Why Apple Shouldn’t Kill the Touch Bar
Rumor has it the MacBook Pro’s mini OLED screen is on its way out. That’s a shame.
Do we recognize innovation when we first see it? I think we can get carried away in the hype and assume something must be innovative, but technology that changes habit isn’t always welcomed as the next big thing.
Take Apple’s Touch Bar. Recent rumors suggest that Apple’s next MacBook Pro update might do away with it, and this has some corners of the internet buzzing with glee.
Introduced almost five years ago, the keyboard-width and single-key-deep OLED display replaced the function keys on the MacBook Pro and thus was seen as a kind of insurrection of the known and accepted.
At the time, I was surprised. Were that many people still relying on function keys? My Microsoft Surface keyboards don’t have function keys, and I’m not missing them. Perhaps the F5 holds some special meaning that escapes me.
The Touch Bar wasn’t a mere digital replacement for the function keys. It’s a programmable screen running, in essence, a watchOS that works with macOS and the apps that run on top of it. It’s remarkably customizable, and because it’s one long, thin screen, it supports gestures for things like scrolling through photos (tiny thumbnails appear in the…
