The Touch Bar on the MacBook Pro is a failure

I mentioned this the other day, but first-generation Apple products often fall short -- really short. And the Touch Bar on the new MacBook Pro's are just that. The Verge just released their review of the MBP with Touch Bar and basically said the Touch Bar is a glorified set of buttons. That's right. It's just the function buttons with a digital display. Anybody who has used a computer in the last decade has probably already learned the STANDARD keyboard shortcut keys which makes this Touch Bar seriously ineffective when moving from machine to machine and still maintaining your workflow.

A lot of the "tricks" of this Touch Bar also center around doing stuff with both hands when nobody would normally do that anyway. One glaring example used in the video above is the ability within Photoshop to change the cursor size while you're retouching. First, let's get this out of the way: no serious retoucher is doing it on a TRACKPAD (they are working off of a tablet). And secondly, if changing the cursor is so important, you would just set the pressure or angle of the pen brush to change with the stroke.

This whole video for the Touch Bar really felt like reaching for usefulness when there isn't any (yet). I have yet to see a way to use the Touch Bar that is both faster and more useful than even a mouse cursor and a keyboard. We'll see where we are a year from now...