To Touch Bar or Not to Touch Bar

Yesterday Apple updated their MacBook Pro lineup and so I decided to post a quick update on my experience with the Touch Bar. If you’re trying to decide if you should get the MacBook Pro with or without the Touch Bar, this is my quick feedback after using it for nearly 6 months, it’s worth getting.

Since I got the MacBook Pro I’ve been experimenting with it a lot, customizing it to my liking and trying to understand how to make best use of it. After 6 months, I’ve basically resorted to using it as a secondary display, and I like that. For the past few months I’ve been using my Touch Bar with the setup you can see in the image above. I have half of the Touch Bar working as a stock ticker keeping me posted constantly on how my stocks are doing, while the other half dedicated to my music controls and an emoji shortcut button. The area further to the right of that can’t be customized and includes Apple mandatory shortcuts like volume control, screen brightness, spotlight shortcut etc..

I’ve customized my Touch Bar to permanently display the above information in nearly every application since I realized I wasn’t using the default shortcuts that apps would display. Some programs like FaceTime I leave it at the applications default display since I like the information thats displayed, in FaceTime’s case the amount of time I’ve been on the call for. I actually like how customizable the Touch Bar is although I’m using the third part software BetterTouchTool to be able to do that.

So if you’re trying to decide if you should get the Touch Bar version of the MacBook Pro or not, I’d personally recommend you get the Touch Bar version. Other than making your laptop look a lot more futuristic and different from the MacBook you’re replacing (I’m assuming you already own a MacBook), the Touch Bar does have functionality and you’ll love the ability to customize it. Want it to display the name of the song you’re listening to? You can do that. Want it to have custom shortcuts? You can do that. It’s really flexible so if you like to tinker and personalize stuff you’ll love it.