Definitely the worst era of Mac laptop hardware that I lived through. I still have a work-provided 2019 MBP and the keyboard is shot (even though I never use it because it's docked to a monitor + keyboard 99.9% of the time), while the Touch Bar flickers with random white rectangles regularly while the machine is asleep. I personally kept using a 2015 MBP until last year for just this reason.

You're right about the hubris, but Caps Lock -> Esc is The Way regardless!

Wow I already forgot about the touch bar. And imagine being so stubborn to keep the touch bar but introduce a physical ESC key, they lost their minds during that time.

If they just put the fancy bar ON TOP of the f-row, we'd still have it.

As a Vim user, I thought it would be a deal breaker, but it really wasn't that bad.

The rest of the laptop was though.

The early touch bar models were terrible. I still remember the day I traded that thing in for an M1.

super lolllz