> Apple's design has been top-notch

But only from the iPhone X to 14, after which the Dynamic Island took over.

(I'll see myself out)

No judgement here. I liked my touchbar, and was pretty productive with it before it got axed.

I maintain that if the Touch Bar had been made full height and had an affordance (like slightly more distance) to prevent accidental touches, it would have been way more practical.

Apple tends to have products on a design refresh schedule, and for the Mac is it about five years. I think the combination of user dislike of the initial implementation and limited developer integration caused the physical Touch Bar to be eliminated in the M1 design.

I don't think the touchbar was going to be worthwhile without haptic feedback. At the very least, it needed the force sensors used for the touchpad so that accidental touches could be properly rejected.

There’s a universe where the touchbar sits above the function row without trying to replace it and is a killer feature.

The amount of times I mute the audio with that stupid touch bar..

There are a few unicode characters I keep finding myself needing to type when I transcribe, and the Touchbar would be perfect for this. Except, there's no good way to just "add keys for that". You have add quick actions, which means writing Applescript that copies those into the clipboard and pastes... this is slow enough that it's noticeable (never mind having to first hit the quick actions button). On top of that, even though the label for the quick action is that single character, the buttons that it renders are like 2 inches wide. So instead of being able to fit 20 such buttons/keys on it, I can fit exactly 6. You have to swipe left and right to see the others.

Is there a Minecraft extension so that the Touchbar becomes the game's hotbar with icons? I've never looked.

I've said this before but the trackpad is too big and they could have fit both function keys and touch bar and everyone would have been happy.

This might be the first time I've heard somebody complain about a trackpad being too big, usually it's the other way around.

> Apple's design has been top-notch

The only designs I'm fond of are the macs. The iPhone looks pretty meh these days. The software side is slowly getting worse, it was great and they've lost the plot making changes for changes sake

> Chrome OS isn't a real OS to me so I couldn't imagine using that as my daily driver as I would macOS

Not sure I understand this? One assumes that "daily driver" involves Linux VM use in this context[1], and ChromeOS's Linux VM integration is just wildly ahead of WSL (which really isn't bad) or the mess on OS X (awful). Installed Crostini apps appear as native apps in the UI. Transparent cross-filesystem access works flawlessly. Wayland and X11 apps appear with native decorations. Clipboard/WM/IPC integration does exactly what you expect. USB devices prompt you if you want to connect to the VM on insert (and remember the setting) etc...

And yes, I'm biased because I work there. But really it's a great development environment.

[1] I mean, if you're doing iOS development or need an M4 Max for performance reasons, or need some legacy Mac tooling like Adobe stuff, you're probably not looking at alternative platforms at all. Someone making the choice you posit is like 99% likely to be a web or embedded person working at a Linux shell as their native environment.

The Debian experience on my kid's Chromebook in Crostini is truly fantastic. The Android experience, on the other hand, leaves a lot to be desired. I had hoped a convertible Chromebook could give them access to all the learning apps across Linux, the web, and Android on a single device; but a lot of Android apps tell the Play Store they aren't compatible, and I have to jump through hoops to get them installed.

For a good experience running Android apps on ChromeOS you really need an ARM CPU and a decent amount of RAM (12 or 16).

To be fair (and, again, biased), Android apps run wildly better on a Chromebook than they do on a Mac or Windows box. :)

School Chromebooks are very limited devices (often these were low-end units purchased at the beginning of the pandemic!), and you're likely comparing it to the flagship Samsung or whatever in your pocket, which is just objectively a much more powerful computer.