Then they should have not called it a “MacBook pro” there is nothing “pro” about touch bar, it’s something useless that I have to pay extra for and I don’t need it at all.
Because I use vi.
Because I am a professional and theoretically the target audience of $3,000 premium quality laptops.
The MBP keyboard buttons aren’t too great for typing all day every day.
Don't care about the touchbar and it's never bothered me.
It's when you bring out Photoshop or (gasp!) Blender or Unity, or doing something else that requires serious memory, when things start getting dicey. It's a specific sort of professional they mean, otherwise almost every employed person would fit.
Not that that makes the touchbar good, but at least you can remove a useless key in favor of a useful one.
As far as I'm aware, Apple doesn't and hasn't ever explicitly targeted its higher-end models at developers. They just happen to have been good developer machines, and so developers confused that for "I am explicitly the target market of this".
Not only do people not know what the F-keys do, but they have no ability to determine what an F-key might do in any given situation.
Not so with the touch bar. The touch bar will do what the touch bar indicates it will do, which is displayed on the touch bar itself.
Other 'Professional' software such as video editing or music production usually sticks to key combos rather than F-keys. This is traditionally why the F-key row is used for things like brightness or volume, and why Macs use these as the default function.
computers have gotten easier and learning what F5 does is not in the realm of necessary things that people should have to know to operate their work device
If you are not memorizing the keys, then you will need to look down at the touchbar to figure out where to tap to do what you want to do.
If you need to be looking anyways, why is it better to look at the top of the keyboard, instead of the screen where your eyes are normally located?
Replicating a touchbar style strip on the screen is a much better option than anything on the touchbar.
That's actually pretty sad (and should be remedied with some education, starting with emphasizing the fact that tools have a learning curve and you're supposed to follow it). I mean, look at non-professionals working with computers daily, like e.g. shop clerks. They have every possible shortcut used in their sales/inventory management software in muscle memory.
But the problem is, there's a huge difference between a cool idea and actual execution, just like Apple's Newton flopped but decades later iPhone succeeded.
I use Ableton pro to make music, I use final cut to make video. I'm pretty sure I fall into the "creative class" of people you're referring to, but I never use any of the touchbar features that ship with the apps unless I'm forced to. It's much faster to use keyboard shortcuts, and I'm sure most "pro" users are already much better with the shortcuts that they don't need the touchbar features.
I'm not saying the idea is bad. It's just a horrible execution.
Since you say you're a creative professional, let me ask you, do you actually use any of these features and think these really improved your life significantly? I'm not talking about imagination, i'm talking about actual product. In my case it's much more of a trouble than any real benefit.
They just made a good laptop, and developers used it because it was a good laptop. If anything, developers bought and used Apple's laptops in spite of shortcomings (as developer machines) which have been present for at least the twelve years that have elapsed since I first used one.
Meanwhile, I'm writing this comment on a 15" MBP with Touch Bar, and I use it as my primary dev laptop. And... well, it's still a good laptop. I would be less happy and less productive using one of the "equivalent" PC builds (regardless of whether running Windows or Linux) people always recommend. And I know that because I switched to Macs from one of those "equivalents" (a Thinkpad running Linux).
Add in that the people who are complaining about how this is the death of Apple are almost always posting while clearly indicating they've never actually used a MacBook Pro with Touch Bar, and I don't put this down to Apple somehow "shifting away" from "influencers". I put it down as the same kind of foaming-at-the-mouth hate that every Apple product in history has attracted, due to those products committing the unforgivable sin of being Apple products. Company seems to've survived that.
And for what it's worth, the Touch Bar took some getting used to, but now it's fine. Some apps do useful things with it. Some apps don't. About what I expected.
Pro doesn't even imply computer power user. It just means the opposite of home/personal.
My partner on the other hand enjoys using it and is always looking to see what the current app displays.
I see it as a way to expose useful items that usually buried in the menus. Non-technical people like this
Also, it makes it easy to discover features for apps that support it .
* I can't customize what's shown on the touchbar when the screen is locked.
* I can't pin ESC and the volume/mute keys to their respective (previous physical) positions and let apps use the remaining area in between
* I can't have it default to my custom layout by default but have the Fn key show app-specific widgets, or have certain apps show app specific widgets (like you can have certain apps show the F-keys).
* I can't have it show my custom layout by default but show pop-up dialog buttons when appropriate.
I know a LOT of people who are not tech savvy and still could write without looking at their keyboard. (p.s. there were devices who had a keyboard before computers even existed and people learned to use them without looking every second at the typewriter/keyboard)
So basically the touch bar basically removes that flow completly
This is what I believe: the touchbar is for people like me... people who never learned to use the F keys, people who aren’t obsessive about shortcuts but appreciate them when discovered. In short, it’s for the 90% of software users that float between general public and pro users. It works.