Deeper dive: Were Touch Bar’s problems software rather than hardware?

The Touch Bar arrived in 2016 seemingly already pre-doomed, on a generation of machines that had a “we’ve run out of ideas” smell all around them. The arrow keys were reshaped, the keyboard got a slimming down, and even the beloved MagSafe wasn’t, in fact, safe. All of these changes would prove unpopular and get reverted in time, and the axe would eventually come for the Touch Bar, too. With an enormous benefit of hindsight, a decade after its arrival, and on the (rumored) eve of fully multitouch MacBooks, I wanted to look critically at the Touch Bar in more detail. I put a spicy title above this post, and while I’m not sure I can answer it in the affirmative, I feel I got surprisingly close to that. What did the Touch Bar do? The Touch Bar replaced the top row of the keyboard with a narrow touch screen and a Touch ID surface/​button on the right. The touch screen provided a constant virtual Esc key on the left, and the remainder could become one of a few things: app controls –…