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Comment by JakeWesorick | Hacker News Reader

Mac Touch Bar is useless. Does anyone actually use it? Would you rather have the touch bar or your escape key back?

I'm using a machine with a touch bar right now and I have an escape key in the upper-left corner of the touch bar where it always was. I don't understand this complaint.

It's not a physical key, and touch bar sometimes crashes, which makes it difficult to back out of many UX flows (think full screen video).

On the Mac, command-. is a synonym for esc.

(Or maybe it's the other way around, since the former have existed on Mac keyboards since day 1, but the latter has not!)

Unfortunately it's not quite where it was though. It's about one key's width in from the left. Presumably for the sheer sake of symmetry with the touch sensor the other end.

The touchable area is actually bigger than it appears. It does in fact extend much farther left. Try it.

This is probably for aesthetics as you mention.

I've read that a couple of times, but it's only a little bit. About half way between the far edge and the edge of the touchbar display.

But still considerably wider than the physical escape button it replaced.

That area to the left is also a touch target for ESC, so the ESC key actually got bigger (but obviously that doesn't help with tactile feedback)

I assume the Touch Bar and the corresponding decision to remove the ESC key is part of the strategy to make the transition between iOS and MacOS as seamless as possible, even if the 2 systems are never completely unified. I can't remember the last time I've ever used the ESC key in day-to-day computing but I notice its absence all the time when using the iPad Pro's smart cover keyboard.

I don't own a Touch Bar laptop myself but as someone who has to teach people how to use computers and applications, the Touch Bar bothers me as much as Microsoft Office's Ribbon toolbar, in which functionality somehow becomes even more difficult to memorize because of the seemingly arbitrary decision in how the context buttons are arranged (nevermind how they might change with each software update).

> I can't remember the last time I've ever used the ESC key in day-to-day computing but I notice its absence all the time when using the iPad Pro's smart cover keyboard.

That's strange, I use it every day to get out of modal boxes, dialogs, close panels etc, revert to normal states.

I'd like to have the keys back but keep TouchID

I ended up buying a second hand late 2013 MBP instead of a new one because of it. Happy with my choice. Disappointed that I don't have the option to buy a top end machine without the touchbar.

I love it. Prepping a Youtube video on how I use it this weekend.

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