When I am at a desk, the lid is closed so both TouchID and touch-anything effectively don’t matter, including any display information. In fact, I am worried about applications gradually putting information only on the Touch Bar that cannot be found anywhere else.
Perhaps they could have placed a TouchID button on the SIDE of the laptop (usable when open or closed). And hopefully the ENTIRE Touch Bar display is also available as a global window ON the screen so that it is still able to display/activate things when you are lid-closed connected to an external display.
The real shock though is that a lot of these changes show a lack of usability testing. Like, “10 minutes in the hallway” level of testing. How much serious work can actually be accomplished with such tiny touch keys that require you to look down at them, constantly changing and mostly unpredictable? Before ever creating new hardware for this, they should have enhanced macOS to provide an on-screen version of this ever-changing toolbar to encourage more universal support from developers and work out the usability kinks. Instead, now they’re stuck: this thing is in your laptop, with all its flaws.
Perhaps they could have placed a TouchID button on the SIDE of the laptop (usable when open or closed). And hopefully the ENTIRE Touch Bar display is also available as a global window ON the screen so that it is still able to display/activate things when you are lid-closed connected to an external display.
The real shock though is that a lot of these changes show a lack of usability testing. Like, “10 minutes in the hallway” level of testing. How much serious work can actually be accomplished with such tiny touch keys that require you to look down at them, constantly changing and mostly unpredictable? Before ever creating new hardware for this, they should have enhanced macOS to provide an on-screen version of this ever-changing toolbar to encourage more universal support from developers and work out the usability kinks. Instead, now they’re stuck: this thing is in your laptop, with all its flaws.