Can anyone explain why the Touch Bar was discontinued?

I was one of those people who hates the Touchbar especially since it replaced the actual physical function keys. The original 2016 & 2017 models even had the ESC key as a virtual key on the Touchbar which is kind of an important key to have available at all times, but when the touchar malfunctions or while in Safe Mode, there was no ESC key available...Apple fixed this on later models by making the ESC key a physical key again.

Perhaps if they added the Touchbar above the function keys I would feel different, but I doubt it. While I can see the Touchbar being useful in a few small edge cases, I never saw anything actually take real advantage of the Touchbar in any meaningful way. In fact, having inconsistent locations for the default items (brightness & volume...varies when on the lock screen and when logged in), plus having to move my finger over after initially pressing the brightness/volume to raise/lower is annoying.

While entering the login password, the Touchbar displays a virtual "Login" button. I don't understand it except it is Apple's attempt to try to make the bar look useful. It is much easier to just press the "Return" key to submit the password than move my hand to the Touchbar to touch the virtual "Login" button to submit the password, or just use the Trackpad to click the "next" arrow.

Being a hardware person, I see it is just more complexity and something else which will fail causing an expensive repair since the Touchbar is not replaceable by itself (at least with official Apple repairs).

BTW, I thought I had read that Apple brought back the Touchbar at least on some of the M2 MBPros.

Just my 2 cent perspective.

This is primarily a user-to-user support forum; other Apple users like you. We don't have access to unpublished information from Apple and to the best of my knowledge they haven't made any public statements.

My own observation is that it didn't seem to catch on and wasn't a popular option. I felt like I was in the minority that did really like. I miss it but not a big deal. Really glad that Touch ID didn't go away.

MacSince84 wrote:

I, like you, think it is a fantastic and unique addition to the platform, but alas I guess we are in the minority.

I, too, loved it. But, it wasn't especially popular, as noted. I also wonder if it added to the manufacturing cost so, removing it might have been a way to keep prices down and still make money.