[lajawfe]

I can't stop but speculate if departure of Ive had anything to do with this. I guess there was a lot of push-back internally about this, but because of Ive, they had to endure 4 generations of butterfly switches. Touchbar also is just a resource hog for nothing extraordinarily useful. I haven't seen people use it too often. I bet they did user studies and found out that the Touchbar wasn't the new interaction method they hoped it would be. And now, they are planning to introduce new macs without them. I bet Ive feels bad about having to see his decisions being rolled back. Anyway, I hope the rumored 16' Macbook pro actually caters to the professionals by prioritizing thermals over thinness, and if one can wish, it would be nice if Magsafe could ride this rollback train.

[bmurphy1976]

This app was released recently:

https://pock.dev/

It puts the dock in your touchbar. It's the first time in the 9 months I've had this laptop where I've actually gone "ok, this is useful" and I am actually using it. I now have the dock auto hide and I mostly use the touch bar to open apps.

That said, I'd still prefer they ditched the touchbar in favor of function keys. I'd be happy if they shrunk the ridiculous size of the touchpad a bit, and put a row of function keys in between the touchpad and keyboard as well.

[pault]

Personally, while I have never once used the touchbar, I do think the ability for apps to display contextual function keys has a lot of use cases. I would be happy if they released physical keys with little oled screens on them, like that old Optimus keyboard. Apparently it was garbage but the tech has come a long way in ten years.

[robocat]

Windows laptops are far worse than the touchbar: replacing the function keys with volume, brightness etc.

The two worst keys are the touchpad lock key, and the WiFi key. Both of which "crash" the laptop when your average user hits them unintentionally: because either the touchpad stops working or the internet stops working. Absolute madness.

[kkarakk]

honestly what do you use the dock for? i find i set up my windows in different workspaces at the beginning of the day and just toggle between them. the dock is more of an annoyance nowadays.

[rando4321]

It's seemed wildly obvious to me that Ive, whatever good work he did under Jobs, did horrible work without Jobs to constrain him.

I hope that Apple returns to making quality hardware without Ive present.

[adt2bt]

Outside of the keyboard fiasco what else has Apple designed that’s so bad?

I quite like Face ID, the latest gen iPad Pro, and even the new Mac mini, and Mac Pro.

Sure the keyboards were bad, but like it or not Apple has a pretty obvious goal to get MacBooks as thin and light as possible. At some point they needed a switch from the existing keyboard design to make it thinner.

[ianai]

It’s pretty suggestive that Ive leaving was precipitated by this. He may have been forcing the keyboard against criticism. I’m sure he had huge clout from his big successes over the years. Good riddance, I say. I hope they make a dramatic back step on their laptops.