I’m not going to get my hopes up, but it appears Apple may finally get rid of the stupid and much-loathed Touch Bar on its 2021 MacBook Pro.
According to trusted analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, Apple is planning to replace the Touch Bar featured on its current crop of MacBooks and, instead, revert back to physical keys (among other things) for the MacBook line. I like to think this long-requested change is due to the exact suggestion I made in my review of the 13-inch MacBook Pro last year. (Yes, that’s me taking credit.)
Regardless, the Touch Bar is one of the most useless additions to the MacBook Pro, a feature Apple first foolishly introduced back in 2016. Sure it looks cool, but it’s super unintuitive — adjusting things like volume and brightness requires extra taps, and it’s not even optimized for all apps. What’s more, unless you go through the process of tinkering with your MacBook’s settings and customizing the Touch Bar, your life is going to be filled with a series of constant accidental triggers of Apple’s other useless innovation: Siri.
Thankfully, I’m not the only one who feels this way. The minute the news broke, people flocked to Twitter to express their disdain for the purported death of this dumb feature.
It sucks. You keep pressing keys by just touching it (not pressing it) which leads to a lot of unwanted keystrokes.
There should be an option to not have it on high end macbook pro.
— LauRRRRRent (@_LR_) January 15, 2021
I 100 percent agree that the Touch Bar is “garbage.”
never liked the touch bar, all my hot keys for adobe illustrator at my F-keys, not too handy removing them
— Daniel Sidebottom (@thefrgstn) January 15, 2021
I told you, none of the third-party apps are even well optimized for it.
The macOS dock is the touchbar of UI design.
— Brian McConnell (@mrbmc) January 16, 2021
If we’re being honest, Apple’s Touchbar was a “look what we can do” moment of creating a solution to a problem that didn’t exist.
What we all really wanted was a light, durable, fast machine, no gimmicks.
I’ve never used the Touchbar and haven’t met one person who likes it.
— Alan Graham (@agraham999) January 16, 2021
In addition to describing the Touch Bar as “garbage,” it can also be categorized under “gimmicks.”
Oh lord, please let this happen. At least give us an option to get function keys instead of the TouchBar. Even if it costs extra, I’ll pay the Pro Stand price. 🙏🏼 https://t.co/PJZllcVmPA
— Konstantin Bender (@konstantinbe) January 15, 2021
See? I’m not the only one who hates that thing. Here’s hoping 2021 brings one bit of good news: the death of the Touch Bar.
