Many MacBook Pro owners still lament the passing of the Touch Bar – the touch-sensitive strip of dynamic icons that sat above the keyboard. The Flexbar is a third-party attempt to revive the idea.
Instead of integrating the Touch Bar into the laptop itself, the Flexbar is an external peripheral that plugs into a PC or laptop’s USB-C port. And yes, that does mean it can work with Windows systems as well as Macs. Indeed, the company claims it’s compatible with any USB-enabled device, including iPads and phones, although it’s more limited on mobile devices.
Much like the Touch Bar, the Flexbar is designed to be application sensitive. Open Photoshop, for example, and the display might change to a selection of brushes to choose from. Open Spotify, and it switches to volume controls and skip track buttons.
ENIAC, the company behind the Flexbar, also seems to have learned from some of Apple’s mistakes. Instead of tightly controlling what you can do with the touch strip, it’s making everything user-customizable, so you can pick and choose which buttons appear when you open a particular application.
It will also offer a plugin marketplace, meaning you can download a series of predefined shortcuts for popular apps such as the Adobe suite, web browsers and the Microsoft Office apps without having to create all the shortcuts for yourself.
For more advanced users, there’s macro recording, allowing you to record repetitive keyboard/mouse click sequences so that you can perform repetitive tasks at the dab of a virtual button.
Flexbar Specs And Price
The Flexbar is a thin strip of a display, measuring 250 x 7mm, which is roughly the same size as the Touch Bar display was. For comparison, a MacBook Pro keyboard measures around 280mm wide. The AMOLED screen has a resolution of 2,170 x 60 pixels and it, of course, offers full touch support.
The device weighs 72g, which means you’d barely notice it in a laptop bag, although the addition of the accompanying stand doubles the weight.
It’s currently being offered via Kickstarter at a variety of price points. The cheapest way to get your hands on it at the time of writing was with the Founders Edition, which costs $119, excluding shipping. The company will ship to multiple countries, including the U.S., Canada and the U.K.
The company estimates that the product will be delivered in February 2025, which is a relatively short turnaround for a Kickstarter project.
The big question is whether the concept of the touch strip has had its day, coming two years after Apple stopped making MacBooks with the Touch Bar.
There are now several similar alternatives on the market, including the Stream Deck range. The Stream Deck+, for example, offers eight customizable buttons with LCD screen beneath them, as well as a touch strip and dials for controlling various applications.
The recently launched Logitech MX Creative Console also offers a customizable LCD keypad with nine different buttons, along with a separate dial that allows you to make fine adjustments in software such as Adobe Photoshop and Premiere Pro.
The Touch Bar was unique when Apple first introduced it to MacBook Pro laptops. The Flexbar, on the other hand, is entering a highly competitive market.
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