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# Vision Pro, Meet Touch Bar
- URL: https://macanorak.com/vision-pro-meet-touch-bar/
- Published: 2026-09-16T17:43:48.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-18T07:43:26.000Z
- Description: Apple keeps building the future, then losing its nerve to finish it
- Author: MacAnorak
- Tags: Track Record

When Apple released the MacBook Pro with Touch Bar, it was something that genuinely excited me. I had one. I saw its potential (I’ve even tried to revisit using the Touch Bar interface via a [different method](https://www.macworld.com/article/3032897/flexbar-review.html?ref=macanorak.com) more recently but that might be a post for a different day.)

Apple didn’t undersell the Touch Bar. At the 2016 launch, [the company called it a revolutionary interface](https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2016/10/apple-unveils-groundbreaking-new-macbook-pro/?ref=macanorak.com) — a dynamic contextual control surface that adapted to whatever application you were using.

After the launch, Craig Federighi met with Marques Brownlee for an [exclusive interview](https://www.macrumors.com/2016/10/28/craig-federighi-touch-bar-interview/?ref=macanorak.com). When Brownlee asked him,

> *“Touch Bar will get better with time, right? What are you most looking forward to seeing, maybe in a year from now, when we have these and developers get their hands on it? What kind of stuff should we expect to see?"*

Federighi responded,

> “*I’m really excited about what we've seen so far. I think, of course, a lot of people will do buttons and sliders, but I think there will be this next wave where people say, "hey, this is like custom hardware”… It's going to be great, but I'm really excited about how fast it's already happening.*”

Apple’s [developer documentation](https://developer.apple.com/documentation/AppKit/touch-bar?ref=macanorak.com) described the Touch Bar as providing dynamic, contextual controls for the frontmost application, and devs were given tools to create their own controls. The framework supported buttons, pickers, sliders, scrubbers, text fields and other interactive elements. Apple even provided gesture-recognition and customisation APIs.

And then… not much happened.

![apple-macbookpro-3.jpg](https://macanorak.com/content/images/2026/09/apple-macbookpro-3-1.jpg)

Apple could have said: *look, we know this is different. Give us a few years and we'll make it brilliant.* They didn’t.

What might have happened if Apple *had* spent the next few years making the Touch Bar genuinely good? Deeper app integrations; system-wide interactions; haptics; better contextual prediction; making it far more customisable? We’ll never know. Instead, the Touch Bar basically became a series of virtual buttons that sometimes changed.

The Touch Bar came at an interesting time for Apple. This was the era of the now-ridiculed butterfly keyboard (those keyboards were indeed a nightmare — I had a MacBook Pro that needed its keyboard replaced three times). It also came during the Intel era, in the midst of Apple's least successful run of Mac design decisions. The MacBook Pro was getting thinner and thinner. Apple seemed obsessed with removing things — ports, keys that worked properly. The Touch Bar fit that era perfectly in all honesty — something removed, dressed up as something added.

Then came Apple Silicon. When Apple redesigned the 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro around the M1 Pro and M1 Max chips in October 2021, it quietly dropped the Touch Bar and brought back a full row of physical function keys. But the cheaper 13-inch model kept going (M1 in 2020, M2 in 2022) Touch Bar and all, right through two more chip generations, before Apple finally discontinued it in October 2023.

Ars Technica's [retrospective](https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/10/its-the-end-of-the-line-for-the-13-inch-macbook-pro-and-the-touch-bar/?ref=macanorak.com) on the Touch Bar details how third-party developers largely ignored it, while users complained about losing physical function keys. Indeed, the first sign of the Touch Bar's impending death was the [physical Escape key coming back](https://www.macrumors.com/how-to/bring-back-escape-key-pre-2019-touch-bar-macs/?ref=macanorak.com). Then Apple stopped putting Touch Bars into new Macs. And by 2023, the last Touch Bar Mac disappeared. Apple didn't replace it with another vision of how this thing could work. It just said: *here's a row of function keys again — let’s go back to your regular keyboard.* Apple introduced the idea of the Touch Bar and then didn't really bother to find out what it could become.

Apple is, I sense, on a similar trajectory with the Vision Pro. It spent years developing an entirely new computing platform. It introduced it with an elaborate product launch. Then it has seemed ambivalent about fully building the future it had announced.

*"Today marks the beginning of a new era for computing,"* Tim Cook said at the [Vision Pro unveiling](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GYkq9Rgoj8E&ref=macanorak.com). *"Just as the Mac introduced us to personal computing, and iPhone introduced us to mobile computing, Apple Vision Pro introduces us to spatial computing."*

![images.jpeg](https://macanorak.com/content/images/2026/09/images.jpeg)

Apple boldly talked about the device as a *new kind of computer*, not merely a fancy VR headset (which was somewhat undermined by Cook saying he used it to [watch the entire third season of Ted Lasso](https://fortune.com/2023/09/18/tim-cook-ted-lasso-apple-vision-pro?ref=macanorak.com) — hardly the sound of trumpets heralding *“a new era for computing”*). They built a huge spaceship with the Vision Pro, complete with a NASA-esque Space Marshmallow [carrying case](https://appleinsider.com/articles/24/02/16/apple-vision-pro-travel-case-review-too-expensive-precision-cushioning?ref=macanorak.com) — but haven’t really taken us anywhere in it (watching Ted Lasso notwithstanding).

The killer application for many people has been using the Vision Pro with a Mac and having multiple screens floating around you (genuinely useful — people still rave about this feature). But where are the regular *look what you can do with this thing* campaigns? Where is Apple showing ordinary people discovering uses nobody had anticipated? Where is the enormous developer push that would make this feel like the beginning of a platform rather than the launch of a product? The effort hasn’t felt proportionate to Apple’s “new era for computing” rhetoric.

Apple has supported the Vision Pro, no doubt. [visionOS](https://developer.apple.com/visionos/?ref=macanorak.com) has continued to receive substantial updates, and Apple has added things such as spatial widgets, spatial scenes, new APIs, improved ‘Personas’, enterprise capabilities and other features. Apple continues to describe visionOS as an active platform for developers. But there's a hell of a difference between *supporting a product* and *believing in a platform*. Apple has *maintained* Vision Pro. What it hasn't really done is make the platform feel strategically alive.

Vision Pro isn’t dead yet. But the pattern I'm describing is about what happens in the years leading up to a product’s death. [Earlier this month](https://www.macrumors.com/2026/09/01/vision-pro-layoffs-were-broader/?ref=macanorak.com), Mark Gurman reported that Apple had cut around 100 jobs from the Vision Products Group, including people working on gaming, immersive video, security, audio, Siri integration, testing and visionOS. The company has reportedly [shifted resources](https://9to5mac.com/2026/06/03/john-ternus-scaled-back-apples-vision-products-roadmap-report?ref=macanorak.com) towards its smart-glasses projects, while the future of a new Vision Pro has become increasingly uncertain.

Gurman also reported that people inside the Vision Pro team had spent months lobbying Apple’s now CEO, John Ternus, to keep faith with the platform. According to his reporting, Ternus had been sceptical of Vision Pro from the start, seeing it as too unwieldy and costly to reach a mass audience. Cook championed the product, for sure. But Cook isn't running Apple anymore.

The first generation of spatial computing was always likely to have teething problems (in this case: expensive, heavy, socially awkward and unfamiliar). That’s what first-generation products are for. Apple hasn't historically expected its first version to get everything right. It has historically been really good at iteration — for example, the iPod became the mini, then the nano, then the touch. The iPhone's iterations speak for themselves.

Apple hasn't only been willing to iterate instant-hit products either. The original Apple Watch had [mixed reviews](https://www.businessinsider.com/history-of-apple-watch-smartwatch-fitbit-wearable-fitness-facebook-2021-6?ref=macanorak.com) and there was no obvious answer to "*why do I need this?*” Apple kept going anyway, and [Series 2's pivot toward fitness, GPS, and water resistance](https://www.theregister.com/2017/05/12/apple%5Fwatch/?ref=macanorak.com) gave it a much clearer purpose.

So Apple has iterated through real failure before. Which makes it harder to explain why other products don’t get the same treatment. Apple seems increasingly willing to launch experimental products without committing to the long, messy process of making them good.

The Touch Bar was an ambitious new interface with very limited iteration and eventual abandonment. The Vision Pro is an enormously ambitious computing platform that has been technically maintained but now has a very uncertain strategic future.

With the Touch Bar, the story became: *look, here's this thing we're calling revolutionary.* And then: *fuck it, never mind*. I suspect the same thing will happen with the Vision Pro.