Complain about 16GB RAM limitation, unpredictable battery life, useless touch gimmick, and then suggest Surface Book as an alternative which: has the same 16GB RAM limitation for the same reason; pioneered unpredictable battery life; and compromises the entire design of the laptop to accommodate a useless touch gimmick.

A full general purpose OS with a touch screen is definitely not a gimmick.

Surface devices (and the many other brands of Windows tablets that sell, which nobody ever seems to mention) are changing the landscape of enterprise computing in a way that iPads or Macbooks never can or will since Apple will always do whatever they can to keep you in some sort of walled garden.

Honest question - have you actually used a Windows tablet in any sort of professional capacity? Because I have and I think it's glorious. The first thing I did when I got one way back in 2012 was to install all of the desktop apps that we use to manage operations in our warehouse. Everything worked great and nobody had to rewrite any of our apps for an iDevice. Within a month everybody in management had one (a cheap $300 Dell Venue 8 Pro, which has lasted me over 5 years so far). That's no gimmick.

There's an app called BetterTouchTool that lets you create your own contextualized Touch Bar buttons that can execute any command(s). It's one of their recent updates: https://www.boastr.net/second-touchbar-alpha-available/

Does anyone know of other apps that let you take control of the touch bar?

"Right now, the incentive is weak. If Touch Bar can only offer users with tasks they can simply done on the keyboard, it will still be useless as the outdated keys it replaced."

If there isn't a keyboard equivalent then sight impaired users are going to have a heck of a bad time. Apple has the good reputation for accessibility, but I'm a bit worried. A lot of ATMs have plugs for audio and now need an adapter.

I tried the Touch Bar at the Apple Store, and after tapping on it for various items, I then found myself tapping on the lower part of the screen as well, which of course doesn't work. It just left me feeling that the Touch Bar is a clunky halfway solution, and that having full touchscreens (like on the new Windows machines) is more natural and intuitive.

This is the first apple laptop that I've been really disappointed with: I dislike the keyboard, the track pad is way too large (I bump the pointer when I try to rest my fingers below the space bar) and I accidentally mute the sound via the dynamic toolbar a few times a week. I have not found the toolbar useful at all. The underside vents are sharp and exactly where you grab the laptop when you pick it up off the table. The power button is now very difficult to understand. (Yes, that flat, blank piece of slightly ajar plastic in the upper right is a power button, you can press it, and, as is often necessary, hold it down to restart. But we took the initial iconic boot sound away, because progress, so you won't know if it is rebooting until you actually see the boot screen.)

But the primary source of disappointment has been USB-C: I use an OWC hub and it is plug-and-pray. Sometimes the computer wakes up, sometimes it doesn't, sometimes it goes into a graphics meltdown. The original apple cable doesn't work with the hub, and neither does the off the shelf cable I bought, so I had to get one from OWC directly.

As a cable autiste and apple fan-man, I'm willing to forgive a lot for The One True Cord (tm) but this has been a rough upgrade.