Touch Bar Discontinued on New MacBooks After Seven Years (opens in new tab)

Customers: Give us a touch screen.

Apple: Look at this clunky mainframe terminal. Now here's the truly remarkable touch bar. It amazingly replaces keys you use, and it incredibly doesn't let you draw or use mobile apps.

Kudos to the marketing team. They made it work. People bought this laptop for the touch bar, and a few years later, many of the same people bought upgrades to remove the touch bar.

Many argue (and I agree) that they didn’t really try. They released a first version and then basically stopped. It was not iterated on to improve functionality (unless you want to count making it smaller to add an escape key). It was not brought to the desktop, nor to all laptops, so it fragmented their market.

Compare this to their horribly unreliable butterfly keyboard. They iterated on that design many times before scrapping it.

Apple is always slow to admit it's misconceptions.

Introduction of a two-button mouse took 21 years (and then they hid the 2nd button and was disabled by default).