MacBook Pro with Touch Bar review: a touch of the future

My potential issue with the Touch Bar is that I never look at the keyboard when I type, so if I need to adjust the volume / screen brightness I would have to change my behavior.

If only these were actions I took more often than using the F keys for various other applications, it wouldn't bother me as much as it does currently.

Honestly, I'll get over it; I'll set up other key chords to take the place of the various F keys I use today. It still bothers me that I'm the one who has to make these adjustments to support something that I have no need for. It's a short term productivity hit, combined with a long tail of annoyance as my hands use their muscle memory and will incur some random state change on my computer.

It looks like Apple is trying to find an alternative to touchscreens just because Steve Jobs once said they're bad.

For me, touchscreens are perfectly useful on laptops, since directly tapping something is much quicker than moving my hand to the trackpad, locating the cursor, moving it around and finally clicking something.

> I have little doubt that in a couple years, the technology Apple has been waiting for will arrive and this vision, or something closer to it, will be complete. Apple just released this machine too soon, or was too aggressive in the decisions it made.

This summary makes sense to me. Luckily, I put 8GB of RAM in my Macbook Air five years ago, and it'll probably do another year.

That said, does anybody use a Macbook for development? If I need to use dongles anyway, I think I could live with one port.

One thing I got from this review is that the touchbar brings keyboard shortcuts to people who wouldn't normally bother to learn keyboard shortcuts.

I personally won't buy one because I've very picky about my keyboards (the squashed arrow keys are as much of a problem for me as the missing escape key). But for average users, I think Apple has managed another UX win here.

I just wish they had made the bar a bit smaller and kept the physical ESC key. I'm not a VIM user so don't care about frequency of use. My biggest issue is how do you CMD+ALT+ESC if an app crashes, locking up the touch bar?