The Touch Bar retains its status as the last technology that Apple abandoned after releasing products with it. The previous one was 3D Touch on the iPhone.
I’ve been using a 2018 MacBook Pro for two years. One of the reasons for the purchase was the Touch Bar, which promised a new experience and high productivity.
The promises were kept, but then why did Apple not sell a single laptop with this stripe in 2024 and abruptly rolled back to the standard F1–F12 keys?
Despite the failure, the idea is considered the best addition to the laptop form factor. In my opinion, it failed for the following reasons: due to the classic Apple desire for minimalism and lack of interest from developers.
😮💨 Do you know what other new product goes through the turbulence of these two factors?
Apple Vision Pro replaces input through physical controller buttons with touches, a major developer deems “non-essential” by the emerging market to use resources to optimize their apps.
All this may sound like childhood sores, but the death of the Touch Bar because of them brings up gloomy thoughts.
Look at the common disadvantages of two technologies that are not obviously similar to each other. Below, Apple should write its internal constitution and work it out as quickly as possible before the “disease” ruins the product.
The touchpad was a nice experiment that wasn’t hard to say goodbye to. In the case of Apple Vision Pro, the future of the corporation is at stake. And for now there is something to fear.
Touch Bar and Vision Pro replace mechanical buttons. No people came
The secret of Apple’s magic is that it reduces the number of steps it takes to achieve what a user wants when interacting with the company’s products. The mouse on the front Mac, the touch control ring on the iPod, the input switches instead of the stylus on the iPhone were loved by users.
Touch Bar aimed to do the same. For normal use, the F1–F12 buttons were hot buttons instead of control buttons, not professional shortcuts. It is logical that Apple wanted to “speed up” communication with the computer and made the panel adaptive and animated.
But tactile feedback and blind use are more important.
I myself noticed when working with the Touch Bar that the touch strip is almost impossible to use without looking at the keyboard. The simplest (and private) actions like decrease opening, music pauses And calling the Mission Control Center They didn’t stretch, they added it in time.
They are not visible and there is no tactile response. With every contact, uncertainty manifests itself, there is little pleasant.
Apple Vision Pro has been criticized for the same thing.
In his review of the Apple Vision Pro, MKBHD’s Marques Brownlee noted carefully (and several times) that at first you need to get used to looking at an object to interact. He was surprised at how much we actually interact with computers blindly.
Not a pretty helmet by any means, I can imagine these bumps in use. Right now, as I typed these words, I without looking at the keyboard I changed the screen brightness several times, wrote and corrected errors in a couple of paragraphs, lowered the music volume, switched the language and translated the transliteration using an external application. Doing the same thing in a headset took at least half as much time.
Responsive and flexible for work that does not require quick reactions.
And Apple understands this. The iPhone, whose entire composition consists of a touchpad with virtual buttons, will be turned on by mechanical keys for the second year in a row, and for almost a decade (since 2015’s iPhone 6S) the soft Taptic Engine is triggered, simulating the force of a squeeze.
Concept of controllers for Vision Pro. Those with touch panels are definitely not needed, it’s better to look at Oculus
The solution for the Touch Bar was to bring back the keys while retaining the stripes or adding Force Touch to the iPhone. But the patents did not reach the final product.
The output for the Apple Vision Pro will be just a mechanical mechanical control item. Now the output from the Mac keyboard and gamepads are already connected to the helmet, but something is also needed for offline input.
You can deny the obvious, but without such an additional gadget, communication with augmented reality will be weak. It will be needed until we start implanting chips into ourselves that simulate tactile feedback, which can also read intentions without having to look at the object.
To finish the point, I’ll quote from our editor-in-chief’s 6 critical disadvantages of the Apple Vision Pro Nikita Goryainovwho personally tried the device:
“I’ll say more about him separately, but now I want to highlight a key point: Eye tracking cannot and should not be the primary method of influencing buttons, highlighting objects, or other control systems..
[…]
Even after three days, I was still angry that Apple was trying to convince me that it was like a robot looking at a certain place in space to illuminate a particular object.”
Too much flexibility leads to loss of mind.
The Touch Bar was constantly changing. Elements jumped around depending on the application and were never similar to each other.
Logically, I agree, that was the problem. But in such a small area, confusion often began, and there was an urgent need to use the same programs for a long time in order to get used to the layout.
The only permanent mode of operation is the Control Strip, which includes the entire set of shortcuts from functional buttons. But it often had to be deployed, which killed the efficiency of interaction.
The terrible chaos from the windows in Apple Vision Pro reminds me of the same experience. Which, by the way, is also available in macOS windows, which is easy to get lost in and which I endure through gritted teeth for the sake of other advantages of Apple’s OS.
Well, this is some kind of hell. Videos like these from Vision Pro scare me
Now VisionOS offers that constant chaos of transition from a small monitor to the real world, to surround yourself with it. There is an assumption that this not only increases problems with the perception of the world in people with schizophrenia, but also can increase the list of patients by hundreds, if not thousands.
Augmented reality in almost any science fiction film is the addition of a digital interface to its own objects. This is not adding alien, foreign pieces of glass with buttons that are also reset every time when turned off.
Our chief editor Mikk Sid Touch Bar wrote about his experience like this:
“For a year and a half, I have never used this element of the MacBook. I tried to train myself, but to no avail: not a single case of using the touchbar finished my job or saved me time.
The only issue I experienced was annoyance because the icons on the touch strip changed when I opened different apps, and I had to take the time to learn what they were for.”
Replace “Touch Bar” with “Vision Pro” and “icons” with “windows” and meanings.
The main threat. Big developers don’t care either and it may stay that way
Apple Vision Pro does not have native or iPad versions of Netflix, Spotify, or YouTube.
This is serious, since the web versions do not provide the features of using a headset like a virtual cinema and are less responsive, as stated in the reviews.
The Touch Bar was not completely abandoned, but came into place a couple of years after its release. Apple has released custom “skins” for its applications and reached an agreement with developers Adobe and Pixelmator Team. Then the enthusiasts showed up for a while. But that’s all.
Games, for example, did not use the bar at all, and most non-graphical tools did not either. Contextually, it was adapted in few places in other programs.
Currently, the only thing you can find in the App Store for Apple Vision Pro is tumbleweed. It’s so bad that even Apple killed half of its applications and didn’t create a native version for them.
One of the external special “themes” for the Touch Bar
I often hear thoughts like “this is a first-generation product, smart, it was the same with the iPhone.”
No, friends, we love to rely too much on analogies where they cannot exist.
The iPhone App Store created a market. The developers strived for this because there was no analogue, the platform was developing quickly.
The App Store in Apple Vision Pro is nothing more than an extension of the company’s service arm.
The helmet appeared in a world where the App Store, which was created by that drive developer, no longer exists. It came about when the trend towards free distribution of Apple software became untenable.
Let me give you a simple example. How’s it going with Instagram on iPad? Not a hint, the answer is: he is not 14 years old and cannot be that old.
What about the App Store for Apple Watch? Yes, developers are running with it so that Apple single-handedly releases new apps for the Watch to keep the product buzzing.
But there is hope. Look at the Apple Watch
Beyoncé, Drake (sorry) and Anna Wintour received the Apple Watch before its release, thereby “lighting up” in the press. This watch is now a symbol of sports, but at the start it was promoted through pop and fashion stars.
It is natural for the original meaning of a product to change and be adapted upon demand.
The Touch Bar was too niche and a tiny addition to improve it and encourage the entire market to move to complex form factor keys. The touch strip was era In the life of a MacBook that lasted 7 years.
At the same time, Apple has experience working on bugs.
The Apple Watch launched as a fashion accessory, but executives quickly realized the device would be the ideal sports companion and immediately shifted focus to promotion and development. Jony Ive himself admitted that the company is ready to introduce fundamental and formative functions after the release.
But the first to receive Vision Pro were journalists and tech bloggers.
The announced but unreleased wireless charging with free placement of AirPower forced the company to wash itself away from the PR disaster and create induction charging with MagSafe magnets, which turned into the universal Qi2 standard, which literally the whole world will switch to in the last ten years.
Apple Vision Pro sells an abstract future, and here the field for maneuver is much wider; from a branding point of view, it will be more difficult to make a mistake.
So far, it seems that Apple has avoided the fate of the Touch Bar by subsidizing the prices of the more basic Apple Vision for growing the environment and EMERGENCY attracting developers with a completely redesigned VisionOS.
That until the device has a large size, normal spatial and adapted OS, the helmet will be in the red zone in accordance with my unresponsive controls and chaotic icons. Exactly what destroyed the Touch Bar.
Source: Iphones RU
I am a professional journalist and content creator with extensive experience writing for news websites. I currently work as an author at Gadget Onus, where I specialize in covering hot news topics. My written pieces have been published on some of the biggest media outlets around the world, including The Guardian and BBC News.
