Keys stopping to work is one thing, but for me the Touch Bar and the screwed arrow keys are similarly disappointing. Apple should've seen this coming. What were they thinking?
It appears they weren't thinking.
The Touch Bar is a huge mystery to me and a colossal nuisance, who wants to look down at their fingers to type? Did we not spend our earliest computing years mastering touch typing specifically for the efficiency of NOT having to look down at your hands when typing? Growing up, our computer lab teacher would place a box over your hands to force you to memorize the key locations to drive home the point, and once memorization occurred it really clicked and WPM and general computing efficiency skyrocketed for everyone. So then comes the Touch Bar to solve no problem but instead introduce new problems, where your hands and fingers literally block the Touch Bar visibility from any normal usage viewing angle, meaning you have to move your hands away from the keyboard, then awkwardly poke around imprecisely with a single floating finger on a little tiny screen to hit "escape" or the "X" button to find the escape key or the brightness and audio output adjustments and other function keys. Did nobody at Apple test it out? Or even think it through? Where is their person to say "no" to what are clearly bad ideas?
That same culture has obvious upsides as well; I'm not trying to just knock Apple as incompetent. I just think the flip side of that coin makes things like the TouchBar more likely to survive scrutiny there.
I suppose Touch Bar just doesn't seem particularly novel to me though, many consumer level PC laptops used to have little touch bars as FN keys in the early and mid 2000s, and they were just as much of a hassle then which is probably why no manufacturer kept them around.
I've yet to encounter a single good use for the touchbar, even the volume control is annoying to use. Especially since it's essentially impossible to hit without looking since there's no 'key feel', and I keep finding myself triggering touchbar actions because my fingers slightly overshoot the number or backspace key on occasion.
It'd be great as an optional addition above the F-keys, or even a little further away since it requires a concerted effort to use anyway.
Even the fact that the pretend 'escape' key doesn't properly operate all the way to the end of the bar (such that it might align with the keys below it) suggests it was far more about aesthetics or some weird notion of 'design' than actual usability.
Or I'm just not the right sort of Pro.
Yet there is still a solution which would probably satisfy most users: A traditional function key row and an additional Touch Bar above.