- First, this suggests development of the feature has either stopped completely or been moved to a different cadence (perhaps Apple will dust it off and reintroduce it in a decade when it needs to pop a little PR dazzle into a future hardware release).
- Secondly, it suggests that the effective market failure of the feature means Apple has diverted resources elsewhere, including testing resources. Because a flaw as widely reported as this should have showed up in testing.
- Finally, it suggests another possibility: that even Apple’s own test teams aren’t making much use of what Touch Bar provides. It’s plausible to speculate that this is because many of the features the Touch Bar supports are now provided by Tahoe’s somewhat smarter Siri, Shortcuts, and Apple Intelligence. In this case, it hints that testers were looking far more closely at those new features than legacy tools they weren’t so interested in, including the Touch Bar.
This grim scenario may generate a little resentment among the small cohort of MacBook Pro owners who acquired that product specifically for the Touch Bar, but I don’t think that will have been the main motivation for many of them. All the same, when you drop thousands of dollars on a Mac you should be able to expect everything to work for a good long time, particularly a feature Apple evangelized so heavily when selling the product to you.
The one definite signal this particular problem sends is that Apple’s Touch Bar has been deprecated. I imagine it would already be discontinued were it not part of the hardware, and someone in a budget-handling position in Cupertino probably wishes Apple could cease all support for it; but can’t without denting its hard-won reputation for building products that work for years.
Can there be a future for the Touch Bar? Perhaps. I’d quite like it to be reintroduced as an app for iPhones and iPads that Mac users could deploy as an additional control interface for complex tasks in creative apps, for example. But is it actually worth the effort that would require? I’ll ask Siri that question once it gets smart enough to maybe answer it sometime next year.
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