The Touch Bar is back, sort of… and it looks terrible
Does anyone miss the MacBook Pro Touch Bar so much that they need it again in almost some form? The answer would be yes if you talk to Eniac, a small company that just reinvented the not-quite-iconic Touch Bar as a Flex beam which can be used with the Mac, iPad, Android and even your Windows PC.
Apple introduced the Touch Bar on MacBook Pros in 2016. It was as close as a MacBook would ever get to a touchscreen display. In practice, you often touched the Touch Bar, which was embedded along the top edge of the keyboard, while looking at the touch-sensitive MacBook Pro screen. The TouchBar was almost magically contextualdisplay functions change depending on the app. However, the loss of the function buttons and the Power/TouchID button annoyed many hardcore MacBook Pro users. And Apple, perhaps sensing it had gone too far, did away with the Touch Bar when it introduced its first Apple Silicon MacBook Pro laptops in 2022.
I lamented the loss and “innate serendipity” of the Touch Bar, but I also understood the Touch Bar’s somewhat limited usefulness and remember how that OLED screen remained untouched for weeks.
Few, not even me, saw the need for a new Touch Bar and certainly not one that sits outside the system.
As Eniac envisioned and is now being offered for $119 on Kickstarter, the new Touch Bar, a so-called Flexbar, is an aluminum bar with a 10-inch 2K OLED display on one side. It looks just as adaptive as the original and even features haptic feedback. But it’s a thick strip that should sit on top of the space between your keyboard and laptop screen.
That it lies there awkwardly while also being connected to power via the USB-C port as you touch and swipe it seems inelegant at best and certainly not something that would ever come out of, say, Apple’s industrial design studio. At least there’s a magnetic stand to hold the Flexbar in place, but that just makes it stick out from the keyboard even more.
If someone wanted to add something to a MacBook so badly, wouldn’t they just choose an iPad? Likewise, many Windows 11 users enjoy touchscreen laptops; why do they need another touchscreen interface underneath that finger-friendly screen?
What Eniac’s engineers may be missing here is the appeal of the original Touch Bar, at least in part because it was integrated into the MacBook Pro chassis. That made it subtle in the best way and allowed you to use it or casually ignore it. I don’t see any way to ignore the chunky, aluminum Flexbar.
Eniac clearly sees things differently. The portable design could be a bonus as it means one Flexbar can be linked to numerous systems. Moreover, Eniac is clear why they created the Flexbar. From the Kickstarter page:
“Discontinuing the original Touch Bar didn’t mean the concept was flawed; it simply hadn’t been pushed far enough to reach its full potential. There’s something in itself that’s undeniable: the potential for a customizable, adaptive interface being able to streamline workflows was huge.”
Flexbar leans heavily on customizability and macros; it seems just as functional and customizable as the original Touch Bar. But I still don’t see the MacBook Pro crowd adopting it. It may find more fans among people who want to use it alongside Windows systems, iPads and Android tablets. At $119 when shipping starts in 2025, it could be so cheap that people will say, “What the heck, I’ll give it up already.”
Still, I wouldn’t call this a Touch Bar replacement, as that’s kind of an insult to the elegant design of the original.
