What's sad is by killing it on the new MBP, they essentially kill it on my laptop as less and less developers will care to implement it. I wonder how long Apple software like Xcode will support the Touch Bar.
Edit: times it's superior to buttons: scrubbing videos, changing Safari tabs
If they had added the Touch Bar in addition to physical function keys then there would have been less resistance to it.
Changing volume is definitely one of those use cases where the physical function keys were much better IMO - It's one physical button press rather than touch the button, look down at the slider, and try to drag it into the right position.
I also use my laptop in a dock about 50% of the time, so end up just using the on-screen volume adjustment and keyboard shortcuts anyway... If Apple really believed in the concept they would have put the touchbar into their keyboards too.
As of now, it's 0.5 additional bars. The whole row after ESC is pretty much useless.
Honestly, I'm on the side of "the touchbar is inoffensive". Never bothered me one bit, but I don't use it anyway so I don't care that they're removing it*. I'm sympathetic, though. I always liked the butterfly keyboard, and the general opinion on that has been made patently obvious.
* I wonder if this has to do with the fact that I never look at the keyboard, so it just doesn't occur to me to use the touchbar, same as I never saw the point of keyboard backlighting.
Not too worried about my laptop being killed though, they screwed the keyboard up so hard it's essentially dead anyway. Have to take it to the Apple Care center to have it revived again sometime soon because I've got 3 sticky keys that won't unstick.
Second gripe is precisely its main selling point - that it can change based on context. I don't want my keyboard changing. I don't want to have to look down to operate my laptop, it breaks the flow and slows me down. I had 2 laptops with the Touch Bar. I tried every software for customising it. BTT, MTBMR (or whatever it's called), and at least one other. I always eventually fix them with the few buttons I use (no sliders): volume/mute, screen brightness, keyboard backlight.
Then, there's also the fact that you can't adjust its brightness or turn it off, and it's always emitting the full spectrum of light, which I find uncomfortable in the dark or late in the day. Granted, this is a smaller thing which is why it's at the bottom but it builds up the list of annoyances.
Edit: just remembered another one - it can freeze. Most of the time it can be fixed by killing a process. Other times, you need to reboot the computer.
FYI, command-<number> will let you switch between browser tabs. So command-2 will bring you to the second tab (starting from the left), etc. I tend to only navigate between the first five tabs or so in this manner (basically, what I can reach with my left hand), and I drag tabs I'm likely to navigate to like this to the left.
What this looks like in practice is:
<tab1> some admin console </tab1> <tab2> email </tab2> ... <tab10> documentation about the admin console </tab10> (drag documentation in tab10 to occupy tab2)
Now I can use command-2/1 to go between the console documentation and the console itself. IMO, the cost of dragging a tab to the left is much cheaper than having to break your visual connection with the screen in order to hunt through the touchbar.
(Make it inherently safe - physical keys, so less chances of programmers ruining it).
If Apple had released computers with the touch bar above the existing physical function keys, everyone would love it and other companies would provide a similar feature, the same way that they have all converged on the same industrial design as what Apple pioneered 20 years ago.
Instead, Jony Ive insisted on the touch bar replacing the function keys, and here we are. At least the butterfly switches are finally dead. (It only took years of worldwide embarrassment and Ive's departure to make it happen!)
* Top row of physical buttons wasn't a big deal since I map Caps Lock to Esc.
* Changing volume and brightness is better in the touchbar: the buttons are large enough to get them by touch, and sliding the finger is faster and more granular than repeatly pressing buttons.
* Here's a tip: you don't have to move your finger from the button to the slider. You can just slide from the volume button.
* BetterTouchTool allowed me to have any shortcut in the touchbar.
- Instead of cmd-ctrl-opt-D in Safari, I’d hit the touch bar button that looked like an iPhone.
- instead of hunting and pecking for XScope screen calipers, I would touch the bar button that looked like calipers.
Etc. I had several dozen per-app automations and shortcuts mapped to easily visible and understandable buttons, now I’m back to wondering if it was F3 or F4 that meant “hide the sidebar” in XCode.
This is a huge step backward. The Mac community has decided that it wants to stay in the past; Apple is saying, “fine, you dinosaurs want the ultimate 2015 MacBook Pro? Here it is. We will leave our engineers who think about the future to the iPad.”
I think they gave way too few APIs to devs for it to be truly functional.
The only time I was missing it was some emulators that didn’t display function keys even though the keys were needed for them.
I use an external keyboard and a pair of 4K screens with it, so it runs closed at the back of my desk. :)
I think that Apple's biggest mistake is not making it more obvious that the bar is editable in all programs. It becomes pretty useful when you can keep only the functions that you use the most.