←Touch Bar

Recently, I read a piece my good friend Owen Williams wrote that I disagreed with. Ignoring my initial instinct to argue on Twitter, I decided instead to write a more detailed response.

Owen’s post was about the latest MacBook Pro line, suggesting that in this latest release, Apple may have lost sight of who they are building these laptops for. You can read the full post here.

One thing that really jumped out at me when I was reading was the following:

“[the Touch Bar] feels like an excuse to not just add touch to the Mac in the first place. While Microsoft is busy letting you touch the entire display, Apple’s making you look down at your keyboard to interact instead — bizarre.”

Microsoft’s Surface Book is arguably the most holistic competitor to the MacBook Pro, and comes complete with a full touch screen that detaches from it’s base. However, when using the Surface in laptop mode (i.e. attached to the base) how much sense does this full touch screen really make?

If you’re reading this on a laptop, reach up from the keyboard, touch the screen at random, and lower your hand again. Alternate hands and do this ten times.

Did that feel comfortable? Did that make sense as a user interaction?

If you watch a pro user on their computer, you’ll see they’re incredibly quick with the keyboard. This is largely because pro users have learnt to utilise key commands etc, to minimise moving their hands from the keyboard over to the mouse and back. They only use the mouse when they can’t use the keyboard to achieve the same thing.

This isn’t new. I’ve always been intrigued by how efficient expert users are in systems that don’t have a GUI. Watch any bank teller update your account details in a DOS based system. They quickly and expertly navigate with just three character codes. Compare that to the same user having to navigate a new web UI with menus and options buried under buttons accessed with a mouse. Keyboards are a faster and more accurate method of input and control than a mouse, or your finger.

It’s not just a hardware issue. To make an item on a screen touch friendly, it has to have a large touchable area. Because your finger is coming from further away, you have less accuracy. No one has achieved this yet. Windows 10 is an amazing OS, but it’s touch vs mouse capabilities are confused. If the touch area is under your fingers already, the touchable zones can be smaller.

While there are interesting use cases for a touchable screen none of them feel “pro”.

While some may say that the addition of the Touch Bar to the MacBook Pro is simply an excuse not to make a fully touch capable laptop, I argue that adding the touch bar to the keyboard is actually making the area already being utilised by your fingers more powerful.

A criticism I have heard a lot, and have thrown myself in recent days, is that the lack of F keys is a real slap in the face for Pro users. “Us developers need F keys! We can’t live without them!” After all, almost every developer knows the shortcuts to their IDE, just like every motion graphic artist knows the keyboard shortcuts to send their animation to the render queue. Every industry has it’s shortcuts. You can even buy keyboard overlays so you remember them better.

In my IDE I use F4, F5, F6 and F9. Three of those are very close together, surrounded by keys I never use. The idea that I could reprogram my F key bar to have those 4 important keys, plus volume and brightness sounds pretty amazing if you ask me. Furthermore, it eliminates the need for that pesky Fn key.

I do have reservations about the difference between touch buttons vs physical buttons for accuracy during touch typing (though I’m still apprehensive about the accuracy of touch while typing on my iPhone, and I’ve owned one for 6 years). However, the Touch Bar is by no means a vanity project or something Apple have added just to release a new MacBook Pro after years of not doing so. I find the Touch Bar to be well considered, beautifully executed and likely to be a core part of pro computers for years to come.

Something I always keep in mind when Apple release something new is that the best of the Apple ecosystem doesn’t come from Apple. They created iOS, and then third party developers and designers pushed what the OS could do. When I look at the Touch Bar I don’t only see what I believe is a brilliant addition to their laptops, I see an outlet for software developers to push the envelope. I’m already liking what I’m seeing from the 1Password team.

I’m not an acolyte and I’m not going to defend their strange decisions around cables, dongles and incompatible hardware. Apple’s mantra of “It Just Works” officially isn’t true if you buy a new MacBook Pro and a new iPhone. Charitably, they have a vision for the future and don’t want to encourage a slow transition.

But the Touch Bar is Apple standing with pro users saying “pro means a kick ass laptop that helps you to do your thing quicker and more powerfully than ever before”. I truly believe that the Touch Bar will have more impact than we understand right now.