I respect your opinion, but all of the examples you gave are already possible with Fn-keys.

I think what the touchbar brings is always active tutorial/reminder as to what's possible with the touchbar. Due to it's very nature you don't have to be taught what's on there, you can see, you then don't have to remember/rely on building up muscle memory.

I imagine it sucks for accessibility. I'd still want one before my faculties faulter, I imagine I'd get some use out of it with my IDE.

My problem with the TouchBar is that I'm using my laptop with an external screen 90% of the time so I'm never really getting used to it.

If the external keyboard had a TouchBar and I would start incorporating it into my workflow I can see it's use-fullness.

> It turns out app makers have found some nifty uses for it, like the ability to quickly mute/unmute when in conference calls, quickly changing volume/brightness, stepping through code while debugging etc etc.

Maybe I've just had a limited, poor experience with it, but from the apps I've used these functions are only available on the touchbar when the app is focused... which has the controls anyway.

I was using Skype for Business and it had the audio controls in the touch bar, and also on the screen about 1.5" inches above the touchbar. I wanted to mute and unmute when I had the app in the background, but I couldn't. Useless.

Yeah... it's really contextual (of course). I work with MSSQL a lot these days and really like that Azure Data Studio has a decent sized "Run query" button in the touch bar, and I use the brightness/volume sliders all the time.

Most apps don't use it very well though - I actually quite dislike Safari's overcomplicated tab buttons - I can't make out anything so it's basically useless, and I use cmd left arrow to go back not the touchbar button.

I would love to have a hardware escape key. But despite the shitty butterfly keyboard issues I'm currently going through I want to keep this Macbook as long as possible.

> like the ability to quickly change volume/brightness

Well, these have physical buttons pre-touchbar, so the touchbar is definitely slower since it requires two clicks (one to summon the slider) and you have to look at it instead of just feeling it.

Literally everything you've cited as a QoL improvement exist on most (if not all) laptops with physical F-keys.

Each to their own, but I've set mine to always and only display the brightness and volume knobs, and I still find it significantly slower to adjust those, than on my old mbp.

But in all fairness, the F-keys on a mac never really worked like function keys, they've always been more of a row of OSX-keys. I can understand why Apple felt a need to innovate that space, but I am not impressed.

No haptic feedback. I am a hunt-and-peck typist, and there is nothing more frustrating than 1) opening a web page to the user manual; 2) starting a build; 3) closing a dialog box; 4) mistakenly completing a word I am typing; all because my ring or middle finger brushed the touch bar.

It's a solution looking for a problem. It's garbage.

i remap capslock to escape regardless of the make/model of laptop i use, so the lack of a physical escape key didn’t really effect me.

i never type with capslock on, and find using it for escape helps my vim workflow

It wasn't until I got a touchbar that I realized the only function key I ever consistently used was F5 for refreshing pages. Even the few I needed in my IDE for 3-4 button hotkeys are replaced with a single button that does what I want. The touch bar is great, and I really don't understand why people cling to function keys so much

There were already keys for all those functions...

I might have to eat crow on this, but I can't imagine Apple holding out the Esc as a 16" power upgrade. It doesn't require extra motherboard or fan space.

You know, if you buy a Surface Pro or Surface Book (or most any other Windows portable), THE WHOLE SCREEN IS TOUCHABLE! The touchbar is the biggest UI/UX screwup since the one button mouse and Jobs' insistence that there be only one menubar - a decision we still suffer from today that was driven by the original Mac's laughable 9-inch 512x342 pixel screen! BTW - You people are seriously acting like an Esc key is an innovation? I'm still waiting for a real delete key... and Home/End, PgUp/PgDn, etc....

I'd be curious what IDEs support the touch bar for debugging or is that something you configured yourself?