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Comment by jez | Hacker News Reader

Not what you're looking for, but I'll mention it anyways just in case:

It's possible to set the default touch bar display to only ever show the expanded control strip (System Preferences > Keyboard > Keyboard > Touch Bar shows: Expanded Control Strip). In that mode you tap volume up and down instead of using a volume slider.

Again, I know you're looking for physical keys (aren't we all) but it's better than nothing.

I've been using the MacBook Pro 16 (with a physical esc key plus a touch bar) and I think it's a pretty good compromise between me who wants physical keys and apple who wants to push the touch bar.

The other thing that kept happening to me: I would accidentally tap the brightness button when reaching for ESC. For that, you can "Customize Control Strip..." and remove individual buttons, so that there's a big gap on the touch bar near the ESC key so that stray taps near ESC don't change the brightness.

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I realise I'm an outlier here but I actually have grown to like the touchbar.

It's often unused, yes, but when I fire up Rider for my day job it automatically flicks to the row of function keys and back depending on which app has focus and it fits quite nicely for me between work and entertainment (I like having the video progress bar if I'm watching something on the laptop). Maybe I'm just strange but the non-tactile function keys didn't really bother me much either.

In any case, I could live without it, which is probably not a roaring endorsement in any case, but I'd rather have it than not.

I like it as well, especially in applications like CLion/IntelliJ which have tons of keybindings I keep forgetting because they are different between Linux and macOS. The context-sensitive touch bar is actually very useful in these applications for things like rebuilding, changing targets, stepping through the debugger etc. without having to use the mouse.

There's a lot of things to complain about with Apple products, but if you ask me there's been enough touch bar bashing by now and people should just get over it. It's pretty useful in some situations, and IMO no real downsides, especially now that the esc key is a real physical key again. Why all the hate?

My guess - that you couldn't get a Macbook without the TouchBar. I'd like to be able to choose between a Macbook with or without a TouchBar, but with otherwise entirely identical specs.

I've been holding out on upgrading my 2013 MBP (mostly out of frugality) to a newer version, mostly due to the butterfly keys and the TouchBar.

Physical F keys are still useful so why not both?

If you hold Fn you get the traditional row of function keys, which seems like a pretty good tradeoff. And if you really hate that, you can simply configure the touch bar to always display them, in which case literally the only downside is that they are not physical keys anymore. Do people really touch-type the function keys so heavily that this becomes a an actual annoyance and not just an ideological one?

Adding an extra row of physical keys that do the same thing as the row of virtual function keys, at the expense of trackpad size and possibly ergonomic (harder to reach the touch bar) doesn't make a lot of sense IMO.

You can’t hit them without looking at the bar, because you have nothing to index your fingers on.

The touchbar is the second worst thing Apple has ever done in the history of the Mac, following closely on that abomination of a “keyboard” they used from 2016-2019.

I liked the keyboard too.

The only time that there would be enough touch bar bashing is when Apple listens and give users an option to have function keys instead.

Pretty sure they just did. The MacBook Air is virtually identical now save for the absence of a fan and the Touch Bar.

And if you ask me, It has not been enough touch bar bashing...

I’ve opted to buy a 2015 Mac Book Pro this year, it might be easier to get over apple than the touch bar even...

I’m with you: I enjoy the TouchBar, and it’s genuinely useful for some apps I use

Yup, me too. Especially when debugging in Xcode, the TouchBar shows a bunch of useful functions.

Those are f keys on a regular keyboard, and a few million of us have developed the muscle memory to use them over the say last thirty years that they’ve been assigned to those f keys in most IDEs.

This is one option, but it still suffers from my main complaint about the touch bar -- it's way too easy to accidentally activate something. Therefore, I have my touch bar set to activate only while I'm holding down the FN key.

I will not remove that safety key until they make the touch bar pressure sensitive so that "buttons" on it only activate with a similar amount of force that was required to activate the tactile buttons they replaced. Until then, I consider it a failed design improvement.

I need my ESC, so I'm glad it's there. As for the rest of the keys on the top row, I was not in the habit of using them except in vim, where I hooked them up to some macros I had written. For them, I kind of like the touchbar now, because I have the fake keys labelled with sensible names. (No more trying to remember that I have to hit F3 to do such-and-such.)

I've also found the touchbar pretty useful in zoom calls, because my zoom client shows keys for common actions.

All in all, I think a physical escape key plus the touchbar is a slight win. I would not pay more for it, but I have reversed my previous opinion that I'd pay more not to have it.

I suspect these new machines are going to be quite nice, although I won't buy one for a while since I purchased a mbp a few months ago.

I don't understand why they don't put the physical keys AND the touchbar in. There is so much space on the 16" model they could easily fit it in and shrink the obscenely large trackpad just a touch.

I think that the trackpad needs to be bigger. Doing gestures is much easier with a big pad.

Especially on the 16 there is no excuse, they could really have a function key row and a touch bar :( more than enough space for them.

I ordered my 13" touchbar MBP with the UK keyboard layout. Adds an extra key to the right of left shift (mapped to tilde), letting me remap the key that is normally tilde on a US keyboard to ESC.

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