First introduced with the MacBook Pro in 2016, it was not just an input method but also a work of art.
Touch Bar was the Best Input Method that was Extremely Customizable on MacBook Pro – then it was Gone…
Though I mostly keep silent about it, I will never forgive Apple for removing the Touch Bar. It was the best feature on MacBook Pro, and Apple took it away.
Sadly, the company didn’t give anyone any reason for it either. Though rumor has it Apple removed it due to technical challenges and was adding to the overall cost of the MacBook Pro.
When the Touch Bar was removed back in 2021 with the 14-inch MacBook Pro, it was replaced with a row of functions keys. Do you know for how long the function keys have been around? For over 50 years.
Rather than make the beautiful Touch Bar even better, somehow one of the most innovative companies in the world took a massive u-turn and brought back keys that have been around for decades.
The Touch Bar was absolutely genius. It changed with every app – if developers put some work into it – and it was super customizable, too. This means you could add buttons to it and make it truly yours.
You could literally add a dedicated ‘Screenshot’ button to it, a task that otherwise requires you to press three keys on the keyboard at once. Touch Bar was designed to save you precious time.
When typing away, it would show you word suggestions and even allow you to view and enter emoji with just a button press – no need to press that awful Command+Control+Spacebar key combination.
When using an app like Safari, you were able to switch between tabs, too. You even get a small preview of the website on the Touch Bar.
The thing that made the Touch Bar extremely weird was how out of place it looked, yet so wonderful because it added to the overall value to the MacBook Pro.
It made the MacBook Pro a joy to use.
In fact, I held on to my M1 MacBook Pro a little longer than usual because buying something else meant giving up on the bar completely.
Eventually, it did work out for me with the M3 MacBook Air, but I rather have that thin OLED strip on the top of the keyboard rather than a boring bunch of function keys any time of the day.
