Macbook Pro Touchbar Ergonomics

I have to rant.

I got one of the Macbook Pro 15” 2016s that were on sale recently at B&H Photo; it was hard to pass up $700 off the standard price for the MBP and my 2013 was a little long in the tooth (plus, I could set it up as a build server!)

So, the machine is fast, the new SSDs are much faster, the screen is nice, the keyboard is… acceptable (only acceptable – I hear the 2017s are better), all that, but the touchbar is an unmitigated disaster.

In no particular order:

• It is impossible to hit escape reliably. The escape key sometimes moves depending on the app, for one. The left side of the bar is supposed to consistently be escape but it doesn’t work like that. This key is kind of important, as I use Emacs. To work around this I remapped Caps Lock to escape just so I had a key I could hit, but now my muscle memory is different between computers.
• The touchbar turns off after not being used, so it deactivates – so you go to press something on it without looking, and it doesn’t work.
• No physical keys and minimal pressure to activate, which means that it’s easy to accidentally hit keys.

It can be made better, but it can’t be made good.

I use BetterTouchTool to rebind the touchbar – my default is now something like this:

Note that everything on the right side is informative only and doesn’t do anything when tapped. For some reason, I seemed to be accidentally tapping the touchbar on the right side. It’s nice having the current sound / time / battery indicator.

When the command key is pressed, it switches to some sliders for easy changing of brightness / volumee:

This is about as good as I can get it, but it still stinks. It’s an okay idea, and I would have put up with it if they had left the standard function keys in place, but as a replacement instead of a supplement for the top row of keys, it just does not work that well. I just do not understand how this got past any developer that was testing the prototype.

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