On this week’s Gadget Lab David Pierce mentions that, while demoing the new MacBook Pro, he tapped an icon on the Touch Bar that triggered a menu to appear on screen, and he naturally when to touch and select an option — twice before realizing his error. To which the Apple rep laughed and said “don’t worry, everyone did this” without realizing how damning her remark was from a UX design perspective. (In her defense, neither did Pierce, since he doesn’t mention it in his writeup.)
As others have said, the Touch Bar is probably the most definitive evidence that Apple does not intend to make touch-screens Macs in the foreseeable future. So it’s pretty funny that real-world user experience with the Touch Bar may well be what pushes to Apple to relent and add a touch-screen to the next MacBook. (In whichever decade “the next MacBook” might be launched.)
Even if you still use the keyboard and trackpad for most things, it’s becoming more and more absurd for any device to have a screen you can not interact directly with. Look at how the next Nintendo console reportedly has a touch-screen even though it wasn’t demonstrated at all in the reveal video and the screen will be hidden inside a dock during half of its operation.
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