SEPTEMBER 2020 MACWORLD 17Macs. (I’d
suggest that the
“classic” Touch
Bar could use a
little bit of love,
but macOS Big
Sur offers no
real Touch Bar
improvements,
so I doubt any
are forthcoming.)
But it seems
more likely to
me that the
company has to choose between two
paths for the Touch Bar: mend it or end it.
A WIDGET OPPORTUNITY?
If the Touch Bar is going to remain and
evolve, it needs to get away from being
just a keyboard row. Think taller, with
room for more information and more
room for fingers to move and swipe in
two dimensions.
This year, along with Macs running on
Apple silicon, Apple is releasing a unified
feature across Mac, iPad, and iPhone: A
new style of widgets, glanceable pieces of
information from the operating system and
third-party apps. iPhone users will be able
to put widgets on their home screens. iPad
users can stash them in the sidebar on the
first page of their home screens. And Mac
users...have to click on the clock in the
menu bar in order to temporarily reveal
them within Notification Center.
It’s better than nothing, of course, but
how about letting Widgets run somewhere
else? If the Touch Bar was expanded to be
one row taller, it could display small and
medium-sized widgets. If Apple embraced
the Touch Bar as a second display, rather
than a screen the size of a keyboard row,
it could become the place for quick,
glanceable and swipeable information. I’d
wager more people would use Touch Bar
widgets than use the existing Touch
Bar—and they wouldn’t get in the way of
the rest of the Mac interface.OR END THE EXPERIMENT
Then there’s the other option: Give up.
Consider the Touch Bar an interesting
latter-day Intel era experiment to bringWidgets in macOS 11 Big Sur.