“You cannot use the Touch Bar without looking at it,” Rob Griffiths writes for The Robservatory. “The Touch Bar, despite its name, is actually an Eye Bar: It forces your eyes off the screen, down to the Touch Bar, back up to the screen, repeat ad infinitum. There’s nothing physical about interacting with the Touch Bar, aside from using your finger: There are no defined button areas, and there’s no haptic feedback when you tap something. So you absolutely must look at the Touch Bar to interact with it.”
“When the new MacBooks were released, I spent about 30 minutes testing a Touch Bar-equipped version in an Apple Store, and this constant moving of my eyes’ focus from keyboard to screen to keyboard to screen to…well, you get the idea… was incredibly disruptive,” Griffiths writes. “To use the Touch Bar, I’d have to change my focus to the keyboard, then refocus on the screen, taking time to find my active window and locate the mouse cursor. This did not make for a pleasant user experience.”
Griffiths writes, “Using a Mac should be about doing things efficiently, and to me, the Touch Bar is an incredibly inefficient solution to a non-existent problem.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Having an infinitely malleable Touch Bar in place of a static row of function keys is an advancement, regardless of where your eyes go or not. Beware of opinions based on “30-minutes in an Apple Store.” When the apps you use regularly utilize the Touch Bar, you learn to use the tools and shortcuts provided. You cannot get to that level in 30-minutes in an Apple Store.
