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Comment by eric-hu | Hacker News Reader

Don’t forget the Touch Bars.

Ouch, yeah. I loved the idea of it. I mean, I have a Stream Deck sitting on my desk as I type this, and that's basically a large, freestanding Touch Bar.

But whoever decided to replace physical keys instead of augmenting them with an additional control was out of their mind. And an undifferentiated escape key? On a pro laptop with lots of programmers? The mind boggles.

The real problem with the Touch Bar was that they never made an external keyboard with it. So I could never actually build it into my habits, since it was only actually available to me half the time.

(I'm demonstrably willing to spend money on fancy Apple external peripherals! I have the touchID keyboard, and think the convenience of it was worth the kinda silly price. I'd absolutely have wound up getting an external Touch Bar keyboard...)

There were so many problems with the Touch Bar to pick any one as the ‘real’ problem. As a software developer, I’m used to resting my finger on the F5 key when I’m thinking or in the few seconds before a build finishes. Can’t do that with the Touch Bar.

Also, it reflected the fluorescent tubes on the ceiling in a way that normal keys don’t.

There are plenty more complaints of course, but I never heard anyone say they found a ‘must-have’ use case for it. In a nutshell - all kinds of problems, no significantly better solutions.

I love the Touch Bar. Should have been above the function keys

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