Apple taught me useful learning. Warning to all owners of Macbooks with Touch Bar

When I bought my MacBook Pro M1 in 2020 with a touch strip instead of a row of physical keyboard buttons, I was looking forward to rewinding digital YouTube videos, literally photos with one-touch shortcuts, and literally juggling emojis with colleagues and friends. quickly selecting them on the Touch Bar screen.

Alas, in a year and a half I have never used a MacBook. I tried to accustom myself, but to no avail: not a single case of using the touchbar made my work easier and did not save time. The only emotion I think is annoyance, because when you open different applications on the touch strip, they changed and it took time to find out why they were needed.

And since the beginning of 2023, I have got a MacBook Air M2, which has a touch atavism replaced again with comfortable and comfortable F1-F12 keyboards. I was delighted later, but I realized one very unpleasant thing.

Now I don’t use the six-key keys at all

There are buttons, but there are no simulation tests.

Indeed, before the touchbar MacBook, I was constantly reaching for the buttons at the top of the display. It was so familiar and natural to control the sound, brightness and other settings of the laptop with their help!

Then there was a period with the MacBook Pro M1, during which at first they constantly remembered that there were no more buttons, and then taught them to control all the settings using the cursor.

And now, when I again have a MacBook with the usual buttons, I understand that they are not that common.

Let’s say sound. You can simply stretch and raise or lower the volume. It doesn’t take time at all. What I do: I drag the cursor to the upper right corner of the screen, open the control panel and slide the slider, adjust the sound.

The exact same thing happens on YouTube. It is much to reduce the volume adjustment with the mouse than to re-accustom yourself to using the buttons. To open the list of applications, I bring the range to the active sector. It’s more comfortable for me.

Not even on the bookmark part of his touch strip in the MacBook Pro M1. But I never clicked on them and watched them.

I realized this by accident, when I happened to see that the top row of functional points is absolutely clean and there are no traces of any touch on any of them. While there are various marks on the keyboard from possible pressings, which I periodically remove with a microfiber cloth.

Everything would be fine, but the lack of use of function keys greatly increases the time it takes to perform the simplest actions. That is, I spend more seconds on inefficient movements, noticeably more often, productivity drops. You might think that this problem is far-fetched, but if you spend 18 hours a day on a laptop, you begin to notice a decrease in work efficiency.

I usually see the same effect when I pick up a Windows laptop. There, precious time is eaten up by the Start button, for example, or closing the active search: out of habit, you drag the cursor to the upper left corner and only then to the right, in search of a red cross.

It turns out that MacBook with Touch Bar, for all its convenience, literally hurt me. Because of it, I can’t get used to using the available buttons and keeping track of a lot of time for unnecessary cursor actions.

Probably, you just need to keep in mind that there are buttons, just hold out the phone and turn off the sound in a human way. But so far I haven’t been able to.

And how are you, former owners of macbooks with a touchbar? Relearned back to physical keyboards?