In October 2016, Apple announced its new MacBook Pro computers to much fanfare, a number of which featured the long-awaited OLED touch bars that replaced the old function keys. Apple appears to remain very impressed with this feature, but not everybody, and particularly not former employee Chuq Von Rospack, feels the same way.
Von Rospach, who worked as a writer at Apple for around 17 years, recently explained in a blog post that Apple is forcing people who are buying a top-of-the-range MacBook to fork out more money for the Touch Bar, regardless of whether they want it.
He said: “The current [MacBook Pro] line forces users to pay for the Touch Bar on the higher end devices whether they want it or not, and that’s a cost users shouldn’t need to pay for a niche technology without a future.”
After Rospach upgraded to an iMac 5K from his previous MacBook Pro, he discovered that not having a Touch Bar didn’t bother him at all and that the absence of the Touch ID fingerprint sensor mattered “a lot less” than he previously thought.
He recommends that Apple should either launch more laptops which don’t include the Touch Bar or expand the Touch ID and Touch Bar to the whole Mac range via a new detachable keyboard.
Does the Touch Bar have a future? Rospach says he doesn’t know and he is sure Apple doesn’t know either. He suggests that Apple became so infatuated with the Touch Bar idea that it lost sight of the reality that, “Apple sells solutions to problems, not technologies.”
Rospach’s article was so popular that he subsequently wrote a second blog post with more views on the future of the Touch ID and Touch Bar, reaffirming his conviction that Apple will build a keyboard with Touch-Bar functionality in the future.