This is where things get very awkward, I find, because those of us who say 'the older generation was better' are frequently derided by those who adopt the newer with comparisons to being dinosaurs or luddites. The answer is that we're neither - we just want devices that are
usable.
Apple seem to be going out of their way to break the usability of their devices. All the Touch Bar seems to do (and the Apple guidelines themselves demand, which this article deliberately tears up) is replicate keyboard shortcuts. Things that most existing users have by now memorised. It creates a distraction and makes it harder to interact with your computer.
It's not just hardware, but software too - one thing that really stuck out at me in this article is this:
>Starting from MacOS High Sierra Play/Pause button globally controls the system sounds. It is not a problem on iPhone, but on Mac it controls every ad that pop-up with more priority than Spotify. You tap the button and don't understand, why it doesn't stop the music. Thanks, Apple. Very convinient.
Why would you do that? On every platform, the media keys control the current media player application. Opening it up to a web browser too is asking for exactly this kind of trouble - breaking the usability of media applications by something completely unrelated hooking into previous functionality.
The best reasoning I can come up with is the iPad. It's often touted that even your great-grandmother can pick up an iPad and learn to use email, Facebook and search for things online. That same person would panic (I know my grandmother does) if you ask her to try using a laptop. It seems like they're trying to market these phenominally expensive machines to a small subset in the hopes of turning them into a new market, at the great expense of their existing user base. Rather than an already heavily-marked-up iPad, they would reap the profits from even greater markup on their laptops, which the target market would use for exactly the same things as the tablet, but with a considerably greater repair bill when the cat accidentally knocks it off the table...
I got a 2014 Retina machine this year. That's usable. It has buttons. It has ports. It does exactly what it appears it will do. People would happily call me a dinosaur for rejecting the current lineup and getting one of these instead. Thankfully, I could not care less.