The death of Apple's Touch Bar is long overdue

Physical keys rule!
By Brenda Stolyar  on 
The death of Apple's Touch Bar is long overdue
Goodbye forever, Touch Bar. I never liked you. Credit: zlata ivleva / mashable

I'm not going to get my hopes up, but it appears Apple may finally get rid of the stupid and much-loathed Touch Bar on its 2021 MacBook Pro.

According to trusted analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, Apple is planning to replace the Touch Bar featured on its current crop of MacBooks and, instead, revert back to physical keys (among other things) for the MacBook line. I like to think this long-requested change is due to the exact suggestion I made in my review of the 13-inch MacBook Pro last year. (Yes, that's me taking credit.)

Regardless, the Touch Bar is one of the most useless additions to the MacBook Pro, a feature Apple first foolishly introduced back in 2016. Sure it looks cool, but it's super unintuitive — adjusting things like volume and brightness requires extra taps, and it's not even optimized for all apps. What's more, unless you go through the process of tinkering with your MacBook's settings and customizing the Touch Bar, your life is going to be filled with a series of constant accidental triggers of Apple's other useless innovation: Siri.

Thankfully, I'm not the only one who feels this way. The minute the news broke, people flocked to Twitter to express their disdain for the purported death of this dumb feature.

I 100 percent agree that the Touch Bar is "garbage."

I told you, none of the third-party apps are even well optimized for it.

In addition to describing the Touch Bar as "garbage," it can also be categorized under "gimmicks."

See? I'm not the only one who hates that thing. Here's hoping 2021 brings one bit of good news: the death of the Touch Bar.

Topics Apple MacBook


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