Making the Touch Bar useful by abandoning Apple guidelines

> the Touch Bar still remains the useless shit and there is no hope Apple will fix it.

> As a machine, MacBook Pro is great. But not because of the Touch Bar. Touch Bar is an inflamed appendix, the same dumb shit as Siri. If Apple had implemented it as an additional row and not the F-keys replacement, everyone would forget about it in a couple of days.

> The reason is simple — that's how you see your laptop 99% of the time:

This is exactly how I feel about the Touch Bar.

If it had been an additional row I would not have minded. I don't dislike sliders to change the volume and I would prefer to see track title there than as notification (notifications create a pavlovian response where I think they are alert for something important, so it is very unpleasant for me to see one popping up for play music).

However, since it is taking away the functions key that I use all the time and replace them with a screen, I strongly prefer using my 2015 MBP over the more recent one.

My Late 2013 15" MBP is starting to fall apart in its old age - its battery is broken, its feet are starting to come off, it's got a ding in the display... it's just barely sufferable, but not for much longer. At this point, I don't see myself replacing it with a Mac. There's nothing compelling about these Touchbar machines.

However, I'd buy this same machine again if they updated the processor (maybe one of those six core i9s that Intel just rolled out) and bumped the RAM to at least 32GB. More local storage would be nice-to-have, but these days I just don't have much locally on my laptop - it's all on NASes/Desktops. I don't care at all about Thunderbolt and probably can go another 5 years without caring too much about USB-C given how slow peripheral redesign cycles are now. So that's it. That's the only two (or three) upgrades I'd care about. All of the rest would be superfluous to me.

Sadly, I don't see that happening. I'll probably break down and replace the battery in this machine and try my damnest to ride this machine out of the decade...

There isn't even an option to make it emulate a standard keyboard row of ESC & F-Keys permanently (with the alternative functionality when you hit Fn, like on a Magic Keyboard).

This "feature" alone has sealed the fate of Apple computer hardware for me. I will not buy another Mac until it has a full developer-level set of features and a full keyboard, one that doesn't cost $700 and five days to repair when it keeps breaking.

I literally don't use my MacBook Pros anymore (one personal, one work) without an external keyboard except when simply impossible. I will literally put a magic keyboard on top of the internal keyboard when that is the only option I have.

Exactly. I would have configured it to be blank, stay off, and remain off. Give me my physical ESC and F-keys.