Apple's 2016 MacBook Pro upgrades introduced the Touch Bar—an interesting piece of hardware that didn't quite make its way in the world. In fact, it was so unpopular amongst power users that the company removed the Touch Bar from its newest 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pro models, bringing back the traditional function keys.

The Touch Bar is still available on the 13-inch Macbook Pro (for now), but the biggest question still looms—can the Touch Bar improve productivity or is it just a gimmick as some users made it out to be?

What Is the Touch Bar?

For a long time, Microsoft and Google have been sold on the idea of putting touchscreens on laptops. Microsoft's own Surface Laptop has it, and Google's Chromebook Pixel had it too. Beyond these two, several laptops running Windows 10 or Chrome OS have displays that accept touch input as well.

On the other hand, Apple has long been against the idea of putting a touchscreen on computers. During the iPad announcement in 2010, Steve Jobs talked about how vertical touchscreens can be painful to use after a while, and will "make your arm fall off."

In recent times, Apple has warmed to the idea of touch screen computers, as per the iPad Pro with Smart Keyboard cover, which does require you to interact with a vertically mounted touchscreen.

Related: Apple Removed the MacBook Pro Touch Bar: Is It Finally Listening to Users?

Nonetheless, for the Mac, Apple stuck to its belief and built on an idea that Lenovo had toyed with years before. By putting a tiny strip of a touch screen right above the keyboard, Apple believes this is a better implementation of touch input on a computer, rather than making the entire display touch-enabled.

How Does the Touch Bar Work?

The Touch Bar dynamically changes functions depending on the app in the foreground. For example, when a Safari browser window is open it will show shortcuts for Back, Forward, New Tab, and more. Putting the focus on Finder (the file explorer) will show shortcuts for Quick Look, Tags, Share Sheet, and so on.

Because of its position on the top of the keyboard, it's technically easier to reach the Touch Bar than having to lift up your hand and touch the computer display.

A Control Strip is persistently shown in the right corner of the Touch Bar. By default, this includes Siri, Brightness, Volume, and Mute controls, but they can be swapped with control you prefer instead. I use Play/Pause, Screen Lock, Brightness, and Volume controls.

MacBook Pro Touch Bar Control Strip

Tapping the arrow button to the left of the Control Strip reveals the remaining functions you'll typically find on other Macs (like keyboard backlight and Mission Control). If you're wanting to use actual function keys, you can also press and hold the Fn button to show the F1 to F12 keys on the Touch Bar.

touch bar control strip traditional

In System Preferences > Keyboard, there are a few settings you can use to tweak the Touch Bar behavior, including keeping a fixed set of toggle keys (pictured above) instead of dynamic ones.

The Good Parts of the Touch Bar

Being a capacitive touchscreen running software made by Apple, you can trust that the Touch Bar will be accurate in responding to your taps. I seldom hit the wrong button and, for the most part, the animations and operation are smooth enough.

Enhanced Media Controls

youtube video playback touch bar

I am particularly fond of enhanced media playback controls on the Touch Bar. For instance, when playing a song on a music app, I can scrub to any part of the song without bringing the app to the foreground. Or, when a YouTube video is playing full screen, on either sides of the timeline you'll see a time elapsed as well as a time remaining counter.

Related: The MacBook Pro Touch Bar Sucks, So I Disabled It

And here's the most interesting part: if you have media playing in a browser tab, and Safari isn't even in the foreground, you can still play, pause, or scrub by clicking the media control button.

Specific App Functionality

google play music touchbar controls

In the Safari web browser, you'll see tiny webpage thumbnails in the middle. Many times, though, they are indistinguishable, so you can't really tell which tab is which. You can quickly move between tabs by sliding your finger over these tiny thumbnails.

safari browser tabs touch bar

For people using Apple's Photos app, I can imagine scrubbing through photos with a similar glide of the finger could be useful.

If you open the Calculator, commonly-used arithmetic symbols (like addition, subtraction, division, multiplication, and percentage) occupy the Touch Bar. I got used to tapping on the Touch Bar when doing long calculations.

calculator touch bar

And there are some tips worth following to make the MacBook Pro Touch Bar more useful.

The Bad Parts of the Touch Bar

The first gripe I have with the Touch Bar is its default brightness—it feels low when you're sitting underneath a bright light source. To make matters worse, the matte finish makes content even harder to see in such lighting conditions. Unfortunately, there's still no way to change the Touch Bar brightness, despite it being released several years ago.

The next problem is that the Touch Bar goes to sleep if you don't use the trackpad or keyboard for roughly a minute. Meaning, the computer display timeout and the Touch Bar display timeout aren't synced.

Remember how I loved seeing the time elapsed or time remaining counters during full-screen video playback? Well, if you're watching a video past a minute, the Touch Bar isn't helpful in showing you that information unless you touch the trackpad. As of today, there is no way to change the Touch Bar screen timeout either.

It Doesn't Add Much Extra Functionality

Most importantly, barring the niche use cases I talked about above, the Touch Bar in its current form does not dramatically improve the usability of a Mac. For example, when using Finder, you'll see a shortcut for Quick Look. The problem is that Quick Look is faster to access by simply hitting the space bar rather than raising your index finger towards the Touch Bar. There's a New Tab shortcut when Safari's open, but my brain is hardwired to use the Cmd + T shortcut already.

finder touch bar

For Apple's own apps, the Touch Bar just ends up showing elements that are either a familiar keyboard shortcut away or easily visible on the computer display. For example, when manipulating images in Preview, you're presented with the Rotate Left and Rotate Right shortcuts, among others. Again, using the Cmd + R keyboard shortcut just felt easier to use.

preview touch bar

The keyboard autocorrect suggestions are probably the most pointless feature on the Touch Bar. When you type, you're typically looking at the screen, not underneath. There's almost never a time when you'll comprehend those autocorrect suggestions to be able to use them. The only silver lining? One-click access to your frequently-used emojis, which is certainly nicer than using the complicated Control + Cmd + Space keyboard shortcut.

keyboard suggestions touch bar

Finally, depending on which version MacBook you're using, there's some re-training required when using the Esc key. On the current MacBook Pro 13-inch model, the Esc key is a dedicated key, whereas on models prior to it, the Esc key is a virtual button in the leftmost corner of the Touch Bar.

emoji touch bar

Even for repetitive tasks, like changing the screen brightness or volume, you have to look at the virtual buttons before using them—something you didn't have to do with the tactile nature of physical keys in the past.

The Ugly Parts of the Touch Bar

The Touch Bar experience has not been entirely a bug-free one for me. And although I've faced only a couple of freezes up to now, others have reported more frequent occurrences of buggy behavior.

Since the Touch Bar is software based, and it's used to control useful functions like volume, brightness, and media playback, a Touch Bar crash can put certain aspects of macOS completely out of reach.

Should You Buy or Avoid the Touch Bar?

Currently, Apple sells three models of the MacBook Pro. Only one of them (the 13-inch model) includes the Touch Bar, whereas the 14-inch and 16-inch models have the familiar physical function keys instead. I can confidently say that the Touch Bar is not a reason to avoid the 13-inch model, it looks cool and can be customized to your liking. You'll get the hang of it in due time.

However, if you were hoping that the Touch Bar will drastically improve your workflow, then I'm afraid you'll be left disappointed. In its current form, it's a cool, experimental feature at best. If you're looking to use the traditional key functionality instead of the Touch Bar functionality adapting to each app, you can use the default key setup. It has the same functions as the traditional physical keyboard row on a MacBook.

For some, the learning curve to use the Touch Bar instead of keyboard shortcuts or the mouse pointer is, unfortunately, too high.

Upgrade or Downgrade?

Whether you should buy the MacBook Pro with a Touch Bar ultimately comes down to personal preference. If you're buying directly from Apple, your only current option to avoid the Touch Bar is to update to a 14-inch MacBook Pro (which costs around $600 more), or downgrade to an M1 MacBook Air (which is $200 cheaper but lacks power).

However, if you're going for a used MacBook Pro, I wouldn't hold off on a MacBook due to the Touch Bar only. You'll most probably end up using it with the traditional key functionality, which isn't too bad after all.