I avoided upgrading to the new MacBooks for as long as possible because of everything I read about the the Touch Bar, how awful it is, etc. I finally upgraded and... it’s fine. Actually, I don’t really mind it at all, and sometimes it’s kind of delightful.

I tend to disagree. It’s effectively still doing the same thing by offering functions of the current application with a single direkt input.

Previously as F1-12 Buttons they were overloaded with OS functions such as brightness and audio controls, moving the application Functions to the fn+ combo key.

With the Touch Bar not only are buttons only available when applicable, they also allow for custom inputs such as a range instead of a binary click and their meaning is a lot more explicit with icons and text as opposed to F1-12

I actually think it’s more of a application support problem. If more applications offered better touchbar support I’d be happy about forgetting a series of hot key keystrokes.

"It's not our niche technology, it's the damn developers not supporting it!"

If only they have left the Esc key.

I may be a minority, but I like the touch bar. It opens a lot of possibilities for each kind of program. It's like bringing software to keyboard. But that's just me.

I love the concept of the Touch Bar. In practice, I never use it and it's not uncommon for freezing to occur when I'm trying to adjust the volume which really colors my perception of the whole thing.

I think the target market should be for non-professional users (who don't otherwise use external keyboards and have shortcuts memorized) which is why it's weird that it's a top of the line addition (obviously, a cost issue).

But it requires each application to write custom code to support. In a world where companies chose Electron over proper native development that is a no-go.