Mac · Reviewed

Touch Bar is a poor substitute for physical function keys

Raised by 279 people over 17 years (2010–2026), in 12 of them.

What people report

2010-01
the bottom touch bar was an absolutely terrible idea; I don't know how that made it through dogfood testing
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2017-11
My guess is the Touchbar is a UX experiment
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2019-03
after the MacBook keyboard touchbar thing I’ve started using a chrome slate tablet
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2020-06
And when it did work, it was hard to use.
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2026-10
I also always felt that the Touchbar would have been a much better idea on the bottom of the screen, rather than on my keyboard.
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Principle

Tactile feedback and eyes-free operation

People report that the flat touch strip has no physical edges or travel, so touch typists can no longer find Esc, function, volume or brightness keys by feel and must look down.

A fix

Restore physical Esc and function keys, or at minimum add tactile ridges or haptic confirmation to fixed key positions. Keep any context-sensitive controls in addition to those keys, not as a replacement for them.

Grouping, principle and fix drafted with Claude and reviewed by Justusability. Counts are people whose comment Claude labelled a usability complaint about this issue; see Method for how, and its limits. Something wrong here?

All 319 source comments