My first MacBook was a mid-2011 MacBook Pro. I still use it every day. I have fallen hard for the promise of the Touch Bar and actually look forward to upgrading eventually.

Out of curiosity, for what use case?

Nothing strange or even very interesting, just two general things.

First is that it should allow applications to reduce the number of persistent UI elements they draw to screen without actually losing context.

Second is it will let me jettison the cognitive load of remembering so many application-specific keyboard shortcuts.

I don't think the first will happen, since there are still millions of Macs in the wild (and many models still in production) which will not have the touchbar. Thus, the easiest path will be to simply duplicate on-screen functionality (or expose functionality already hidden behind menus).

That's naive.

This, obviously:

https://youtu.be/E7Or2M7XUb4

https://github.com/avatsaev/touchbar_nyancat

I would expect there will be more third party integration for the Touch Bar in the near future. Slack maybe?

Have you seen this?

http://railsware.com/blog/2016/11/07/touch-bar-interface-for...

In other area, Apple offers discount for education sector, it may boost some interest to get Macbook over other branding.

They've offered that for literally decades. Competitors (e.g. Dell) also offer discounts. I don't think that's a huge factor, especially in November, which is off-cycle for EDU purchases.

In our country, there is no Dell across all the schools. It's Apple, Lenovo, Asus and HP.

I'm not commented that count for November but for more growth in the future which is on sale twice a year.