I think what the touchbar brings is always active tutorial/reminder as to what's possible with the touchbar. Due to it's very nature you don't have to be taught what's on there, you can see, you then don't have to remember/rely on building up muscle memory.
I imagine it sucks for accessibility. I'd still want one before my faculties faulter, I imagine I'd get some use out of it with my IDE.
It does also provide some useful feedback as it can display things, too.
I buy what people say that it's way better for scrubbing video/audio if you do that a lot (lots of people previously bought special-purpose accessories for the same)... and mostly worse otherwise.
I was part of the spell correction team at Google, and we made sure that we aren't overly aggressive even though lots of people mistype their web query.
Nowdays I find it much harder to research rare things on Google, and I have to undo the automatic correction that the spell corrector does all the time (which is OK as long as it's easy to undo).
I'm more ok with the extra step, if it's my fault for misspelling.
Less so if I have to take an extra step to correct Google's inaccurate "correction."
I know at this point it's mostly marketing, but we are talking about a "pro" model.
In any case, it is very non-obvious that removing the function keys used by power user and non-power user alike (often for work) is necessary for the survival of the company.
It is also very non-obvious why the function keys had to be removed for a touchbar to be added to an already relatively expensive piece of hardware. The touch-bar/function keys are already non-reachable from the home row for most people; so what's another row? I think this was a design-oriented decision, not a regular-user-centric one.
Making scrubbers for audio/video (more) physical is nice, since scrubbing video with a mouse usually requires that you first move the mouse to wherever the video player puts its scrubber, and scrubbing with the keyboard usually requires multi-key combos and always has the “wrong” granularity. (It’s also helpful in that you can now combine this scrubbing in a gesture with mouse movement, e.g. picking up a clip from your library in iMovie, scrubbing through the timeline to scroll it to the right position, and then moving the mouse over to the timeline and dropping it. That’s basically an impossible gesture with mouse-movements alone; you’re left to hover the clip over the scroll-edge of the timeline and wait for it to accelerate its scrolling [and then usually overshoot].)
Come to think of it, Sublime Text and other IDEs with a minimap could display it (rotated to horizontal) on the touch-bar, and let you scrub on it, too. Do they?
The basic VLC two-finger scroll scrubbing works way better.
And as TouchBar is a per app custom display, you'd have to look down at your keyboard to see the current status... of anything.
Someone in a related thread said the app-specific keys are only available when the app has focus, so wouldn't you have the status of the app in front of you anyway?
In any case, I found the statement funny, because touch is flakey for me, so I never know what impact pressing a touch key will have.
Essentially a partial fusion of the two things would be physical keys with screens on top for dynamical renaming. but that would have its own problems.
So for me, the Touch Bar makes these contextual commands discoverable, and that’s worth more than the tactility of physical keys. Doesn’t matter if I can touch without looking, if I don’t know what the keys do. Besides, after a couple of years with the Touch Bar I feel like muscle memory seems to work about the same anyway, I never have to look for the mute button in Zoom for instance, I know where it is.
Thanks for challenging my comment, prompting me to (hopefully) clarify!
I do have touchbar envy! I tend not to look at my keyboard too much on desktop, but when on a laptop it's definitely in my peripheral vision and would hopefully encourage me to learn it's shortcuts. There's a lot of UX work involved to make it all work perfectly though. App's especially, shouldn't just use the touchbar, they should make it easier with visual in app reminders about what's down there. They should do this with the standard FN-keys too for us non-touchbar folk. I'm a big fan of having keyboard shortcuts shown on screen UI's.
There's no denying it can do more in than Fn-keys.
