All of these changes would prove unpopular and get reverted in time, and the axe would eventually come for the Touch Bar, too.

With an enormous benefit of hindsight, a decade after its arrival, and on the (rumored) eve of fully multitouch MacBooks, I wanted to look critically at the Touch Bar in more detail. I put a spicy title above this post, and while I’m not sure I can answer it in the affirmative, I feel I got surprisingly close to that.

What did the Touch Bar do?

The Touch Bar replaced the top row of the keyboard with a narrow touch screen and a Touch ID surface/​button on the right.

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The touch screen provided a constant virtual Esc key on the left, and the remainder could become one of a few things:

app controls – whatever the app wanted (either buttons or more interactive surfaces):

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control strip – roughly the same as what function keys do today by default (brightness, transport controls, volume):

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a hybrid mode of smaller app controls on the left, and expandable control strip on the right:

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F1–F12 keys:

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a few smaller modes, like showing spaces, quick actions, or emoji:

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small submodes where only the middle of the Touch Bar would be taken over:

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The Verge has a five-minute video that shows a lot of this stuff nicely.

Functionality

Touch Bar arrived with a hybrid of functionality for casual and pro users – some built into the macOS itself, and some coming from specific Apple-owned apps.

A few apps offered basically a subset of their toolbars (although often without customization), with an occasional submenu, like digging deeper into font options or choosing a color adjustment. Some apps like Safari and Photo would invest in tiny previews of objects.

Particularly demo-friendly were sliders for volume and brightness, and those in specific apps – playback in QuickTime, or swiping through the photo gallery, clearly inspired by similar controls on the iPhone. Even though Touch Bar was referred to as “multitouch,” it really only supported tapping and horizontal swiping, with just the latter being something classic function keys clearly couldn’t do.

A simple but effective was also an arrow pointing to Touch ID authorization and payments – a small example of software proprioception – which Apple even included as a GIF in their press release:

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But there were also some strange moments, the strategy feeling a bit like “let’s...