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Comment by clra | Hacker News Reader

This will sound trite, but I'm completely serious. The number one thing I want to see in the next MacBook Pro is the abandonment of the Touch Bar. Make it a row on the keyboard again.

I didn't think that the Touch Bar was useful when I first saw it, and now, six months later, I haven't found one more reason that I'd want ever want it. I don't want haptic feedback or any other kind of improvement. Apple made a mistake and should own up to it. Just throw it out.

Aside from that, I'd love to see a little better battery life and would have no problem whatsoever trading away a few more millimeters of thinness if I could get it. The MBP is thinner than I need already.

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Having used a MacBook Pro with a Touch Bar for about 10 months now, I'll have to agree that it didn't really improve my UX in any meaningful way. I have tried various customization tools, but I don't find myself using it for anything other than controlling playback, display brightness and volume, and the old function keys did that just fine. In fact, they were easier to hit correctly most of the time.

I don't hate the Touch Bar - it didn't really make things worse for me, but that's not really a good enough reason to keep it around. TouchID has saved me a lot of time spent entering my passphrase, so that's been great, but I imagine that can easily be replaced with FaceID in a future release, which would have the nice side-effect of solving the lack of biometric authentication on the iMac.

I also hate the touch bar, but far worse is how they ruined all the other keys with the new, super loud low travel design.

I want the keyboard from my 2013 model back. It was nearly perfect.

While I agree the Touchbar is a crappy gimmick (albeit I don’t hate it, I think it’s a useless feature), I have to disagree on the keyboard. I hate typing on my personal 2015 MBP keyboard now and have to use an Apple Magic Keyboard 2 with it.

Whenever the laptop gets hot (always) the keys will feel a lot different and often not even click.

I think my favorite MacBook Pro keyboard was the one on the Aluminum PowerBook. The 12 inch Aluminum PowerBook is my favorite Apple product of all time. It was perfect to me in every way.

I have a 2012 and a 2009 here. The keys on the previous to retina generation feel way better than the original retina, and the keys on the new one are way crappier than that. The retina was decent, the old(1st gen black chicklet keys) one was awesome.

I always feel like a curmudgeon saying this but they really screwed this up. And i say that as someone who's completely fine with the newer thinkpad keyboards even.

I bought the version without Touch Bar because I hated it so much (after trying one at the store) and desperately need a new Macbook Pro to replace my old 8 year old one. So I agree even though I won't be buying another computer for a few years. I do like the new keyboard though. Shame about it having worse specs but it's more than enough for my dev needs.

Apple's continuing with the bizarre / bad design decisions, the latest iPhone X has an ugly notch in the screen, unfortunately there's no way to avoid that if you want the latest iPhone.

I ended up buying a second hand MacBook Pro instead of a new one because Apple have stupidly for some reason decided that if you want a more powerful configuration, you have to have a shitty touch bar. It makes no sense, a touch bar and a high spec are orthogonal.

Before seeing your post, and at the risk of possibly garnering snark-downvotes, I was going to write "a real keyboard".

Much as I find OS X (OK macOS if we must) the best balanced OS for my purposes, and am attached to so much of the great software it has available, I'm never going to have imposed on me a keyboard I can't touch type on.

Assuming Apple remains stubborn on the fake function keys, my current ageing MBPro will absolutely be my last.

Agreed. But please keep the Touch ID button.

Remove the touch bar and reintroduce the magnetic power connector - it was such a great thing. And then please make the arrow up and down keys larger - I find myself hitting the wrong key several times every day.

I personally don’t miss MagSafe like I thought I would. I’d rather have charging ports on both sides like the current MBP.

I agree, I never want to see a proprietary apply power adapter ever again, especially given their history of disintegrating within a year or two.

Charge ports on either side fix a real pain point for me - all my workspaces happen to have power on the right hand side.

Also, if you need the safety of magsafe, you can get magnetic-connect usb-C cables, where the usb 'stub' fits into the female port, but connects magnetically to the rest of the cable.

Yes - this is my only gripe with the keyboard, the up and down keys are terrible. It's a shame when things are fine and just get made worse in the new version.

I would prefer Face ID, actually

Not looking off as much as it does and not on the power button, though.

I can see the value in having programmable buttons...but why they put that bar there instead of little OLED screens on all the Function keys amazes me.

Because a touch screen can support inputs other than just keydown/keyup?

Well I'm sure every bad decision ever made had some kind of rationale that made sense to someone at the time.

The Touch Bar isn't that bad in and of itself. What is annoying is that there is no way to get rid of the Siri icon. Unless they're giving them away for free, you shouldn't have to constantly see advertising for their shitty search engine.

You can remove Siri in preferences.

Oh nice, I'm assuming that's new, everything I read when it first came out said there was no way to get rid of it.

Not new.

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