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Comment by chrischen | Hacker News Reader

I'm certain people who are OK with the touch bar don't care about it as much as the people who hate it, but I for one prefer that they are iteratively innovating on the keyboard for macs. I'd rather they do that than make a thick brick of a laptop with a row of mostly useless function keys that a vocal minority has been harping for.

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The keys that the touchbar replaced were definitely not useless - they were media control, sound control, screen/keyboard brightness and expose/mission control/launchpad (and of course, ESC.)

Those are all extremely common keys to use. And yes, you could also use them as "F#" keys I guess. Now, those keys are non tactile and much, MUCH less pleasant to use. Also, if you're watching a movie in the dark and you turn off your keyboard backlight the stupid touchbar stays lit up for 45 seconds.

I think Apple will eventually kill the touchbar or at least offer a version without it.

I think the corner they've painted themselves into is they know they can't charge more for a non touchbar version and if they offer it for less that's cutting profit margin as well as a tacit admission that it isn't a beloved feature.

But their choices over the last few months along with the revelation that they're finally ditching their butterfly keyboards leads me to believe it's coming.

They are ditching butterfly keyboards due to the reliability issues (dust causing keys to malfunction), not because of they've abandoned the quest for thinner, lighter laptops.

Except now we have only one MacBook Pro choice: one with a more expensive part that uses more battery and is another possible failure point. It’s a net negative for anyone who is even neutral to it, never mind someone who uses say the physical escape key on a regular basis.

The keyboard was previously awesome. Just put the old version back. Why iterate on something that sucks. The form sucks, the switches suck, the arrow key layout sucks. Go back to the good times of the <= 2015 boards.

my 2015 Pro is so much better than mycompany 2017 Pro w/ touchbar

like people are saying, most people just don't care about the touchbar. It does get annoying at times (as a vim user). Why WHY do they hide the esc key and have it take two inputs to increase the volume/brightness by more than 1 tick (sliding is terrible).

Other than that, I totally agree, the real focus should be the keyboard. Because it's shit. Here aresome of the awesome problems I go through on a daily basis at work.

- space bar double spaces all the time. Turned off key repeat and also whatever other suggestions I could find on Stack

- backspace deletes too many characters

- keys double type or are just not responsive (space, left shift, fucking / for some reason)

yeah, real fun using it especially while I'm on call right now and working on prod servers!! WORK ON THE KEYBOARD APPLE

You can just put your finger on the volume or brightness icon and slide it. You don’t have to pick it up or wait for the slider to appear.

You can also set the esc key to stay visible.

yeah I downloaded Dock to display my dock and esc key at all times.

Thank you for the tip. Knew you could use the slider but thought you actually had to be on dot, feel so dumb. Never tried sliding in place!

For your keyboard problems, just get it repaired. It's free under a four-year warranty, and it usually only takes one day: Just drop it off at an Apple store, and pick it back up the next day.

(Also, if you're a vim user, you should really remap Caps Lock to Esc. There's a pane in System Preferences for it, and it should be done whether or not you have a touch bar.)

Caps Lock is better remapped to CTRL in my opinion. However, with Vim I always use CTRL+] instead of ESC because I think it’s easier to reach.

Pretty sure that having a work laptop gone for a day is not an ideal situation for most people.

I'd also like to add that there's a chance they also swap out your battery during the keyboard repair.

That's fine. I myself will continue to purchase from Lenovo, who tried something similar to the Touch Bar and removed it after listening to customer feedback.

Lenovo actively lost my trust (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superfish), as opposed to Apple which doesn't care about my opinion but is upfront about it.

Never installed on the ThinkPad line, so not my problem :)

I think "the company that makes my laptop has only installed spyware on other laptops" is a pretty weak security guarantee.

I use my function keys constantly as text editor shortcuts

Most people don't, and the touchbar just makes it more versatile for more users at the cost of tactility.

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