![]() Placing it where they did means you have to either move your hands or crane your neck to actually view what's on it in normal use, and making it the same height as the function keys it replaced means that about all you use it for are replacement buttons and slide controls. So I'd argue that those are design flaws. ![]() Not to mention that its proximity to the top row of the keyboard meant that it's far too easy to accidentally hit the edge of the touch screen and do random things. It's too narrow to really do anything else that might work on a touch screen like zooming or rotating gestures. It does two things "better" than just function keys: it updates to show what the keys do, and it lets you slide along it. To actually use it, you need to essentially take your hands off the keyboard, look at the bar, and then carefully press the elements on it.Īnd it's not sufficiently more useful than regular function keys. When using the keyboard, your hands will tend to block parts of the Touch Bar. Remember, the Touch Bar is part of the keyboard. It is if you position the touch screen in such a way that it's hard to see. Its almost impossible to use a touchscreen without looking too but thats hardly a design fault. Had they put the touch bar above the existing function key row (even if that meant making the absurdly oversized trackpad smaller) instead of in place of it, the touch bar would have been a much better design, and people would have loved it. The keyboard-based controls were an okay compromise. Now, it's all about making laptops ultra-thin, no matter what you lose in the process. There once was a time when Apple had actual physical buttons on the side of the screen for these things. It's not the modal nature so much as the fact that the modal nature caused you to lose functionality that should never be modal, like volume control and screen brightness. In reality.the model nature meant I was constantly switching back to get basic volume control. I was quite interested in it and thought it would be great to use at first, including usage on things like Logic Pro X etc. It's the model nature, not fact of being a touch screen, that really killed its use for me. Dieter Rams, a significant influence on Ive, compiled 10 principles for "Good Design." Number three was "good design is aesthetic." Apple seems to have remembered numbers two and four: "good design makes a product useful" and "good design makes a product understandable." And professional users can afford to pay for the top-of-the-range devices that are more profitable to Apple. After all, you're liable to lose professional customers - architects, musicians, film-makers - if they can't plug their laptops into external monitors. But there is merit in sometimes listening to your customers, particularly when the pendulum has swung too far away from function and towards form. Perhaps this would have happened under Ive, but Evans Hankey, who now heads the industrial design team, has overseen plenty of other tweaks that seem to indicate a change of philosophy. ![]() Gone is the so-called "butterfly" keyboard, which rendered the device thinner but whose clunky mechanics made typing more difficult farewell too to the Touch Bar, a touch sensitive strip display along the top of the keyboard which could show functions for the web browser one moment and mixing tools for music apps the next, but was almost impossible to use without looking back are HDMI ports, which let you plug the computer into high-definition displays without using an adapter. Headline features released five years ago under Ive's aegis have been scrapped. From the iPhone to Apple TV to the Macbook, gone are the days of "The user be damned, we think this looks cool." Monday's unveiling of a new Macbook Pro lineup of laptops provides evidence of the shift. Since he stepped down as chief designer at the end of 2019, Apple seems to have reemphasized function. Bloomberg: There was a sense that, without the moderating influence of the late Steve Jobs, perhaps Jony Ive started to prioritize aesthetics a little too much.
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