I don't even want to go into the horrors that is working in vi with touchbar escape key...
If a less-powerful CPU is fine, the MacBook Air is great. It doesn't have the touch bar, and in my opinion, its tapering design look way cooler than a MacBook Pro (acknowledging the fact that the MacBook Pro is already one of the coolest looking laptops out there).
At least the resale value of the MBP is something no other hardware can really compete with. I mean, I know I kind of cheated by buying on a students discount for a diploma course I was taking on the side at the university. But I managed to get 80% of what I originally spent on a 8 month old machine, and I most certainly won’t be able to do with whatever I replace it with.
(I definitely agree this is a bad design, though).
I had turned my macbook pro's screen brightness down to complete black as I was using an external monitor only, and in a dark environment. Some time later I happened to restart my machine, and both the internal and external displays came up completely black.
The touchbar displayed only "Esc", without the normal brightness control. I had to figure out from memory how to log in without being able to see the screen, i.e. exactly how far I needed to move the pointer on the trackpad to click on my username, without any indication of what state the UI was in. There was no controls on the touchbar to adjust the display brightness and an external Apple USB keyboard which did have the brightness control keys was not recognised. Fixing it required both an SMC and PRAM reset.
I would pay a significant premium for a macbook pro without the touchbar. I've had other cases where the machine appears to be (but isn't necessarily) bricked and there's no indicator lights anywhere to show what's going on, even if the machine has power. I hope with Ive's departure they'll dial it back a bit and start building machines which might be slightly less beautiful but include some of the more practical affordances.
/rant