Apple got ahead of itself with the touchbar and it's no surprise they have not pushed on it much since release. I sincerely hope they are mature enough to recognize it was not the right tech and pull it from future laptops.
I expect the opposite. They will continue to iterate and fix the issues with the touchbar which many users already like and appreciate. The obvious change to make is the addition of haptic feedback.
Yeah they are called physical keys, no need to make a NASA pen... didn't Apple buy out some company making keyboards out of tiny e-ink dipslays, that would actually make sense. Making keys out of a touchscreen when the only reason to look at it is because there are no physical keys on the other hand is ridiculous.
> no need to make a NASA pen
The "NASA pen" urban legend (often used to comment on the contrast between American over-spending on innovation and Russian common-sense) is actually a myth. Both NASA and the Soviets used pencil-based technology originally -- NASA used ordinary sharpening-based pencils (later moving to mechanical pencils), while Soviets used more crayon-like "grease pencils". There were flaws with both technologies, and a private American company (Fisher) created a pen they claimed could work in space which was later adopted by both NASA and the Soviets. NASA only paid $4.00 per pen, nowhere near the "millions of dollars" often cited as the cost of development.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fact-or-fiction-n...
The Touchbar has many clear benefits over physical keys (in addition to drawbacks). Adding haptic feedback doesn't make the TouchBar equivalent to hardware keys. It makes it a better Touchbar. The fictitious NASA pen had no benefits over a pencil. Touchbar has benefits.
As is frequently trotted out whenever someone reaches for this analogy, http://www.snopes.com/business/genius/spacepen.asp (tl;dr: pencils aren't great in space, another company invented the pen on their dime and sold it to NASA). There's definitely UX headroom when iterating on user input; the first gen touchbar has been undeniably meh, but that's not to say another iteration or two can't be a marked improvement over a 150 year old technology.
Really? Who? I haven't heard a single opinion on this that's stronger than lukewarm.
Also touch screen for volume, brightness, and video scrubbing === better than keys.
I got the version without, but is it universally bad..?
Have you ever tried to type on a touch keyboard without looking at it?
But it works for iPhone thanks to a combination of changes in habit and autocorrect and plenty of typos, whereas no matter how much I have tried I have never made typing work on a tablet.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acer_Iconia_6120
As someone who can actually type without looking at the keys, I would never buy a laptop without a real physical keyboard.